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. i For My Mom and Dad ii 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 iii 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 iv 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 v 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 1 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 2 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, 3