A Well-Paid Slave (10 page)

Hemus was fired on July 6, 1961, and replaced with Johnny Keane. After briefly studying for the priesthood, Keane had played in the Cardinals' minor league system until a vicious beaning by pitcher Sig Jakucki in 1935 fractured Keane's skull and put him in a coma for a week and in the hospital for six more. Keane played one more year, then managed for 17 seasons in the Cardinals' minor league system before becoming one of Hemus's coaches. Keane had been passed over five times for the Cardinals' managerial post.

As the new Cardinals manager, Keane immediately inserted Gibson into the starting rotation. The 5-foot-9, 165-pound Flood finally heeded his coaches' advice, stopped trying to hit home runs, and turned himself into a singles hitter. A month later, Keane made Flood the starting center fielder. Flood finished the 1961 season with a .322 batting average and held the center field job for the next eight seasons. The former seminary student sensed the anxiety that lay behind Flood's calm clubhouse demeanor. He could read on Flood's face when things were bothering him, and he tried to put Flood's active mind at ease. Keane recognized that Flood, Gibson, and White were not just great natural athletes; they were also smart, educated, and proud men and budding team leaders. He respected them in a way that Hemus, according to Flood and Gibson, never did.

Flood, Gibson, and White led the Cardinals into the 1960s. They represented the next generation of outspoken black athletes. They also became the best of friends. Flood first met Bob Gibson during a September 1957 game in the Sally League. The starting pitcher for Columbus against Flood's Savannah team, Gibson did not get out of the first inning, walking five straight hitters with two outs—beginning with Flood. The segregation and discrimination in the Sally League infuriated Gibson. One of seven children whose father had died three months before he was born and whose mother worked in a laundry and cleaned houses and hospitals in her spare time, Gibson grew up a sickly child in an Omaha, Nebraska, ghetto. A rat once bit Gibson's ear. Pneumonia nearly killed him. His older brother, Josh (not the Hall of Fame catcher), promised to buy Gibson a baseball glove if he recovered. Raised by his older brother, Gibson starred in baseball and basketball playing with and against whites. He attended Creighton University on a basketball scholarship and played for several years with the Harlem Globetrotters, initially dividing his year between the Cardinals and the Globetrotters until Devine agreed to cover his basketball salary.

Gibson and Flood were reunited at the Cardinals' 1958 rookie instructional camp. Gibson arrived in St. Petersburg in 1958 and made the same mistake that Flood had made with the Reds in 1956—Gibson showed up at the white players' hotel. He was immediately sent to a black boardinghouse, where Flood happened to be one of his three housemates. They roomed together when Flood briefly began the 1958 season at Triple-A Omaha and were road roommates for nearly ten years with the Cardinals. Flood grew closer to Gibson than he was to his own brothers.

Flood and Gibson may have led the Cardinals on and off the field in the 1960s, but in early 1961 they could not crack Hemus's starting lineup. Rather, the mantle of leadership initially fell on the third member of their trio, Bill White. Born in Lakewood, Florida, and raised in the integrated steel town of Warren, Ohio, William De Kova White was the only child of a military secretary and never knew his steelworker father. White finished second in his high school class, attended Hiram College on an academic scholarship, and planned on becoming a physician. But the premed student could not bear asking his mother for any more spending money and instead accepted the New York Giants' $2,500 bonus to play baseball. As the first black player to survive a season in the Carolina League, White yelled at his tormentors and gave them the finger. White, like Flood, later developed an outward calm that masked his deep sensitivity and competitive inner fire.

One weekend before spring training in 1961, Flood and White drove to Miami and were introduced to a young man named Cassius Clay. The Louisville Lip charmed them. The light-heavyweight Olympic gold medalist in 1960, Clay had moved up to the heavyweight division and turned professional. During a two-week period in Miami Beach, he won his fourth and fifth professional bouts against Jim Robinson and Donnie Fleeman. He also sparred with former heavyweight champion Ingemar Johansson. “I'll go dancin' with Johansson,” Clay said.

In between fighting palookas and dancin' with Johansson, Clay invited Flood and White to a Nation of Islam meeting. They were searched for weapons and forced to leave their wallets and watches at the door. A speaker stood up and started talking about white devils. The ballplayers, as well as Clay, got up and left. “Sounds as if black power would be white power backwards,” Gibson said later. “That wouldn't be much improvement.”

In 1961, White spoke up about one of the most important baseball issues of the day: segregated spring training facilities. White arrived in St. Petersburg, Florida, an All-Star first baseman only to be treated like a second-class citizen. His white Cardinals teammates either rented private beachfront condos for their families or sunned themselves by the pool at St. Petersburg's Vinoy Park Hotel. White and his fellow black players stayed in boardinghouses in the black section of St. Petersburg and were afraid to bring their families to Florida. As a result, any team unity fostered in spring training was destroyed once the Cardinals left the field.

That year, an incident in spring training finally made White speak up. He saw a list of Cardinals players invited to a March 9 “Salute to Baseball” breakfast for the Cardinals and Yankees at the local yacht club, sponsored by the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce. No black players were on the list. To make matters worse, the list included Doug Clemens, a white Cardinals outfielder who had appeared in exactly one major league game and had never even come to bat. White was so incensed that he mentioned the situation to Associated Press reporter Joe Reichler. At 5:20 p.m. on March 8, Reichler put White's comments on the national wire.

“When will we be made to feel like humans?” White asked Reichler. “They invited all but the colored players. Even the kids who never have come to bat once in the big leagues received invitations—that is, if they were white. . . . How much longer must we accept this without saying a word? This thing keeps gnawing away my heart. I think about this every minute of the day.”

Cardinals public relations director Jim Toomey feebly replied that it was his fault. He had invited only the Cardinals players staying at the team hotel because it was close to the yacht club and the breakfast was at 8:15 a.m. Toomey said he had excluded white veterans such as Stan Musial staying in private condos with their families as well as the black players. Toomey's response ignored the bigger issue that the team's black players were not isolated from their white teammates by choice.

Flood had spoken out about the spring training situation a month before White helped make it a national issue. “The rookie who is trying to win my job can bring his wife to camp and live in the most lavish surroundings,” Flood told a
Pittsburgh Courier
reporter the week of February 4. “Me, I'm forced to leave my wife at home because we can't find a decent place to stay. It just doesn't make sense.”

At spring training, Flood broached the issue with Cardinals owner Gussie Busch. It was unfortunate, Flood told Busch, that he and the team's other black players had to stay in the black section of town.

“Do you mean to tell me,” a surprised Busch said, “that you're not staying here at the hotel with the rest of the fellas?”

“Mr. Busch,” Flood replied, “don't you know that we're staying about five miles outside of town in the Negro section?”

Busch said he did not know, and from that point on the Cardinals organization began to take White's and Flood's complaints seriously. Devine called Flood in the spring of 1961 and asked him if he was satisfied with the team's spring training accommodations. Flood did not mince words in voicing his displeasure, a bold move considering that his position with the Hemus-led Cardinals in the spring of 1961 was tenuous at best.

White and Flood were not the only ones blasting segregated spring training accommodations. Wendell Smith, who had led the
Pittsburgh Courier
's campaign urging Major League Baseball to integrate and had served as Jackie Robinson's roommate and confidant in 1946 and 1947, wrote a front-page article in the January 23, 1961, edition of the
Chicago American
about the problems of black players at spring training. Smith tried to shame the black players into standing up for their rights to desegregated housing, calling them “Fat Cats” and “Uncle Toms” who refused to jeopardize their standing with major league clubs.

A week after Smith's initial article, the chairman of the St. Petersburg chapter of the NAACP, Dr. Ralph Wimbish, told the
St. Petersburg
Times
that he would no longer help the Cardinals and Yankees find housing for their black players. So did Dr. Robert Swain, a black dentist who owned a six-unit apartment building in St. Petersburg where some black players stayed. Wimbish asked the two major league teams to pressure their spring training hotels to integrate. He named White, Flood, and George Crowe of the Cardinals and Elston Howard and Hector Lopez of the Yankees as spokesmen. He also mentioned Flood's decision not to bring his wife to spring training.

Wimbish's home and swimming pool at 3217 15th Avenue South was the black players' unofficial clubhouse. The players ate, sat around the pool, watched television, and talked. Wimbish's wife, Bette, made a gumbo that Flood enjoyed. “After dinner, we'd sit around and talk about everything, including segregation,” Bette Wimbish told the
St. Petersburg Times
. “Some players were conservative and didn't want to rock the boat. But others, like Curt Flood and Bill White, resented the way they were treated.”

After White's comments hit the national wire on March 8, the talk at Wimbish's home centered on the chamber of commerce breakfast. White received a belated invitation, but he did not want to wake up early to eat breakfast with bigots. Flood and Bette Wimbish argued that White should go. “Curt thought it was important to break down the barriers, make inroads so that the black ballplayers could be recognized,” Bette told her son, Ralph Jr., a
New York Post
sports editor, “but Bill held firm and said no. He wouldn't go.” At 8:15 a.m. on March 9, 48 Cardinals and Yankees players attended the breakfast. Only one was black. At the behest of his team, Yankees catcher Elston Howard went in order to “help to break down some of the segregation mess.” White, Flood, and the other black Cardinals players stayed home.

White's comments to Reichler, Smith's reporting, and Wimbish's activism planted seeds of change. “It was our own little civil rights movement,” White said. The national civil rights movement had taken off on February 1, 1960, when four black North Carolina A&T students demanded service at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave until they were served. The sit-ins swept the South. Integrated groups of “Freedom Riders” boarded interstate buses beginning in May 1961 to test the desegregation of southern airports, bus terminals, and lunch counters. The Freedom Riders suffered brutal beatings and arrests, attracting national media attention to the unfairness and cruelty of southern segregation.

On July 31, White and Detroit Tigers outfielder Bill Bruton addressed the Players Association's representatives in Boston at the second of two All-Star Games scheduled that year. The association backed a resolution sent to the owners asking them to ensure that black players at spring training would be treated like “first class citizens.” When the owners of the spring training hotels for the Yankees and Cardinals refused to integrate their facilities, the Yankees, a team not known for its progressive racial policies, left St. Petersburg and found integrated housing across the state in Fort Lauderdale. The White Sox, Orioles, Braves, and expansion Mets also moved into integrated facilities in 1962.

The Cardinals reacted like a corporation with a crisis on its hands. Busch and his public relations man, Al Fleishman, knew that segregated spring training facilities were bad for beer sales. Rumors surfaced of a black boycott of Anheuser-Busch's beers. Devine knew that the segregated facilities were bad for his team. The Cardinals vowed not to return to the all-white Vinoy Park Hotel. During spring training in 1961, Busch asked city officials to help the team find desegregated housing.

A businessman purchased two adjacent motels, the Skyline Motel and the Outrigger Motel, on the southern tip of St. Petersburg and housed the Cardinals there in 1962. Twenty-nine of the 32 players stayed at the 49-unit Skyline Motel. (Three players with families from St. Petersburg lived elsewhere.) Captain Ken Boyer and future Hall of Famer Stan Musial sacrificed their private beachfront condos that season and moved into the motel with their families. The motel's food, based on its Polynesian theme, was awful. Cardinals players and their families responded by barbecuing their own food. White and Gibson cooked, pitching coach Howie Pollet made the salad, and Boyer and pitcher Larry Jackson purchased the meat and worked the grill. Players, front-office personnel, and sportswriters stayed there, 137 people in all, including 32 wives and 25 children. It was like Camp Cardinal. Each week the team held a fried chicken picnic dinner. The team showed nightly movies, held costume parties for the kids, organized fishing trips, toured Busch Gardens, and cruised on Gussie Busch's yacht. This was the beginning of the social integration of the Cardinals. Flood, Gibson, and White spent the next few years completing the job.

The civil rights movement grabbed Flood in 1962 and would not let go. His hero, Jackie Robinson, showed him the way. Since retiring after the 1956 season, Robinson had thrust himself into politics and the freedom struggle. In February 1962, he invited the 24-year-old Flood to join him, heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, former light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore, and entertainer Harry Belafonte's former wife, Margurite, at the NAACP's Southeast Regional Conference in Jackson, Mississippi. Before 3,800 people at the Masonic Temple in Jackson, Flood and the other athletes spoke out on behalf of racial justice. Robinson, recently elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, was the master of ceremonies. Grayer and about 50 pounds heavier than in his playing days, Robinson told the audience that these athletes were there “to let you know we are with you 100 percent.” He swelled with pride over the comments by his fellow celebrities. “Our admiration for Patterson, Moore, Flood, and Marguerite [sic] Belafonte is unlimited,” Robinson wrote in his column for two of the nation's largest black weekly newspapers. “They represent the kind of thinking and dedication which is helping to lick one of the toughest problems of our time.”