Baseball in the Black Public Sphere

490 Pages·2010·1.81 MB·English

Baseball in the Black Public Sphere: Curt Flood and the Disappearance of Race

A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Abraham Khan

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Advisor:
Kirt Wilson

August 2010
Abraham Khan

© 2010
Acknowledgements

I owe appreciation to the following individuals, each of whom contributed various forms
of valuable counsel, support, and resources to my efforts in completing this project:
Parvez Khan, Suzanne Cook, Dennis Cook, Kirt Wilson, Ron Greene, Ed Schiappa,
Davis Houck, Malinda Alaine Lindquist, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Mary Vavrus, Michael
Bruner, David Cheshier, Carol Winkler, Scott Varda, Adam Khan, Cy Kiani, Andrew
Nishioka, Jonathan Reeve, Jay Finch, Paul Skiermont, Sanjay Agrawala, Mariela
Rodriguez, James Brey, Kara Wilder, Carolina Castro, Jessica-Lee Stefanik, Lindsey
McMonagle, Bea Dehler, Joan Lund, and the librarians at the Auburn Avenue Research
Library in Atlanta, GA.

Special thanks to Danielle Hegedus and Miles Davis.
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For My Mom and Dad
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BASEBALL IN THE BLACK PUBLIC SPHERE:
Curt Flood and the Disappearance of Race
Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: THE DEMISE OF THE ACTIVIST ATHLETE..................................1
NOTES.............................................................................................................................14
CHAPTER 2: CURT FLOOD, RACE, AND PUBLIC MEMORY............................15
SECTION A – THE TOPIC.................................................................................................19
Hall of Fame Debates and the Problem of Jackie Robinson.....................................20
A Flood of Racial Memories......................................................................................26
SECTION B – RACE, CULTURE, AND PUBLIC ADDRESS....................................................34
Race as a Social Construction: Problems and Categories........................................34
Race, Culture, and the Public Sphere........................................................................42
Publicity and Rhetoric................................................................................................50
NOTES.............................................................................................................................58
CHAPTER 3: THE WAY IT IS: CURT FLOOD’S PUBLIC CASE..........................63
SECTION A – SARCASM AND POESIS IN CURT FLOOD’S PUBLIC SPHERE.........................67
Having it out in Public...............................................................................................69
“The Show”................................................................................................................74
Racism and Cynicism.................................................................................................80
SECTION B – DISCOVERING DEHUMANIZATION: CURT FLOOD’S DOUBLE-
CONSCIOUSNESS.............................................................................................................87
Blackness, Sensitivity, and Consciousness.................................................................89
Of the Coming of Curt................................................................................................94
The Cool Cat............................................................................................................102
Flood’s Humanism...................................................................................................109
SECTION C – CURT FLOOD’S SLAVE NARRATIVE..........................................................114
Blackness and Second-Sight.....................................................................................116
Flood the Critic, Flood the Connoisseur.................................................................121
“Principle”...............................................................................................................129
Principled Abolitionism............................................................................................137
The Slave Narrative..................................................................................................142
NOTES...........................................................................................................................149

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CHAPTER 4: CURT FLOOD’S CASE IN THE “FIGHTING PRESS”.................154
SECTION A – COUNTERPUBLICS AND THE DILEMMAS OF INCLUSION............................157
Counterpublicity and the Black Press......................................................................158
The Parallel Discursive Arena.................................................................................162
“The Fighting Press” & “The Cry For Liberation”...............................................168
SECTION B – SPIRALING EXCLUSIONS AND THE DISINCORPORATION OF CURT FLOOD.176
Liberalism and the Black Bourgeoisie.....................................................................177
Disciplining Discourse in the Black Counterpublic.................................................187
No True Counterpublic?...........................................................................................196
The (Self)Abstraction of Curt Flood.........................................................................201
NOTES...........................................................................................................................210
CHAPTER 5: JACKIE ROBINSON IN THE BLACK PUBLIC SPHERE............216
THE BLACK PRESS’ COMMUNIST PURGE.......................................................................220
“THE PRINCIPLE HAD BEEN ESTABLISHED”: JACKIE ROBINSON’S SPEAKING MOMENT..226
JACKIE ROBINSON AND BLACK CIVIC ETHOS................................................................238
NOTES...........................................................................................................................249
CHAPTER 6: RACE, CLASS, AND PRINCIPLE: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF
CURT FLOOD’S BLACKNESS..................................................................................252
FREEDOM, PRINCIPLE, AND RACE.................................................................................256
THE FIRST MOVE: “YOU WOULD HAVE TO KNOW CURT FLOOD THE MAN….” .............261
THE LANDSCAPE OF PUBLIC DEBATE: CHAOS AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST IN BASEBALL’S
DYSTOPIA.....................................................................................................................269
THE SECOND MOVE: LABOR, THE PRINCIPLE, AND THE BLACK PRESS..........................282
THE THIRD MOVE: THE PRINCIPLE AND ITS ALTERNATIVES, OR “MODIFICATION,
ALTERATION, ADJUSTMENT, AND REFORM”.................................................................295
CONCLUSION.................................................................................................................307
NOTES...........................................................................................................................312
CHAPTER 7: “A BIT OF POETIC JUSTICE”: RACE, SLAVERY, AND THE
REVOLT OF THE BLACK ATHLETE.....................................................................316
FROM ROBINSON TO FLOOD: FINISHING “THE REVOLUTION”.......................................319
THE ETHOS OF PROTEST, THE SLAVE METAPHOR, AND PUBLIC ADDRESS....................327
“HUMAN LIFE IN A MICROCOSM”: EVIDENCE OF SPORTING VOLATILITY.....................334
THE RADICALS..............................................................................................................345
Racialized Sports Reporting, or, The Idiom on the Agenda.....................................347
Slavery and Split Loyalties in the Press...................................................................354
The Black Scholar....................................................................................................362
Harry Edwards and the Olympic Project for Human Rights...................................367
Integration & Loyalty, “From a Black Point of View”............................................372
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Radicalizing Curt Flood...........................................................................................380
OF WHAT VALUE IS MARTYRDOM?..............................................................................387
CONCLUSION.................................................................................................................394
NOTES...........................................................................................................................398
CHAPTER 8: CURT FLOOD AND THE PUBLIC CULTURES OF RACE AND
SPORT............................................................................................................................405
NARRATIVE ONE: OF RACE IN PUBLICS AND COUNTERPUBLICS...................................413
The Trouble With Publics.........................................................................................414
Race, Inclusion, and the Representation of Black Experience.................................419
NARRATIVE TWO: OF THE TRIUMPH OF NOSTALGIA.....................................................432
Remembered as Forgotten.......................................................................................437
The Activist Athlete and the Problem of Black Experience......................................450
NOTES...........................................................................................................................465
BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................................470
SCHOLARLY SOURCES...................................................................................................470
NEWSPAPERS................................................................................................................477
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Chapter 1
The Demise of the Activist Athlete

In 1990, the race for the US Senate in North Carolina featured contrasting images
of the United State’s troubled racial past. The Republican candidate was incumbent Jesse
Helms, whose anti-intellectualism and racist platform had kept him in office since 1972.
His chief opponent was Democrat Harvey Gantt, the first African American admitted to
Clemson University and former mayor of Charlotte. In a close contest characterized by
the symbolic echoes of segregation’s ugliest manifestations, some of Gantt’s closest
associates appealed to University of North Carolina alum Michael Jordan, then arguably
the most famous person in the world, to offer at least some small measure of support. A
television commercial would not be necessary, they assured him, nor an oration; instead,
just a photo-op would do, or, a brief, passing token of affinity. Jordan’s now-infamous
response?: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”1 Whether discouraged by a greedy
conscience or dissuaded by Nike, whose sneakers he sold, Air Jordan stayed out of
politics. Jesse Helms was re-elected, and Michael Jordan became a transnational
commercial brand.2
In November 2002, a New York Times editorial implored defending champion
Tiger Woods to boycott the Masters golf tournament, held each April at Augusta
National Golf Club, a cloister of the power-elite that refuses to admit women as
members.3 Five years earlier, Woods’ professional career was inaugurated by a Nike
commercial that declared, “There are still golf courses in the United States that I cannot
play because of the color of my skin. I’m told that I’m not ready for you. Are you ready
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for me? Hello world!”4 In response to the New York Times’ appeal to that once-
promising gesture, Tiger said, “It would be nice to see everyone have an equal chance to
participate, but there is nothing you can do about it.”5 That year, Tiger finished nine
strokes off the lead. Augusta National has still not added a woman to its membership,
and Tiger Woods was recently declared the world’s first billion-dollar athlete.6 Hello
world, indeed.
On the strength of examples such as these, reports of the “demise of the activist-
athlete” abound. Depending on who is asked, the rise of the “activist-athlete” can be
traced to 1936, when Jesse Owens repudiated white eugenic fantasies right before
Hitler’s eyes; or 1947, when Jackie Robinson endured a summer of racist insults in Major
League ballparks; or 1967, when Muhammad Ali refused to go to Vietnam. Regardless
of where this origin is imagined, the activist-athlete is embodied in John Carlos and
Tommie Smith, who raised their black-gloved fists in Mexico City in iconic unity in
1968. Figuratively speaking, Smith and Carlos were escorted to the podium by Harry
Edwards, a Cornell-educated sociologist from California who had attempted to lead an
international boycott of the Olympics by black athletes. Known as the Olympic Project
for Human Rights, Edwards’ project failed to created the absence it desired, but the tenor
of its rhetoric produced the circumstances in which one of the most recognizable
photographs in the history of sport was taken. Believing that the Olympic moment has
set something powerful in motion, Edwards wrote in 1969 that “the black athlete has left
the facade of locker room equality and justice to take his long vacant place as a primary
participant in the black revolution.”7
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To be sure, Edwards makes explicit what these examples of the “activist-athlete”
suggest to the imagination. The demise of the activist-athlete is a story about the
changing relationship between black sports participation and black political participation.
Over thirty years later, Edwards offered an account of the vivid contrast that so clearly
distinguishes Jordan and Woods from Carlos and Smith: “[B]lack athletes have become
sufficiently integrated into the sports system. They have a stake in all of the business
dimensions of that system, [...] the business matrix of sports. Thirty years ago that was
not the case. We are talking about different times.”8 But this account of the changing
times is not an account for how and why the times have changed. Certainly, Edwards’
observation induces nostalgia’s warm comforts. But in using that familiar trope of civil
rights discourse to explain the shift - black athletes have become sufficiently integrated -
Edwards extends an alluring invitation to view these developments with a rooting
interest. After all, this is how sport’s progress narrative is told; from Jesse to Jackie to
Ali to Jordan, things are only getting better. However, Edwards adds explanation to his
description, and his memory is expressed in sickness for the home that was built in 1968:
[T]he outcome of the actions of Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John
Carlos, Jim Brown, Curt Flood, Bill Russell, Spencer Haywood and others
who paved the way is Dennis Rodman, Deion Sanders, and so forth.
There are a whole bunch of athletes whose focus is on ME, and I am so
militantly about me, that there are no rules I need to recognize. Whatever
serves to promote me is legitimate. So you have guys who are not
demonstrating and raising a fist at a podium in deference to a greater
cause, but doing anything to draw attention to themselves as individuals.9

In the end, Edwards’ memory of the activist-athlete is defined by a sense of loss. As an
historical narrative, it is compelling in its tragic simplicity; once integrated into the
business matrix, black athletes lost their incentive to oppose structures of inequality. But,
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