The OTHER Drive to Integrate Baseball (Part III)
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 former major league baseball player Curt 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 my blog posts “The OTHER Drive to Integrate Baseball Part I and Part II“ I excerpted from Snyder’s book his description of Flood’s experiences playing in the minor leagues in the South during the 1950s. Another important and interesting facet of the integration struggle–one which lasted well into the 1960s–was the segregation black major league players experienced during spring training camps in Florida. Famous, well-paid, and widely admired black baseball players had to go to spring training in the South and live under Jim Crow. From A Well-Paid Slave:
“In 1961, [Cardinal first baseman Bill] 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…White was so incensed that he mentioned the situation to Associated Press reporter Joe Reichler [who]…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 (more…)
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