A Well-Paid Slave by Brad Snyder Page A

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