It felt right that just a few days after Hank Aaron died, the voters for the Baseball Hall of Fame Tuesday refused to induct superstars Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling.
Bonds was the player who broke Hank Aaron’s home-run record, but under the suspicion of using performance-enhancing drugs. Clemens was suspected of using them as well to amass his pitching record. Schilling stained his strikeout titles by repeatedly pitching insults at Muslims and transgender people, and metaphorically throwing beanballs of ignorant bombast at Black athletes and Black culture.
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Schilling tweeted approval of a T-shirt suggesting that journalists should be lynched. For the last nine years, all three have seen their candidacies for the hall clipped by Major League Baseball’s voting rules that include consideration of character along with playing statistics.
So at least for another year, they do not share the pedestal that Aaron earned with his studied mechanics at the plate that launched far more home runs than one might think possible from a wiry body, his grit and class to endure racism, and his caring about the country.
In 2007, when Bonds was approaching Aaron’s record of 755 home runs, I noted in a column for The Boston Globe that Aaron hit his home runs with “focus, concentration, discipline—and nothing else.” That was also at a time of doping scandals in the Tour de France and NASCAR’s struggle to curb cheating on the aerodynamic design of cars. Outside of sports, it was also a time when the nation was mired in a war launched on the White House lie of Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and ongoing angst over widespread cheating in high schools and graduate schools. Such cheating today is symbolized at the most affluent levels by the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal involving Hollywood celebrities and the filthy rich.
Amid all that, I lamented that Aaron’s discipline to do things the right way occupied a “very lonely place” in America. Or, as Aaron biographer Howard Bryant wrote in his obituary tribute, “Over the course of his 86 years, America asked him to do everything right … No special favors. No handouts. America asked him to believe in meritocracy, the meritocracy of the record books and the scoreboard.”
June 1960 letter from then-candidate John F. Kennedy
Because of that, it also feels right that Aaron lived long enough to see Trump spirited out of the White House after the latter tried to lie and cheat his way into a second term. Aaron chose his political moments carefully, but when he spoke, it was with the authority of a 400-foot blast into the bleachers. Commenting in 2018 on the growing number of athletes on championship teams who refused invitations from a racist president to visit the White House, Aaron said he wouldn’t go either if he was still a player. “There’s nobody there I want to see,” he said.
His seriousness goes back to 1960 while playing for the Milwaukee Braves. The team’s World Series victory in 1957 and National League pennant the next year made him the most famous Black man in Wisconsin. He campaigned for John F. Kennedy in a crucial primary victory over Hubert Humphrey. Kennedy wrote Aaron to thank him for his “wonderful cooperation” that was no doubt “a very real help.”
Aaron campaigned in 1992 for Bill Clinton, helping Clinton win Georgia by 13,700 votes and becoming the first Democrat to win a presidential election in the state since former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter in 1976, and the only one until Joe Biden nipped President Trump in November by less than 12,000 votes. Clinton, speaking at Aaron’s funeral, joked, “For the rest of his life, he never let me forget who was responsible for winning. Hank Aaron never bragged about anything, except carrying Georgia for me in 1992.”
Many years later, Aaron campaigned in Milwaukee for President Obama’s second term and later excoriated Republicans who refused to cooperate with the nation’s first Black president. He told USA Today that Obama was “left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he’s treated. We have moved in the right direction, and there have been improvements, but we still have a long ways to go in the country. The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.”
When I did a series on Black athletes in 1980 for Newsday, Aaron had retired to another lonely place, the neckties and starched shirts of the front office. At that point, he was the only front-office African American for any Major League Baseball team, running the minor leagues for the now Atlanta Braves. He caustically told me in an interview that there was no excuse for this tokenism.
“Before I got up here in the office,” Aaron said, “everybody was trying to tell me that doing this paperwork would be like trying to get out of med school. It is an important job, and I handle almost 200 players, but I discovered there’s nothing complicated about this job. Willie Mays could do it. Ernie Banks could do it. Maury Wills could do it.
“I sign and transfer papers, go to meetings, the same thing that whites have been doing for 20 years. I listen to a lot of bull and go to parties.”
Forty years later, professional and major college sports remain two separate universes. Black men make up the majority of scholarship players in college football and basketball and the majority of players in the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, yet the front office and head coaching ranks remain vastly white. On Tuesday, in recognition of Aaron’s concern, the Braves, Major League Baseball, and the MLB Players Association teamed up to establish a $2 million fund to promote diversity in baseball.
Unfortunately, we’ll believe diversity in baseball and sports operations when we see it, since it took Aaron to die before such a fund was put together.
Aaron, born in 1934, said that he sometimes hid under the bed as a child in his native Mobile, Alabama, when the Ku Klux Klan marched down the street. His approach of Babe Ruth’s record brought an onslaught of hate mail and death threats that sucked the joy of the pursuit from him. He would write in his 1991 autobiography, “The Ruth chase should have been the greatest period of my life, and it was the worst. I couldn’t believe there was so much hatred in people.”
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He and his wife Billye turned that pain into making sure that Black youth would not feel so lonely in pursuing excellence and breaking barriers. They gave millions of dollars to historically Black colleges and universities, most notably to Morehouse School of Medicine and predominantly Black Atlanta Technical College. They also funded scholarships for college students in Milwaukee.
In one of his last public acts, Aaron joined other Atlanta luminaries, including former Atlanta mayor and civil rights icon Andrew Young, to receive a COVID-19 vaccine shot at Morehouse to promote others getting it. “It’s just a small thing that can help zillions of people,” Aaron said. At his funeral Wednesday, Quiana Lewis said that because of the Aarons’ youth philanthropy, she was able to train under the principal harpist for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Today a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, Lewis said, “It is one thing to be told that anything is possible, but it’s completely different when you’re shown.”
What I will personally remember the most about Aaron was a moment in 1973 when he came back to Milwaukee for Hank Aaron Day. I was a college journalism student then, and I was in the dugout snapping pictures of him for a Green Bay newspaper. For a split second, he looked upward back toward the field, with an ebullient smile.
Few people, including many of his teammates on the Atlanta Braves, knew how many death threats he was getting. That made the smile all the more precious. I was too young to know, but he was living out the line from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s famous poem “We Wear the Mask” that goes: “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile.”
Yet, no matter how much Aaron was torn up inside from the weight of his pioneering, his heart continued beating and bled for the next generation. In his final days, despite his own decades of loneliness, despite whatever he may have truly thought about his records being broken through cheating, he was thinking about zillions of people. The timing of his death, with the nation having just rejected four years of cheating and lying at the highest level of government, and the Baseball Hall of Fame rejecting alleged cheaters for its highest honor, felt right: Aaron’s final home run to us of discipline, dignity, grace—and nothing else.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Pulitzer-finalist journalist, a Union of Concerned Scientists fellow, and an environmental consultant. He is author of “Environmental Justice? Unjust Coverage of the Flint Water Crisis,” a 2017 paper for the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the Prospect’s board of directors.
Used with the permission. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2021. All rights reserved.
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