Curt Flood in the Media: Baseball, Race, and the Demise of the Activist Athlete

1. Curt Flood and the Demise of the Activist-Athlete

 Curt Flood and the Demise of the Activist-Athlete The contrasting images featured in the 1990 U.S. Senate race in North Carolina could not have been more pronounced. The Republican candidate was incumbent Jesse Helms, whose racist and reactionary politics had helped him secure reelection since 1972. His chief opponent was Democrat Harvey Gantt, the first African American admitted to Clemson University and former mayor of Charlotte. Legend holds that Gantt’s associates appealed to Wilmington native and University of North Carolina alum Michael Jordan, then arguably the most famous person in the world, to offer the Democratic challenger a small measure of support in an election that was certain to be close. Jordan’s now-infamous response? “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”1 Whether discouraged by a greedy conscience or dissuaded by Nike, whose sneakers he sold, His Airness avoided the political stage. Helms was once again reelected, and Jordan ascended into 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.“A tournament without Mr. Woods,” the Times insisted, “would send a powerful message that discrimination isn’t good for the golfing business.”3 Five years earlier,Woods’s professional career had been 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 for me? Hello world!”4 In response to the Times’s appeal to that hopeful salutation, Tiger’s political voice became paper-thin:“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,Woods finished nine strokes off the lead,and“discrimination” failed to hurt business much at all. Augusta National has still not added a 1  . . . curt flood and the demise of the activist-athlete woman to its membership, but Woods was recently declared the world’s first billion-dollar athlete.6 On the strength of examples such as these, reports of the “demise of the black athlete” abound.7 Depending on who is asked, the emergence of the black“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 the origin is placed, the black activist-athlete is frequently embodied in John Carlos and Tommie Smith, the American sprinters who raised their black-gloved fists in iconic unity at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. Symbolically 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’s endeavor failed to create the mass absence it desired,but its spirit of protest produced one of the most recognizable images in the history of sport. Believing that the Olympic moment had 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.”8 More than three decades later, Edwards offered an account of the vivid contrast that distinguishes Jordan and Woods from Carlos and Smith: “Black athletes have become sufficiently integrated into the sports system. They have a stake in . . . the business matrix of sports. Thirty years ago that was not the case. We are talking about different times.”9 His observation loads terms to describe the shift—black athletes have become integrated— and extends a taunting invitation to root for these developments. After all, this is how sport’s progress narrative typically takes shape: From Owens to Robinson to Ali to Jordan,things keep getting better; at least we are moving in the right direction. However, Edwards adds a revelatory juxtaposition between past and present.“The 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...