Defiance, not hippie style
The athletes in this story were not hippies, and most would not have used the word about themselves. What they shared with the counterculture was a willingness to say no to institutions that expected obedience. Two episodes show it clearly: the gathering of black athletes in Cleveland in June 1967 to examine Muhammad Ali’s stand, and Curt Flood’s refusal in 1969 to accept a trade, which led to a lawsuit against baseball’s reserve clause.
Ali refuses induction
On 28 April 1967, in Houston, Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion, declined to step forward when his name was called at an army induction centre. He cited his religious beliefs as a member of the Nation of Islam. He was stripped of his boxing titles and licences, and on 20 June 1967 he was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison, pending an appeal. The Ali draft refusal is covered in its own article. Here the question is how other athletes reacted.
The Cleveland summit
On 4 June 1967, a group of prominent black athletes met in Cleveland, Ohio, to talk with Ali. The meeting was organised by the former football star Jim Brown. Those present included the Boston Celtics’ Bill Russell and the young UCLA basketball player Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, along with a number of professional football players and the Cleveland politician Carl Stokes.
Reports from the time say that the athletes wanted to test Ali’s sincerity before they supported him, and that they questioned him closely. They came away convinced, and they issued a statement supporting his right to refuse. Some of them were wary of the risk to their own careers, and the press response was mixed, with many sports writers hostile to Ali.
The summit is notable because it showed that sport was no longer a place where black athletes were expected to stay silent. It belongs with the broader civil rights movement and the rise of Black Power in the same years. In 1968 the Olympic medal-stand protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos made the same point to a global audience. Ali’s conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court in 1971, and he returned to the ring after a long absence.
Curt Flood and the reserve clause
Curt Flood was the centre fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, a respected fielder who won several Gold Glove awards and played on the Cardinals team that beat the Red Sox in the 1967 World Series, alongside Bob Gibson and Orlando Cepeda. He was well paid by the standards of the day, and he was not an obvious rebel.
In October 1969 he learned that the Cardinals had traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies as part of a multi-player deal. Flood did not want to move. Under baseball’s reserve clause, a team could renew a player’s contract each year, which in practice bound him to that team unless it traded or released him. A player had no right to choose another employer.
Flood wrote to the commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, in December 1969, saying that he did not consider himself a piece of property to be bought and sold. Kuhn refused to approve his request to be treated as a free agent. Flood then sued, in January 1970, with the support of the players’ union and its director, Marvin Miller. His lawyer was the former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg. Reportedly, several former stars, including Jackie Robinson, testified in his favour.
The case against baseball
The courts ruled against Flood. In June 1972 the Supreme Court decided the case, Flood v. Kuhn, by a vote of five to three. The majority upheld baseball’s long-standing exemption from antitrust law, describing it as an anomaly but one that Congress, not the court, should change. The dissenters included Justice Thurgood Marshall, who argued that the exemption should not stand.
Flood paid a high price. He sat out the 1970 season, played briefly for the Washington Senators in 1971 and then left the game. His career was effectively over, and his choice had cost him money and his place in baseball.
What changed later
Flood lost, but his case helped to push the issue. In December 1975 an arbitrator ruled, in the cases of the pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, that a player who played a season without a signed contract could become a free agent. That led to the free agency system of the late 1970s, in which players could move between teams. Many consider Flood a forerunner of that change, though the 1975 outcome came by a different legal route.
Taken together, the two episodes show that athletes in the late 1960s were more willing to challenge authority openly. Sport’s rebels were not rock musicians or hippies. They were working athletes who risked their livelihoods to make a point about their rights.