Lou Brock died today. He and Bob Gibson were my favorite Cardinals in the mid-sixties, when I was a teenage fan of St. Louis — in an era when they won two World Series, once in 1964 and then again in 1967.

No one on that team was a more exciting player to watch than Lou Brock. (Okay: Bob Gibson matched him.) Thinking about that team reminded me of David Halberstam’s book, October 1964, which recounts that major league season and highlights the racial differences of the era between the American League and the National League.

The Dodgers had introduced Jackie Robinson to major league baseball in 1947. Seventeen years later, the Cardinals had put together a lineup with a terrific nucleus of Black players at the heart of the team. (The American League, including the Yankees, were hesitant to add Black players.) This was the year that LBJ pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a year before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Beginning in the early ’60s, before winning the pennant, the Cardinals — who had spring training every year in St. Petersburg — had encountered Florida law that mandated segregated housing. White baseball players were allowed to stay in swanky hotels; Black players boarded with Black families nearby. Here is a brief description from October 1964 of how the Cardinals (owned by the brewing magnate, August Anheuser Busch, Jr.) changed that:

Finally, a wealthy friend of Gussie Busch bought a motel, the Skyway, and the Cardinals leased it for six weeks and rented some rooms in an adjoining one, the Outrigger, so that the entire team and their families could stay together. A major highway ran right by the motel, and there, in an otherwise segregated Florida, locals and tourists alike could see the rarest of sights: white and black children swimming in the motel pool together, and white and black players, with their wives, at desegregated cookouts. That helped bring the team together.

Things are so much different in sports today. How disheartening to have a president whose torrents of racial divisiveness have set the stage for white supremacists to enter into the contemporary political arena, where they have become a slice of the Republican base.

P.S. Since it’s Labor Day, let’s take note of the fact that the Cardinals’ center fielder in the ’60s, Curt Flood, fought baseball’s reserve clause, making labor history, though he lost his case before the Supreme Court.

P.P.S. And another Labor Day item: Kevin Drum has the graph of the day.