A Well-Paid Slave by Brad Snyder Page A

the nation’s best minor league prospect, were so eager to get him into their lineup that they sought to turn the graceful center fielder into a third baseman. The experiment began in pregame warm-ups during Flood’s September call-up to the major leagues, continued during an aborted winter league season in the Dominican Republic and at spring training in 1957, and ended with the Savannah Redlegs of the Class A South Atlantic (“Sally”) League.
    After High Point-Thomasville, the last thing Flood needed was a year in the Sally League. With teams in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina, the league was Flood’s introduction to the Deep South. Hank Aaron had integrated the Sally League in 1953 along with several other players. Despite growing up in Mobile, Alabama, Aaron said he “wasn’t prepared at all for what would happen that year.” If anything, racial tensions had increased by the time that Flood played there four years later.
    Before the 1957 season, the Georgia Senate passed a bill, 31-0, banning interracial athletics in an attempt to keep integrated teams out of the state’s four Sally League towns. The bill would have ended many major league teams’ affiliation with Georgia, but it died in the House of Representatives. Senator Leon Butts, the author of the legislation and a native of Lumpkin, Georgia, near Columbus, fumed: “I think it’s a shame the major league ballclubs and the NAACP have gotten control of the Georgia House.”
    That same year, U.S. senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina broke the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history by holding the floor for 24 hours, 18 minutes. He was defeated in his efforts to prevent the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. On September 4, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus enlisted the National Guard to prevent nine black students from integrating Little Rock’s all-white Central High School. Faubus flouted federal court orders and forced President Eisenhower to bring in the U.S. military to oversee the integration of the school. The Savannah Morning News ran front-page stories about the “Little Rock Crisis” every day.
    Flood knew what to expect after a season in the Carolina League, but life in Savannah was still hard. “The Georgia city had lately been in a high state of tension about school desegregation and other civil rights,” he said. “When I saw how uptight the black community was, and how hostile the whites were, I realized that Cincinnati had arranged another full dose for me.”
    One day, in between games of a doubleheader, Flood peeled off his only uniform and threw it into a pile with those of his white teammates. The team trainer yelled as if Flood had lit him on fire. The trainer extricated Flood’s uniform and jockstrap from the pile with a long stick with a nail on it and sent his clothes to the black laundry 20 minutes away. Flood cried as he sat naked waiting for his uniform to arrive while his white teammates took the field. He could not even wait in the same section of the clubhouse as his white teammates. He dressed in a cordoned- off section made out of corrugated tin next to the dugout. According to Flood, local law prevented him from dressing with his white teammates.
    He could not find a place to live until the dean of men at the local black college, Savannah State, offered him a room. The college cafeteria was usually closed after games, so Flood sometimes cooked a piece of meat in his room. Sometimes he went hungry rather than eat the greasy food at the only late-night place that would serve him, the all-black lunchroom at the local bus station.
    Savannah center fielder Buddy Gilbert thought that Flood was the loneliest man in the world. On road trips, Gilbert frequently brought food out to Flood and the other black players on the team bus. “Poor Gilbert’s small