Robert Smith
speaker
1,476 appearances
11 recordings
6 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 8 Jul
Robert Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When he was coming up in professional baseball in the 1950s, he played on minor league teams in North Carolina and Georgia, where there was just constant racist heckling from the fans.
One time, he even got yelled at by his team's own trainer for
because he put his dirty uniform in the laundry with his white teammates' uniforms.
And in fact, the trainer pulled Flood's uniform out with a stick and sent it to a black laundry 10 miles away.
And after the union head tells Flood how he'll probably lose his case and be ostracized from baseball, Flood says, OK, but if I do win, will it help other players in the future?
And the union head says, yeah, it will.
And Flood says, that's good enough for me.
Let's do it.
He decides to sue Major League Baseball.
you find a guy who's kind of half politician, half lawyer.
Yeah, that'll do it.
So the union finds this lawyer named Arthur Goldberg.
He had been a former Supreme Court justice who stepped down to be the ambassador to the UN, which truly seems like a step down, I guess.
Not back in those days, yeah.
Goldberg says he'll take the case if the union just pays his expenses.
And Goldberg and Flood come up with a strategy that is this.
They're not just going to fight the case in court.
They're going to fight the case in what journalists love to call the court of public opinion.
They're going to try and convince America that the reserve clause is wrong.
You're out of order.
Showing 221–240 of 1,476 · page 12 of 74
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