A Well-Paid Slave

by Brad Snyder

  After Curt graduated from Oakland Tech at the end of January 1956, he signed for no bonus, a $4,000 salary, and an invitation to the Reds’ spring training. “We were prepared to pay Curtis a bonus,” Mattick claimed at the time, “but the boy decided against it.” Under the bonus rule, anything greater than $4,000 would have made Curt a “bonus baby” and forced the Reds to keep him on their major league roster for two seasons. The Cincinnati Enquirer erroneously reported “that all 16 major league clubs sought to sign Flood after his graduation from high school last week.” The Oakland Tribune claimed that “no less than 11 clubs” were willing to bid on Flood’s services and that one team was prepared to offer him “around $25,000.” In truth, Mattick was the only scout who had made him an offer.

  At 18, Curt could not have cared less about the reserve system. Or that he would be competing with all his friends from West Oakland for a spot on the Reds’ roster. He wanted to be a major league baseball player like his hero, Jackie Robinson, and to play for the Reds with his former high school teammate, Frank Robinson. In part because his class graduated in January, Curt received a plum invitation to spring training to show the Reds what he could do.

  On the standard team questionnaire, Flood informed the Reds that he liked Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies and that San Francisco native Joe DiMaggio was the greatest player he had ever seen. Next to a question about women, Flood wrote “Eeeech.”

  The only one not enjoying Curt’s success was his older brother Carl. Carl was more than 6 feet tall and, despite a lengthy criminal record (the armed robbery conviction came five years later), still possessed loads of pitching talent. As a 19-year-old semipro pitcher, he threw three consecutive one-hitters. “The three hits wasn’t really hits,” childhood friend Thomas Johnson recalled. “[It was] a couple of misplayed balls, and they gave them hits.” Those misplays drove Carl crazy. His talent was enough to warrant a $2,000 minor league contract. “He turned it down,” Herman Jr. recalled, “because little brother was making more than he was.” Not that it mattered. Herman Jr., the soft-spoken but wise oldest brother, knew that Carl lacked Curt’s discipline. Carl’s pride held him back; Curt’s propelled him forward.

  By signing Curt for $4,000 and sending him to Florida in March 1956 for spring training, the Reds thrust him into the South’s cauldron of racial discord. Nearly two months before Curt’s graduation from Oakland Tech, on December 1, 1955, a tailor’s assistant at a Montgomery, Alabama, department store refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Rosa Parks was the second woman arrested for this act of racial defiance on a Montgomery bus in nine months. Parks’s arrest led to the creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and to a massive boycott of the city’s bus system. The reluctant leader of the MIA and the boycott was a 26-year-old pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr.

  The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the courage of civil rights heroes such as Rosa Parks triggered a southern campaign of white violence, intimidation, and murder. In a decision known as Brown II, the Court declared in May 1955 that integration of the public schools should occur with “all deliberate speed.” This “all deliberate speed” language encouraged white resistance to integration in the halls of Congress, in state legislatures, and on the streets.

  In late August 1955, a 14-year-old Chicago boy went to Money, Mississippi, to visit his relatives. Unfamiliar with the South’s unwritten rules, Emmett Till supposedly whistled at the wife of a white store owner. He was kidnapped from his great-uncle’s home. Three days later, Till’s body was found in the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck. He had been shot in the head and bludgeoned to death. Till’s mother left his casket open so that thousands could view his mangled corpse.

  Curt Flood was as naive about and ignorant of the customs of the South as Emmett Till. The only things Curt had to protect himself from this storm of racial hatred were the inner strength his mother had exhibited in Louisiana, the courage Rosa Parks had shown that afternoon in Montgomery, and the self-confidence he had carried with him as a youngster growing up in Oakland.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I am pleased that God made my skin black but I wish He had made it thicker.

  —Curt Flood, The Way It Is

  In late February 1956, Flood arrived in Tampa, Florida, after the first airplane flight of his life. Barely a month past his 18th birthday, Flood was waiting for his luggage in the Tampa airport’s baggage claim area when he saw two water fountains, one labeled “White” and the other labeled “Colored.” “For a wild instant,” Flood said, “I wondered whether the signs meant club soda and Coke.”

  Upon arriving at the Cincinnati Reds’ spring training headquarters at the Floridian Hotel, Flood could not wait to settle into his room and check out the town. He entered the lobby and asked for his room key. Before he could set down his bags, a black porter whisked him into a cab headed across town to a black boardinghouse named Ma Felder’s after the black woman who ran it. All the Reds’ black players, including Frank Robinson, were there.

  Ashamed and in complete cultural shock, Flood did not dare tell the other black players that he had gone to the white hotel even though many of them had once made the same mistake. Chuck Harmon, one of the first two black players in Reds’ history, tried to calm Flood down and give him a crash course on segregation. Putting up with separate spring training facilities was not about being an Uncle Tom, Harmon told Flood, it was about getting to the major leagues.

  Flood had no chance of making the Reds straight out of high school. In his first few games, he impressed Cincinnati manager Birdie Tebbetts with his fielding and his poise, but flailed at the plate chasing outside curveballs. He wound up playing mostly in B games. His lone highlight that spring was getting into a March 31 game as a pinch runner against Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Trying to prevent Randy Jackson from taking his third-base job, Robinson stole bases and jawed with umpires that day as if it were the 1955 World Series. Robinson always played with a chip on his shoulder. Later that season, he spoke out about the segregated spring training and minor league facilities. He said that “after ten years of traveling in the South, I don’t think the advances made there have been fast enough. . . . It is my belief therefore that pressures can be brought to bear by heads of Organized Baseball that would help remedy a lot of the prejudices that surround the game as it’s played below the Mason and Dixon Line.”

  Immediately after playing against Robinson on March 31, Flood was sent to train with the Reds’ Class B Carolina League affiliate in High Point, North Carolina. He joined the team at the Reds’ minor league spring training facility in Douglas, Georgia.

  Ma Felder’s was a day at the beach compared with Douglas, Georgia, where more than 400 Reds minor leaguers trained at an old army base. If ever the farm system structure that had been popularized by Branch Rickey made players feel like cattle, this was it. The players lived in barracks, were awakened at 7 a.m., and wore numbered placards on their backs. Flood’s number was 330. He and the other black players lived in separate barracks and ate in separate mess halls from their white teammates. At night, they could watch movies from the balcony of a local theater but preferred bars in black neighborhoods where no Reds officials dared go. The conditions affected Flood’s play on the field. The High Point Enterprise reported that he “looked miserable at the start.”

  Life only got worse for Flood in High Point-Thomasville, the adjacent North Carolina furniture towns with a combined population of 60,000 and home to Flood’s first minor league team. “I was ready for High Point-Thomasville,” he said, “but the two peckerwood communities were not ready for me.”

  “Massive resistance,” the campaign of white violence and intimidation in response to the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions, was in full swing. Whites rioted and burned crosses in February as a young black woman named Autherine Lucy unsuccessfully tried to attend the University of Alabam
a. In March, 100 southern congressmen and senators declared in a document known as the “Southern Manifesto” that the Supreme Court had abused its judicial power. Dr. King’s Montgomery bus boycott lasted 382 days and would have lasted longer had the Supreme Court not declared in November 1956 that Montgomery’s segregated bus service was unconstitutional. Whites were angrier than ever before about blacks ruining their southern way of life, and that way of life included minor league baseball.

  Just because Jackie Robinson had integrated the major leagues in 1947 did not mean that small southern towns were going to accept black players on their minor league teams. The Carolina League’s first black player, Percy Miller, lasted just two unhappy weeks with Danville, Virginia, in August 1951. Two years later, Flood’s future Cardinals teammate Bill White, who also played for Danville, was the first black player to survive a full Carolina League season. A black player did not join a North Carolina-based Carolina League team until 1955, just a year before Flood’s arrival. Racism plagued the southern minor leagues well into the 1960s and by 1956 had reached a fever pitch in the Carolina League, which Flood called the “peckerwood league.”

  Games at High Point-Thomasville’s Finch Field generally drew between 500 and 1,000 people, and Flood could hear every heckler in the 3,500-seat ballpark. He internalized all the insults he heard in the stands. “One of my first and most enduring memories is of a large, loud cracker who installed himself and his four little boys in a front-row box and started yelling ‘black bastard’ at me,” he said.

  During the first few weeks of the season, Flood could not wait to get home to his room at a black boardinghouse, where every night he would break down and cry. “It’s hell down here,” he wrote home. “I didn’t know that people could act like this. The home fans are swell to me, but on the road they are on me all the time. . . . I don’t know how long I can take it.”

  He called his sister, Barbara, and told her that he wanted to come home. “I felt too young for the ordeal,” he said. “I wanted to be home. I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted to be free of these animals whose fifty-cent bleacher ticket was a license to curse my color and deny my humanity. I wanted to be free of the imbeciles on my ball team.” Barbara frantically phoned Reds scout Bobby Mattick. “His sister called me and said he wanted to come home,” Mattick recalled. “I said, ‘You call him back and tell him not to come home. Tell him to tough it out.’ ”

  Flood understood the stakes. “What had started as a chance to test my baseball ability in a professional setting had become an obligation to measure myself as a man,” he said. “As such, it was a matter of life and death. These brutes were trying to destroy me. If they could make me collapse and quit, it would verify their preconceptions. And it would wreck my life.”

  With the Hi-Toms (the name of the High Point-Thomasville team), Flood wore a stealth shield on his back, number 42, the number worn by Jackie Robinson. The number honored his hero, reminded him of what Robinson had gone through, and pushed him to go forward. It was like wearing Superman’s cape.

  Robinson had experienced the South, but not for a whole season. At the start of spring training in 1946, he had to leave Sanford, Florida, in the middle of the night because of threats on his life if he continued to stay there. Two other Florida cities, Jacksonville and DeLand, canceled spring training games in 1946 rather than allow him to play there with the Triple-A Montreal Royals. Later that season he played in two southern border cities, Baltimore and Louisville. The Dodgers tried to insulate him from future spring incidents by training in Havana in 1947 and later purchasing their own spring facilities and housing in Vero Beach, Florida. Robinson and his family, however, still experienced the Jim Crow South outside the walls of the Vero Beach training complex, at spring training games in other Florida towns and during a few exhibition games each spring on the Dodgers’ annual trek north to Brooklyn.

  Flood and other black players of his generation survived entire minor league seasons in the South. “We were Jackie’s disciples,” said Ed Charles, a member of the 1969 World Champion New York Mets who spent one of his eight minor league seasons in the South with Flood. “We were an extension of Jackie. We were the early trailblazers, on the heels of his trailblazing. He was up North. He assigned us to break the barriers in the South. . . . We had to complete the job that he had started, and that means we had to comport ourselves the way that he did. . . . We were on a tightrope all the time.”

  Fans in other Carolina League towns tested Flood’s resolve. Greensboro was bad. Smaller, southeastern North Carolina towns such as Wilson, Kinston, and Fayetteville were worse. In Wilson, during one of the league’s two midseason all-star games, a High Point Enterprise columnist noticed the “considerable amount of cat-calls directed at the all-Negro outfield.” In Fayetteville, a military town, one fan called out upon seeing Flood: “There’s a goddamned nigger son-of-a-bitch playing ball with them white boys! I’m leaving.” In Durham, Flood hit a ball into the left-center-field gap, and his cap flew off as he rounded first base. A man sitting in a wheelchair halfway up the stands behind the Hi-Toms’ dugout yelled: “Run, nigger, run.”

  The words “Run, nigger, run” stuck with Flood’s lone black teammate, pitcher John Ivory Smith, for the rest of his life. A native of Cocoa Beach, Florida, Smith pitched for the Hi-Toms until he was transferred to another team in early May. A month later, Bo Bossard, a black infielder from Columbia, South Carolina, joined the team. These native-born southerners knew what to expect; for Flood, however, southern segregation was foreign territory.

  The worst part of life in the Carolina League for Flood was the travel. White teammates saw Flood’s shoulders drop as they got off the bus to eat while he was forced to stay on the bus and wait for them to bring him food. Sometimes he was told to go to the back of the restaurant. He once ate a hamburger in the yard of a diner among barking dogs while his teammates sat inside. His teammates went to the bathroom at rest stops; Flood had to ask the bus driver to pull over to the side of the road. At home and on the road, the bus dropped him off in the black section of town. The routine alienated him from his white teammates. His manager, 42-year-old former Reds utility player Bert Haas, did nothing to bridge the gap.

  Like the Carolina League’s dozen other black players, Flood learned an important early lesson: how to duck. As the league’s best hitter, Flood saw more than his share of beanballs and knockdown pitches. Johnny Pesky, the former Red Sox infielder who managed the Durham Bulls that season, praised Flood’s “attitude” and “courage.” “They keep throwing at Flood to keep him loose up there at the plate and he continues to dig in,” Pesky said.

  One night, as Flood lit up Kinston’s pitching, Kinston manager Jack Paepke decided he had seen enough. He inserted himself as the team’s pitcher. Kinston outfielder Carl Long cringed when he heard what his manager was planning in the dugout. “The manager said, ‘I’m going to hit that son-of-a-bitch upside the head,’ ” Long recalled. “And he hit him upside the head. Curt went to first, stole second, and stole third. After the ball game, he said he was going to steal home if he could. The next at-bat he hit a home run.”

  Black ballplayers and entertainers of that era were prime targets for white violence. On April 10, 1956, singer Nat King Cole was knocked to the floor as he performed before an all-white audience in Birmingham, Alabama. Six men were arrested before they could do him serious physical harm, but a plot was uncovered that involved more than 100 people and aimed to kill the singer. In a Carolina League game that year in Greensboro, Danville outfielder Leon “Daddy Wags” Wagner mysteriously dropped an easy fly ball. His manager began to yell at him between innings until Wagner explained the situation. “[A] guy was hiding out behind the left-field stands,” Wagner said. “He pointed a shotgun at me and yelled, ‘Nigger, I’m going to fill you with shot if you catch one ball out here.’ ” Police caught the man, and Wagner, though not the deftest fielder, at least tried to catch fly balls again.

  Flood and the Carolina
League’s other minority players thrived despite the torrent of racial abuse. The league’s best players were black or Hispanic, including future major leaguers Wagner (51 home runs, 166 RBIs), Hall of Fame first baseman Willie McCovey (.310), infielders Tony Taylor and Jose Pagan, and pitcher Orlando Pena. Flood outshone them all. He led the league with a .340 batting average, set a league record with 133 runs, tied for the league lead with 190 hits, finished second to Wagner with 128 RBIs, walked 102 times, stole 19 bases, and hit a team-record 29 home runs. He dazzled teammates with his running catches in the outfield and led the league with 388 putouts. Pesky proclaimed Flood the league’s best prospect. The Carolina League named him its player of the year. “I lit up that league—I carried my ballclub, and if that sounds like bragging, I don’t care,” Flood said. “I played like I was on fire to prove to myself that you can always overcome anything from the outside.”

  Despite accolades from the league and quiet admiration from teammates and opponents, Flood was miserable all season. He did not care whether his team won or lost. There were times when he despised his team’s pitcher so much that he contemplated making an error on purpose. He never did. “Pride was my resource,” he said. “I solved my problem by playing my guts out.” But for the first time in his life, baseball was not fun. It was a job, and a miserable one at that.

  After the season’s final game, Flood was excluded from the team party at an all-white establishment until owner Tom Finch, a Thomasville furniture dealer and friend of Sam Bercovich’s, intervened. Nothing could change Flood’s mind about High Point-Thomasville. By the end of the season, his weight hovered around 135 pounds. His face looked gaunt. He was exhausted. But he knew he had played his way out of the peckerwood league. “I believe that I would have quit baseball rather than return there,” he said.