Background: Recently I’ve been reading Brad Snyder’s interesting book A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood's Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports. Though the book's central subject is Flood's honorable challenge to the reserve clause, perhaps the most fascinating part of the book is its description of what one might call “The Other Drive to Integrate Baseball.” 

Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball in 1947, and while things certainly were rough, within a few years there were dozens of blacks playing in the major leagues, and overt racism dissipated. The “other” drive to integrate baseball is the experiences of black players in the minor leagues in the South during the 1950s and early 1960s, an area which in some ways has largely been ignored. In The OTHER Drive to Integrate Baseball (Part I) I excerpted extensively from Snyder’s book is his description of Flood’s experiences playing in the South during the 1950s.

There was one paragraph from A Well-Paid Slave which I found particularly outrageous--reading it I'm amazed that these black players didn't strangle somebody. The incident happened while Flood was playing in the Carolina League in 1956 when, according to Snyder, racism and the white attempts to drive blacks out of the league "had reached a fever pitch." From A Well-Paid Slave:

"One day, in between games of a doubleheader, Flood peeled off his only uniform and threw it into a pile with those of his white teammates. The team trainer yelled as if Flood had lit him on fire. The trainer extricated Flood’s uniform and jockstrap from the pile with a long stick with a nail on it and sent his clothes to the black laundry 20 minutes away. Flood cried as he sat naked waiting for his uniform to arrive while his white teammates took the field. He could not even wait in the same section of the clubhouse as his white teammates. He dressed in a cordoned-off section made out of corrugated tin next to the dugout. According to Flood, local law prevented him from dressing with his white teammates."

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Baseball/Sports, African-American Issues, Racism. You can trackback from your own site.