Free A Well-Paid Slave by Brad Snyder

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.”
    â€œMassive 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 Alabama. 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