A Well-Paid Slave (11 page)

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 two 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.

Curt turned to his friends, Johnny and Marian Jorgensen, who immediately took up the fight. Marian turned her Oakland home into mission control and found the Floods a lawyer, a former congressman from Martinez, California, named Robert Condon. On October 26, Condon filed a lawsuit in Contra Costa Superior Court against Finn and the owner of the home, Constance Oliver. The lawsuit sought access to the house as well as $10,000 in punitive damages. Condon also filed a complaint with the California Fair Employment Practices Commission. Contra Costa Superior Court judge Richard E. Arnason issued Flood a temporary restraining order—after Flood put up a $1,000 bond— forbidding Finn and Oliver to rent or sell the property for the next year. The court order permitted Flood to move into the house the following day.

Backed by the court order, 11 sheriff's deputies, several highway patrolmen, and two representatives from the state Fair Employment Practices Commission, Curt and Beverly attempted to move into their new home at 1:30 p.m. on October 27. Approximately a dozen supportive local women and their children, along with 30 members of the media, watched. No one knew what to expect. Condon had brought along a locksmith after correctly assuming that the locks had been changed. The locksmith drilled a hole in the back door and fitted it with new locks. Not knowing who or what might be inside, the sheriff's deputies searched every room and every kitchen cupboard before allowing the Floods to enter. As Curt and Beverly waited outside, Curt spoke with the neighbors and joshed with their children. Once it was declared safe, he gave the 30 newsmen a tour of the home. After the tour, he addressed the assembled media on his back porch with an eloquence, calm, and self-assuredness that belied the commotion of the day.

“Yes, we thought of chucking the whole thing to avoid trouble,” he said. “But there's a great deal of pride involved.

“It doesn't make any difference whether I'm a professional athlete or a Negro or whatever—I'm a human being.

“If I have enough money to rent the house, I think I ought to have it.

“There was a challenge to be met, and I think we met it well.”

Flood was eventually forced to drop his lawsuit after Finn and Oliver could not be found to be served with papers and did not show up for court; the battle, however, had been won.

“You don't do these things if you scare easily,” Flood told the
Baltimore Afro-American
, “and this time I knew I was legally and morally right.”

The housing ordeal made the front pages of the
San Francisco Chronicle
and
Examiner
as well as several other Bay Area newspapers. The
Washington Post
wrote an editorial arguing that Flood's housing dispute was the perfect example why Californians should vote against the referendum seeking to repeal the state's fair housing law.

Six women brought over a small tree for the Floods' backyard and cooked dinners for their first two nights in the house, bringing tears to Beverly's eyes. Several days later, two neighbors took her to the local grocery store. The men invited Flood to play golf and bridge.

Breaking barriers, however, came with a cost. The Floods' children endured racial taunts and got into fights. Debbie, their oldest daughter, was excluded from the local Brownie troop. Racists phoned the house and threatened the family. The police received a false report that someone had broken into the Floods' home and stolen the furniture. Both Finn and the owner refused to cash Flood's rent checks, much less sell him the house.

“I have no regrets,” Flood told the
Los Angeles Times
in January 1965. “We've enjoyed living here and have met some wonderful people. The experience has been well worth all the difficulties we had at the start.”

A few of Flood's Oakland baseball buddies slept outside the house in a parked car that first night to make sure that nothing happened to him or his family. They were not the only ones watching. J. Edgar Hoover was watching, too. On October 30, the FBI director ordered the special agent in charge of the San Francisco office “immediately [to] obtain facts pertinent to this alleged occurrence through established police and/or other sources.” The San Francisco office had received its initial report on Flood's housing dispute three days earlier. On November 4, Hoover received a three-page memorandum and numerous news clippings as well as several updates about Flood's housing lawsuit. Hoover wanted the information in part because of Flood's “recent notoriety as a player in this year's World Series.”

The FBI director was no friend of the civil rights movement. He appeared to be more concerned about Communist infiltration of the movement (which he was convinced of) than he was with protecting civil rights workers from white violence. In October 1963, Hoover persuaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy to approve wiretaps on Martin Luther King's home and office because King continued to consult with advisers with alleged ties to the Communist Party. In April 1964, Hoover bugged King's hotel rooms and later attempted to blackmail the civil rights leader about his extramarital affairs. Hoover's interest in Flood was about as beneficial as a file with the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.