Death Isn’t a Slave’s Freedom: The Historic Erasure of Curt Flood’s Life
by David J. Leonard | special to NewBlackMan
Nikki Giovanni once write that “death is a slave's freedom” aptly surmising elements of Curt Flood’s life and his struggle against America’s (white) baseball establishment. Denounced for his efforts to challenge baseball’s slave-like conditions and crucified for his efforts to connect baseball to slavery, to American racism, Flood experienced neither vindication nor compensation in part until his death, at which time Flood tasted freedom in a certain way – freedom from the death threats, abuse, ridicule, and American racism.
Yet after watching HBO’s recent documentary The Curious Case of Curt Flood, I am less sure that “death is a slave’s freedom” in that Flood was unable to escape demonization and ridicule, as the film turned his life into a spectacle of sorts. In an effort to illustrate how the human cost faced by Flood and his family, to highlight the difficult path to redemption, the film spends an overwhelming amount of time on Flood’s personal tragedy. Evidence in the divorce from his initial wife shortly after he fought to live in an Alamo neighborhood and the financial, emotional, and physical impact on Flood during and after his suit against Major League Baseball, Curt Flood’s life is a testament to the costs of resistance and struggle.
Yet, the film goes too far in this respect, turning Flood’s life into a spectacle, a train wreck that the audience is suppose to stare and marvel at for the duration of the film. Focusing on alcoholism, fraudulent paintings and the personal demons that haunted Flood, The Curious Case of Curt Flood highlights the narrative grip that confines Flood in our contemporary moment. In “The Way It Is: HBO’s The Curious Case Of Curt Flood,” Nasir Muhammad & Stephane Dunn elucidate the film’s flaws in this regard, seemingly questioning its narrative focus on the tragedies experienced by Flood and his ultimate redemption, turning an important history into a “E’ Hollywood” story. They quote Stan Hochman, whose critiques of the film illustrate the powerful ways that death is not a slave’s freedom:
The courageous athlete who dared to challenge an unfair system is depicted as an alcoholic, a womanizer, a woeful husband, a dreadful father, a lousy businessman and a fraud who never really painted those portraits he churned out that enhanced his image as an artist . . . .In the history of warts-and-all biographies, this one slithers near the top of the list.
Curt Flood was a freedom fighter. That didn’t begin with his challenge to Major League’s Baseball Reserve clause or his rhetorical links to a larger history of slavery. Curt Flood had a long history of fighting for justice. At one level, the film successfully documents how Flood’s challenge was not simply about economics but humanity and civil rights. In 1964, when he sought to move his family to Alamo (CA), only to face an owner (and his gun-toting enforcers) that refused to rent to them, Flood took the matter to court. Questioning why they called the street they lived on La Serena (serenity), Flood noted that there was nothing peaceful for a black family because of “fear of some maniac with a gun will sneak up on your kids.” The Floods received a death threat and had been called the N-Word shortly after to moving into his dream home. The beauty of the American Dream was unattainable for Flood confirming that his economic success did not affirm his humanity or freedom.
This act of resistance, alongside of his involvement with the civil rights movement, his family history of challenging white supremacy (his mother had to flea the South after she defended herself against a white woman), his challenges to racial discrimination in the allocation of player raises or his involvement with the player’s demand that owners disentangle pension contributions from television and radio money, illustrate a larger body of work for Flood. Flood described his political orientation in the following way:
I’m a child of the sixties, I’m a man of the sixties. During that period of time this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Good men were dying for America and the Constitution. In the southern part of the United States we were marching for civil rights and Dr. King had been assassinated, and we lost the Kennedys. And to think that merely because I was a professional baseball player, I could ignore what was going on outside the walls of Busch Stadium was truly hypocrisy and now I found that of all those rights that these great Americans were dying for, I didn’t have in my own profession.
The linkages to the 1960s, to a larger struggle for human rights, are evident in Flood’s effort to connect baseball to a history of slavery. He was not alone in comparing the exploitation and experiences of black athletes to those of African Slaves of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries. Harry Edwards, Tommie Smith, Muhammad Ali, among others, all sought to contextualize the exploitation and abuse experienced by black athletes within a larger history of white supremacy. He was thus a product of a larger struggle for black humanity and therefore he embraced the language of that movement. In failing to offer this context, we get a curious interpretation of history that individualizes and dehistorizes the struggle for black freedom.
Moreover, Flood’s efforts to challenge baseball make sense given his efforts to secure equity and freedom for all Americans. His determination to transform baseball (and America as a whole) was clearly a manifestation of a lifetime of experienced indignities, from the refusal of a locker-room attendant to clean his uniform along with the white players to his movement from the team hotel to the “colored section.” The courageous stance that Flood took was thus understandable given his commitment to social justice and the stated impact that a history living inside of American Apartheid had on him. While acknowledging some of this history, the film’s focus on the peculiarity leaves viewers with the impression that Flood was “odd” and “different” (which had “positive” and “negative” consequences) rather than a product of a system of class and racial exploitation.
The critiques here are snot imply about the lack of “positive” representations in the film, the erasure of the racism that resulted from his refusal to play by THEIR rules, or even simply about historic accuracy, but rather that the choice to focus on the tragedy and redemption erases not only the contributions of Flood but the ways in which his story provides a historic marker for the larger history about the struggle for racial justice.
In “‘Death Is a Slave’s Freedom:”’ Curt Flood and the Fight against Baseball, History, and White Supremacy” (Reconstructing Fame: Race, Sport, and the Redemption of Once-Tainted Reputations, eds., David C. Ogden & Joel Nathan Rosen – University of Mississippi press), 2008) I explore the ways in post-death media commentaries and political posturing celebrated Curt Flood (as part of efforts to demonize contemporary black athletes and celebrate American racial progress), his contributions to baseball, and his courageous stance against Major League Baseball. In this article, I wrote the following:
Be sure, the story of Curt Flood is certainly one of courage and resistance, but it is equally a story of power, of the powerful and the great lengths the powerful have gone to maintain that control, those privileges and traditions that guaranteed their hegemony. In the end, however, only death could save him from the demonization, from the alcohol and drugs that invariably served as an antiseptic for the pain and poverty, from the letters and stares, from the exile, banishment and denunciations. This part of the story found little place in the reclamation projects that dominated the landscape following his death, but they certainly bear our attention in a time of increasingly reactive and certainly even reactionary narrative.
Even the respect that his legacy has garnered in the days and years after his death (although despite his contributions on and off the field Flood unjustly remains outside of the Baseball Hall of Fame) has not resulted in a full appreciation of the life, courage, and humanity of Flood. It results neither in Flood’s freedom nor for the freedom that he fought to secure during much of his life. Meager honors given in death do little to alter the persistence of racism and injustice inside and outside of sports. Lip service in the afterlife will not suffice nor will memory, especially when historic memory is confined by stories of personal tragedy and redemption; such memorials are unable to secure justice for Curt Flood, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Ella Baker, Dorothy Dandridge, or any of the nameless people history selectively remembers. Death will be the only potential avenue for freedom should the injustices done to Flood, and myriad forgotten others, continues. And even that will remain illusive because for Curt Flood death isn’t freedom because if it were we would be talking about courageous activism in the face of racism and the hall of fame not that other stuff.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard blogs @ No Tsuris.
