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

Abraham Iqbal Khan. Curt Flood in the Media: Baseball, Race, and the Demise of the Activist-Athlete. Oxford ms: University of Mississippi Press, 2012. 208 pp. Cloth, $55.00. In late October 1969, the St. Louis Cardinals traded their star centerfielder Curt Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies, a mediocre baseball team in a city with a reputation for bad race relations. Flood, thirty-one, had earned the right to object to the trade from St. Louis, where he had played twelve years, hit .293, and was considered the best defensive center fielder in baseball. But he had no legal grounds to do so because of Major League Baseball's reserve clause, which bound a player to his team unless it traded or sold him to another. This forbade Flood from playing with any team but the Phillies. Flood, however, refused the trade and sued Major League Baseball in federal court, claiming that the reserve clause violated federal antitrust laws and the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition of slavery and involuntary servitude. In a letter to baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Flood said, do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. He then referred to himself as a well-paid slave in a television interview with sportscaster Howard Cosell (11). Flood, while losing his case in federal court in 1970 and then in the US Supreme Court in 1972, helped change the course of baseball. In his book, Curt Flood in the Media: Baseball, Race, and the Demise of the Activist-Athlete, Abraham Iqbal Khan chronicles how the ballplayer's challenge to the baseball establishment addressed W.E.B. DuBois' notion of double consciousness and the complexities of activism, which positioned the ballplayer the fault line between liberal and radical modes of political speech (15). The book is thoughtful, provocative, and well-written. But the book falls short of its potential because its research largely fails to acknowledge the body of literature on the media, race, and baseball. There is not enough on the media to justify the title, Curt Flood in the Media. Khan's chapter on Jackie Robinson, for instance, would have been stronger by drawing on the work of scholars like William Simons, Bill Weaver, Pat Washburn, Brian Carroll, and others. Nevertheless, Khan does an impressive job of deconstructing Flood's strategy for challenging the reserve clause. He writes that Flood's characterization of himself as a well-paid slave unintentionally shaped the story's rhetoric as what the author describes as a black thing (27). This made Flood's argument less acceptable to the white mainstream, which was critical of Muhammad All's refusal to serve in the Vietnam War, and of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who defiantly raised their fists from the winners' platform at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City To Khan, Flood found himself in a rhetorical quandary. If he pursued the slavery argument, he would lose some of the white financial supporters he needed for the lawsuit. …

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