Henry Aaron did as much as anyone to redeem the South
By David Von Drehle,
Long before the television impresario Ted Turner marketed the Atlanta Braves as “America’s Team,” Atlanta had no big league team at all. There was no Major League ballclub anywhere in the Deep South as of 1964, the year three disappeared civil rights workers were found buried in an earthen dam in Mississippi. The city dangled a new stadium, lavish TV rights, parking receipts and the generous patronage of Coca-Cola to attract a franchise.
The Braves of Milwaukee took the bait, which meant that Henry Aaron of Mobile, Ala., was headed back to the South. I’m going to call him Henry in this column because that was the name he preferred, as opposed to “Hank,” a nickname attached to him by a PR man who thought White fans might find it friendlier. A giant on and off the field, Aaron died on Friday, a few weeks shy of his 87th birthday.
How did he feel about the move? As you might expect: “I have lived in the South, and I don’t want to live there again,” Aaron said in anticipation of the Braves’ 1966 debut in Atlanta.
But Henry Aaron won over Atlanta and retired as the greatest player in franchise history — the franchise marketed as a team for the whole nation. His hero, Jackie Robinson, broke through baseball’s wall of segregation, but even he didn’t do it in Dixie. Aaron finished the job in large part because he was both supremely talented and incredibly steady.
There is a very exclusive club whose members hit a baseball well enough to compile a career batting average above .300, who hit hard enough to accumulate 300 or more home runs and who played long enough to hit safely at least 3,000 times. Club roster: Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, Stan Musial and George Brett. The club gets smaller when you double the number of homers to 600: Aaron and Mays. Add another 155 home runs (more on this number later) and you have Aaron, all alone.
He was ridiculously consistent. Elected to the All-Star team in 21 consecutive seasons, a record. Top 20 in the balloting for most valuable player 19 seasons in a row. The all-time leader in runs batted in and total bases. Eight seasons of 40 or more home runs. Seven additional seasons with more than 30. He was the league leader in slugging percentage four times over three different decades.
That steadiness carried him through one of the longest and loneliest of all civil rights marches, as year after year Aaron faced the National League’s best pitchers in pursuit of the most hallowed record of the most celebrated player in the history of the national pastime. A person is rarely more alone than in the batter’s box; a home run is an epitome of individual achievement. Aaron needed 715 of them to unseat Babe Ruth as the all-time home run king.
(About that number: Major League Baseball recently took the long overdue step of acknowledging that the organized Negro Leagues are properly part of “major league” history. Statistics racked up before Robinson’s trailblazing 1947 season will be added to career totals of players such as Mays, Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, Roy Campanella and others who played on both sides of the egregious color line. Aaron’s five documented home runs for the all-Black Indianapolis Clowns came in 1952, too late to be added to his totals.)
A lifetime record creeps up gradually. Through the strife of the late 1960s and early 1970s — when the avowedly White supremacist George Wallace was winning electoral votes for president and White citizens from Boston to Denver were protesting violently against school desegregation measures — Aaron closed relentlessly on Ruth’s record.
“My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats,” he later recalled. “I had to go out the back door of the ballparks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day.”
One lonely trip to the plate after another.
I turned 13 in the winter of 1974, when Henry Aaron spent the offseason parked at 713. He needed one more to tie and another to break the record. Everyone knew that baseball’s steadiest superstar would finish the job promptly once the new season started. And he did, with a homer on Opening Day, April 4, and another on April 8. Still, then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn made no effort to be present.
When “The Hammer,” as he was known, died, he died in Atlanta. The place he didn’t want to go had become the place he didn’t want to leave. A prosperous businessman and recipient of the prestigious title of Georgia Trustee, Henry Aaron had done as much as anyone to redeem the South from the clutches of its history and to open a way forward. Not with one swing of the bat, but with tens of thousands; his motto, he said, was “just keep swinging.”
Read more from David Von Drehle’s archive.
Read more: Dave Sheinin and Matt Schudel: Hank Aaron, baseball great who became force for civil rights, dies at 86 Thomas Boswell: Hank Aaron’s greatness and grace were underappreciated and unmatched Neil Greenberg: Hank Aaron’s staggering stats go well beyond the home run record
