A Well-Paid Slave by Brad Snyder Page B

and about 50 pounds heavier than in his playing days, Robinson told the audience that these athletes were there “to let you know we are with you 100 percent.” He swelled with pride over the comments by his fellow celebrities. “Our admiration for Patterson, Moore, Flood, and Marguerite [sic] Belafonte is unlimited,” Robinson wrote in his column for two of the nation’s largest black weekly newspapers. “They represent the kind of thinking and dedication which is helping to lick one of the toughest problems of our time.”
    In Mississippi, Flood and the other celebrities stayed in the homes of black families. Their host families escorted them to the rally with pride. The rally, in turn, inspired local black Tougaloo College students such as Anne Moody. “People felt relaxed and proud,” she later wrote. “They appreciated knowing and meeting people of their own race who had done something worth talking about.” Moody went on to risk her life in Mississippi voter-registration drives and lunch-counter sit-ins. Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, was the group’s official host. A year later, Evers pulled into his driveway, got out of his car, and was shot in the back and killed.
    The athletes attracted the attention of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an anti-civil rights police force established by the state after the Brown decision to “do and perform any and all acts deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states,” including spying on and intimidating civil rights workers. The Sovereignty Commission investigator at the February 25 rally reported that “Patterson and the other world-known Negroes” drew “one of the largest crowds I have ever observed for a meeting of this type.” Cars jammed Lynch Street next to the Masonic Temple and were so numerous that it was impossible for the investigator to record the license-plate numbers. By virtue of his participation, Flood earned himself a secret Sovereignty Commission file.
    Flood told the Mississippi audience that the rally helped him realize his responsibility to the struggle for racial equality. He went to Mississippi not to gain notoriety among white authorities or for the thank-you note from NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins. Flood went because his hero had asked him to go. He went because he wanted to show his solidarity with southern blacks fighting for their freedom. He went because he felt the civil rights movement in his soul.
    Flood was one of the first active major leaguers to join the civil rights struggle. Baseball is the most individualistic team sport, and baseball players are, by their very nature, self-interested loners. Black major leaguers were still fighting for their own rights in baseball in the early 1960s; few of them stood up for the rights of others. Some, like Frank Robinson and Willie Mays, refused to get involved. Flood and White felt differently. In 1963, White said that Flood “went to Jackson, Mississippi, to show by his presence that we in the big leagues were solidly with those unfortunate people down there.”
    Flood’s participation in the rally was brave considering that Mississippi and Alabama were engulfed in racial intimidation, violence, and murder. President Kennedy was forced to mobilize federal troops in late September and early October 1962 so that James Meredith, a black air force veteran, could enroll at the University of Mississippi. Thousands of schoolchildren marched in the streets of Birmingham in April 1963 as Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor turned police dogs and high-powered fire hoses on them. Medgar Evers was murdered in June. On August 28, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington. Less than three weeks later, a bomb at Birmingham’s 16th Street