In 1961, A little-known black doctor stood up to Major League Baseball. He changed the game forever.
March 1961
For Alex Haley, the future author of the monumental best seller Roots, St. Petersburg, Florida, must have seemed like a time warp when he arrived from his Greenwich Village studio. Living in the hippest and most politically progressive neighborhood in New York City, he was used to rubbing elbows with whites and blacks on a daily basis. That was not the case below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Beginning to make a name for himself, Haley was one of the few African Americans in the US writing for “mainstream” — that is, non-black — magazines. He was sent on assignment by SPORT, a popular monthly magazine known for its in-depth sports stories that went beyond the highlights of a game. His plan was to interview Dr. Ralph Wimbish, the debonair six-foot tall, 212-pound African American physician, and learn how this doctor recently upended the Major League Baseball establishment.
During the interview, Haley learned that Dr. Wimbish’s home was a focal point for African Americans, especially traveling black celebrities who were banned from staying in the local hotels. Wimbish and his family boarded or hosted musicians Cab Calloway and Dizzy Gillespie, Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens, and tennis legend Althea Gibson. During spring training, New York Yankees catcher Elston Howard stayed with the Wimbishes too.
Even if they did not sleep there, ball players such as the Cardinals’ Bill White, Curt Flood, and Bob Gibson came by to use the swimming pool, play table tennis, and relax since there were few alternatives available to them. What the athletes mostly came for, though, was the food. Wimbish’s wife, Bette, recalled years later how she was “constantly cooking and serving” gumbo and occasionally chitterlings for their celebrated guests. It did not matter how expensive it got during spring training. Wimbish was more than willing to cover it. Their home was known as the “Wimbish Hotel.”
But what Haley was most interested in what happened six weeks prior that landed Wimbish on the front page of every sports section across the nation.
For months, Dr. Wimbish had been mulling over the decision about whether to continue to house black ball players who were unable to stay in the same accommodations as their teammates. Although it was financially lucrative, he was also contributing to the problem.
Finally, in late January 1961, he said to Dr. Robert Swain, a black dentist who also provided housing to black athletes in St. Petersburg, “Damn it, we’re not going to do this anymore.”
No longer would Wimbish tolerate separate housing for African American ballplayers during spring training. No longer would he drive around his neighborhood, with a player or two in his car, seeking suitable quarters. Wimbish’s routine was the same every season. He’d get out of his car, inquire if the black homeowner was interested, and if not, drive to the next location until the players were taken care of, paying for their housing from the funds he was given by the team’s traveling secretary.
Wimbish confided to Alex Haley during the interview:
The more I thought about it, the more I felt that it was wrong [and] had gone on long enough. It was high time the club and the city put them in the hotel where they rightfully belonged with the rest of the players.
Wimbish was not the only one planning to voice opposition. Throughout the month of January, before players arrived, muckraker and one-time Jackie Robinson confidante Wendell Smith was already raising hell with his nationally syndicated columns, calling for an end to spring training’s segregated housing. His articles were fierce, but they had minimal impact in swaying the league or its owners to reverse it stance or put pressure on Floridians to change its ways.
On January 31, Dr. Wimbish met with the St. Petersburg Times sports reporter Jack Ellison. “The time has come,” Wimbish told Ellison. He would “no longer help visiting [black] baseball players find spring lodging.”
Living conditions for the colored players in the Florida camps are not satisfactory. The Negro is not permitted the privacy of the white man . . .. He is herded into a boarding house usually some distance from the center of town. There he must answer the dinner bell and eat whatever is set on the table.
“It’s time management of the clubs takes a hand,” Wimbish declared.
Then came the bombshell. The decision would take effect that spring.
Rookies, pitchers, and catchers who were always the first to arrive were scheduled to report to spring training in two weeks. The next day, February 1, 1961, the St. Petersburg Times published the interview and was soon picked up by national press including the New York Times. Teams were immediately put on the defensive.
In Sarasota, where the Chicago White Sox trained, hotel management indicated that there would be “little change in the practices of past years.” That did not sit well with the Sox’s owner, Bill Veeck. A rebel rouser, Veeck responded that either the hotel management reconsiders its decision or he’d take his team elsewhere. The following day, a spokesman from the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce announced that the White Sox would be able to have all of their players stay together at the team’s hotel.
Others from around the league jumped in. Brooklyn Dodgers great Roy Campenella, who had been out of baseball since a 1958 car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, also spoke out. “If you play like a major leaguer, you should be permitted to live like one.” His former boss, Branch Rickey, was one of the most vocal supporters of desegregation in sports and said, “There is no earthly reason why Negro players shouldn’t stay in the same hotels and eat in the same restaurants as other players.”
For St. Petersburg, this type of publicity could have an adverse effect on the town’s economy and culture. “Baseball is the life blood of some of our communities,” a local business leader explained to the media. “We can’t upset the traditions of generations in a single day or a single year.” What he really meant was that he feared Florida’s spring training teams moving three thousand miles west to Arizona to join the Chicago Cubs, San Francisco Giants, Cleveland Indians, and Boston Red Sox.
While Wimbish received praise for his heroism, he was not immune to threatening phone calls and death threats including a cross burning in his front yard.
While the Yankees showed some gumption, the majority of teams who trained in Florida, including the Cardinals, had no plan to upset the status quo. “We don’t make the rules and regulations for the various localities.” team General Manager Bing Devine stated.
Devine knew the locals wouldn’t budge.
“When either the Yankees or the Cardinals, or both, feel the situation has developed so they must insist on housing all their personnel in the same hotel,” the owner of the hotel the team stayed in, “then the Yankees and the Cardinals should look for other hotels.”
On February 4, 1961, four days after Wimbish’s comments were published, the Yankees owner Dan Topping, to the shock of the handful of assembled journalists, announced that the Yankees were making plans to leave St. Petersburg, where they had been training since 1925. Although Topping had taken other considerations into this decision such as the fact that the club wanted a new ballpark and felt that the city was in decline, the segregation issue was the primary motivator. He wanted all of his players “under one roof.” They left St. Pete for Fort Lauderdale.
Even though some teams like the Kansas City Athletics and the Milwaukee Braves (who featured Hank Aaron) were outright resistant (“My boys do not mind being subjected to the Jim Crow laws in the spring,” said the Braves’ President vice president Birdie Tebbetts), the majority of teams saw the writing on the wall and also began applying pressure to their host cities.
Although most teams did not move as quickly as the Yankees, the floodgates had opened. It didn’t happen overnight, but by 1964, the Minnesota Twins, who trained in Orlando, integrated its quarters, the last team to do so. What was once thought to be unfathomable, had suddenly, within three years, become the new normal.
Florida paid a hefty price for its antiquated traditions. The Grapefruit League gave up ground to Arizona’s Cactus League. Spring training was once dominated by the Sunshine State. Now, Major League Baseball’s teams are evenly split between the two states.
Although Dr. Wimbish got to witness the fruits of his labor, it was short-lived. On December 2, 1967, Ralph Wimbish, a lifelong smoker, had a heart attack and died. He was forty-five years-old.
Hailed for having been “ahead of his times” and a “real fighter” for civil rights, it was Hank Aaron who summarized the spring training situation best: “[T]here wasn’t a white man in Florida — or in baseball, for that matter — who was going to change things just out of his sense of decency. It had to happen through pressure.” No one applied that pressure more effectively than Dr. Ralph Wimbish. How many people could claim to have driven the New York Yankees out of town?
It was this story that drew Alex Haley to St. Petersburg that March. Haley’s article was published later that summer in SPORT, but to minimal fanfare. Little else would ever be written about Dr. Wimbish, who seems largely forgotten in St. Petersburg now. There is no monument, public facility, or street bearing Dr. Wimbish’s name. He is an unknown entity in baseball and African American history. Relentless in his quest for racial justice, Dr. Ralph Wimbish risked it all — his livelihood, his house, his personal safety, his family’s well being. It is for this that he should be remembered.
