by Brad Snyder
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.
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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.”
In Mississippi, Flood and the other celebrities stayed in the homes of black families. Their host families escorted them to the rally with pride. The rally, in turn, inspired local black Tougaloo College students such as Anne Moody. “People felt relaxed and proud,” she later wrote. “They appreciated knowing and meeting people of their own race who had done something worth talking about.” Moody went on to risk her life in Mississippi voter-registration drives and lunch-counter sit-ins. Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, was the group’s official host. A year later, Evers pulled into his driveway, got out of his car, and was shot in the back and killed.
The athletes attracted the attention of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an anti-civil rights police force established by the state after the Brown decision to “do and perform any and all acts deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states,” including spying on and intimidating civil rights workers. The Sovereignty Commission investigator at the February 25 rally reported that “Patterson and the other world-known Negroes” drew “one of the largest crowds I have ever observed for a meeting of this type.” Cars jammed Lynch Street next to the Masonic Temple and were so numerous that it was impossible for the investigator to record the license-plate numbers. By virtue of his participation, Flood earned himself a secret Sovereignty Commission file.
Flood told the Mississippi audience that the rally helped him realize his responsibility to the struggle for racial equality. He went to Mississippi not to gain notoriety among white authorities or for the thank-you note from NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins. Flood went because his hero had asked him to go. He went because he wanted to show his solidarity with southern blacks fighting for their freedom. He went because he felt the civil rights movement in his soul.
Flood was one of the first active major leaguers to join the civil rights struggle. Baseball is the most individualistic team sport, and baseball players are, by their very nature, self-interested loners. Black major leaguers were still fighting for their own rights in baseball in the early 1960s; few of them stood up for the rights of others. Some, like Frank Robinson and Willie Mays, refused to get involved. Flood and White felt differently. In 1963, White said that Flood “went to Jackson, Mississippi, to show by his presence that we in the big leagues were solidly with those unfortunate people down there.”
Flood’s participation in the rally was brave considering that Mississippi and Alabama were engulfed in racial intimidation, violence, and murder. President Kennedy was forced to mobilize federal troops in late September and early October 1962 so that James Meredith, a black air force veteran, could enroll at the University of Mississippi. Thousands of schoolchildren marched in the streets of Birmingham in April 1963 as Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor turned police dogs and high-powered fire hoses on them. Medgar Evers was murdered in June. On August 28, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington. Less than three weeks later, a bomb at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church killed four black girls in the church restroom.
From April to September, Flood could not do much to stay involved because he went wherever the Cardinals’ schedule took him. On the day of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, for example, Flood and the Cardinals were playing the Giants in San Francisco. It tore Flood up that he was not more involved in civil rights marches and demonstrations. “I should be there instead of here,” he said. During the offseason, Flood traveled to places such as St. Augustine, Florida; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Jackson, Mississippi, because he wanted to see what was going on. Bill Patterson, the director of Oakland’s De Fremery Recreation Center, once ran into Flood in Jackson. “What are you doing down here?” Patterson asked Flood. “You could get yourself killed.”
Flood’s moment of truth came after the Cardinals won the 1964 World Series. The Series victory over the Yankees capped off a spectacular season for Flood. He was named to his first National League All-Star team and won his second straight Gold Glove. He batted .311 and tied for the league lead with 211 hits, the second consecutive season he had finished with 200 or more. Branch Rickey, a senior consultant with the Cardinals, wrote in a scouting report that Flood had the “best hitting form of any man on the Cardinal club.” Flood was 26 and an established star.
After the season, Flood remarried his first wife, Beverly, who had divorced him the previous winter. Curt and Beverly were first married in 1959 when he was only 21 and she was 20. Curt adopted her two children from a previous marriage, and the couple then had two children of their own, Curtis Jr. and Shelly. But Curt’s infidelity on the road and during spring training, Beverly’s frequent shopping sprees, and their different personalities strained their marriage. The young couple also had trouble finding a suitable home in segregated St. Louis. They lived there during the offseason because Beverly had grown up in St. Louis and her family owned a nightclub there. In 1962, Curt and Beverly tried to save their troubled marriage by moving from St. Louis to an integrated neighborhood in Pomona, California, outside Los Angeles. Cardinals broadcaster Harry Caray warned Curt not to move to California because it was a community-property state, entitling Beverly to half of everything Curt had earned during the marriage.
In October 1963, Beverly filed for divorce, alleging that Curt had made her feel “inadequate and inferior” and had struck her on one occasion. She charged that he preferred to spend more time with his sketch pads in the garage than he did with her. On February 27, 1964, a California judge granted the divorce and ordered him to pay her $100 a week in child support and $75 a week in alimony and to make Beverly the beneficiary on his $50,000 life insurance policy. She also received sole title to their home in Pomona.
By the time Curt and Beverly were married for the second time, they were expecting their fifth child, Scott. They decided to rent (with an option to buy) a home in Alamo, a white Oakland suburb just south of Walnut Creek. They returned to the Bay Area to be closer to Curt’s family and so that Curt could work for Johnny Jorgensen’s engraving company. Both Johnny and Marian had encouraged Curt to try to reconcile with Beverly. The house in Alamo was the key to a fresh start. On the morning of October 24, Curt and Beverly paid the $655 security deposit (two months’ rent plus a $75 cleaning fee) and signed the $290-a-month lease to rent a three-bedroom, $35,000 ranch-style home with a pool at 170 La Serena Avenue. The next few days were anything but serene.
The real estate agent, Phyllis Schofield, did not tell George Finn, the owner’s boyfriend who had power of attorney over the home, that the Floods were black. Finn found out shortly after the Floods had signed the lease; he demanded that Schofield meet him at the house to return the keys. When she arrived, Finn and another man blocked the driveway with their car. They opened up the trunk, pulled out tw
o shotguns, and cocked them to let her know that they were loaded.
“No niggers are going to move in here,” Finn warned Schofield as he took back the keys. “We will shoot them first.”
The law did not concern George Finn. He and his identical twin brother, Charles, had been in and out of prison for most of their lives. In the early 1950s, they attracted national media attention as the “Flying Finn Twins” by purchasing a surplus government airplane, losing it to the government in a legal dispute, and stealing the plane back. In 1954, they were sentenced to a year in federal prison for making a citizen’s arrest of the U.S. attorney from Los Angeles in connection with the airplane dispute. They claimed that the U.S. attorney had illegally kept the plane from them, but they were convicted of assaulting and impeding a federal officer. In prison, they went on hunger strikes and were paroled after 114 days. In 1969, they were blamed for the disappearance of a $100,000 government helicopter. Three years later, they sued the government over the ownership of Lake Tahoe. George Finn was part crackpot, part militiaman; there was no telling what he would do to Flood and his family.
Immediately after receiving Finn’s initial phone call to return the keys, Schofield sent her husband to intercept Curt, Beverly, and Curt’s half sister, Rickie Riley, before they reached their future Alamo home. They reconvened at the Schofield home, where Schofield and her husband explained to the Floods what had happened and begged them to consider another house she had showed them. The Floods explained that they did not like that house as much as this one. Beverly was intent on living in the Alamo house, and Curt was intent on standing up for what was right. It did not matter that his four children were cooped up in an Oakland motel or that his wife was six months pregnant. There was a principle at stake: He should be able to live where he pleased.
