A Well-Paid Slave by Brad Snyder

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.
    â€œDo you mean to tell me,” a surprised Busch said, “that you’re not staying here at the hotel with the rest of the fellas?”
    â€œMr. 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