Henry Aaron: A Quiet Civil Rights Man
HENRY AARON, the baseball star, was born in 1934 in the Down the Bay section of Mobile, Alabama but raised mostly near the docks in a neighborhood called Toulminville. Though he was a superb all-around player, he’s best-known for hitting 755 home runs in his career, the only man in Major League history to surpass Babe Ruth’s “unbreakable” record of 714, without taking steroids. His 2,174 career runs scored and 2,297 career RBI are staggering numbers. You could take away all of Henry Aaron’s home runs and he’d still have 3,000 hits.
He was also important as a civil rights man, and as an example of a life of grace.
From the time he was a boy, Aaron disliked whiners and complainers. His father, Herbert Aaron, was a quiet, honorable man, who set him a good example. Mr. Aaron made about $75/week as a boilermaker’s assistant. When he retired 20 years later, it was $115/week. Friendly journalists in later years would write ‘Estella Aaron raised eight kids on that paycheck. The Aaron family worked hard, attended the Baptist Church, and stayed out of trouble.’
That’s not entirely true. Herbert Aaron supplemented the family income with a tavern, the Black Cat Inn, which was right next door to the Aaron house. There was drinking and dancing and music there. Some of the liquor Herbert made himself. He called it “white shinny,” and the law used to come around trying to find this moonshine and fine or arrest Herbert Aaron. Early one morning, some deputies turned over the bed looking for it when Estella Aaron was still sleeping in it. Herbert had hidden the white shinny in his potato vines. He enjoyed outsmarting white people, but the mask he wore was of a simple man who knew his place in the world.
In 1942, a neighboring house in Down the Bay was demolished. When no one claimed the wood, the Aarons gathered it up. Estella pulled out all the nails, Herbert bought two weedy lots in Toulminville for $55 each, and paid a pair of carpenters $100 to build a six-room house. Decades later, when Henry Aaron was a star ballplayer, looking at expensive homes, he would marvel that his boyhood home had cost $110 for the land and $100 for construction.
The Aarons tried to kill one hog a year for the pork, but almost everything else they ate was from their garden. A lot of collard greens, butter beans and cornbread. Always more than one child to a bed. When the Klan came marching down the street, Estella would tell Henry to go hide under that bed.
Henry picked cotton, hit bottle caps with a stick when he couldn’t afford a bat. He was a natural at baseball, a star from the beginning, although he hit cross-handed with his left hand above his right on the bat. He was a skinny infielder, and a dead pull hitter. Carver Park was just a block from Henry’s home, and he’d run over there after finishing his chores. If his team was batting, the batter would just lay down the bat, knowing that Henry Aaron was about to pinch-hit.
In 1947, Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the color line and paved the way for black players in the Major Leagues. In 1948, Jackie played an exhibition game in Mobile and 14-year-old Henry Aaron saw him play and vowed to try to make the Major Leagues, too. His mother wanted him to be a teacher. She saw how good Henry was with people, how much he loved children, and she knew that hundreds of children could be inspired by a skillful teacher to reach higher in life.
But he was so good at baseball that at the age of 18, he was already starring for the Mobile Black Bears and getting on a train in Mobile bound for Winston-Salem, North Carolina to join the Indianapolis Clowns, in the Negro Leagues. Herbert Aaron was glad his son was giving professional baseball a try, but warned Henry as he left home: “Don’t speak out of turn. No one wants to hear what you have to say until you’ve proven yourself.” It didn’t take Henry long to pack. He only had one pair of pants, and two dollars in his pocket. Mobile was highly segregated, and that train was the first time he’d ever been so close to white people. He wondered if he was making a mistake leaving home.
The veterans on the Clowns weren’t very friendly. Many of them were as good as Major Leaguers but only made a fraction of Big League salaries. They were too old to be Major League prospects but this skinny kid Henry Aaron had a chance to reach the Majors. So they teased him, and tried to keep him out of the batting cage. For a kid 150 pounds, Henry had tremendous power. He swung hard and hit the ball on the nose. He could hit even an excellent fastball, and had no trouble adjusting to a sharp-breaking curve.
Henry Aaron made it to the Majors by the age of 20, after the Indianapolis Clowns sold his contract to the Boston Braves. The Braves sent him to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he made friends with Wes Covington, a big prospect for the Braves, and also a black man. Covington was a talker and a teaser. He asked Henry why he never wanted to try anything adventurous. One day in a rainstorm Aaron’s cardboard suitcase started to fall apart, and Covington never let him forget it.
One of Henry’s minor league managers was Mickey Owen, a former Major League catcher who was amazed at Henry’s bat speed and ability to put the bat head on the ball. He told Henry that lack of ability would never hold him back from a great career. It was the other things he’d have to think about: getting enough sleep, drinking in moderation, taking care of his body.
Henry got married and in Puerto Rican winter ball, learned to play the outfield and to hit the change up. He and his wife Barbara had their first child, a beautiful daughter named Gaile. One of Henry’s lasting memories of Puerto Rican ball was looking out the window and seeing a cow munching on one of Gaile’s clean diapers hanging on the clothes line.
In Jacksonville, Florida, Aaron met Joe Andrews, a white first baseman who could hit almost as well as Henry — but who drank and brawled and eventually ended up in jail. There he got to thinking about all the abuse that Henry and the other black players had endured in Jacksonville, and he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and never took another drink. When Joe Andrews and Henry Aaron were teammates, Andrews was appalled by the racial abuse from the crowds. Aaron seemed to take no notice of it and once after a vicious racial slur from the stands, Andrews turned to Henry and said “Did you hear that?” Henry replied, “What do you think, I’m deaf?”
Because Henry had superb reflexes, he was very rarely hit by a pitch, which was useful because black players got thrown at a lot. Some white pitchers automatically got in a bad mood when they saw a black face in the batter’s box, because they didn’t think black players belonged in the Majors. Others didn’t mind them there, but had swallowed the myth that they frightened easily.
Henry also had the ability to keep the bat back, to wait until the last possible fraction of a second and then whip the bat through the strike zone and hit the ball with the sweet part of the bat. Curt Simmons said that trying to sneak a fastball past Henry was like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.
Early in his career, he often swung at bad pitches. Part of it was pride; he felt sure he could make good contact even on pitches outside the strike zone and he felt there was psychological value to letting the pitcher know that. But he decided in later years, looking back, that it was also tied to his having grown up black in the south; he didn’t trust the umpires to be fair about balls and strikes, and so he felt he ought to swing at whatever he could reach. Later, as he became a star, he became more selective.
In 1952, the Boston Braves finished in seventh place in the National League. They were a sad sack team, perennial also-rans in Boston to the Red Sox, and they were playing a lot of young players who weren’t ready to carry the team. But in 1953, the Boston Braves relocated to Milwaukee. A hick state, East Coast people said. A sparsely populated football and ice hockey state, with only two seasons, Winter and July.
But Braves players had a great time there in the 1950’s. They were no longer the “other” team in town. People came from all over the Midwest to see the Braves, who drew over 2 million fans one year, in cozy County Stadium. The players were treated like royalty. Many of them found they couldn’t pay for drinks, for gasoline in their car or their dry cleaning. People in Milwaukee were that thrilled to have Major League Baseball.
When Bobby Thomson broke his ankle in 1954, Aaron got into the Braves’ starting lineup. At age 20, Aaron hit .280 with 13 home runs. His solid rookie season ended early when he broke his own ankle. But Ted Williams, one of the greatest hitters ever, heard a Hank Aaron base hit that year and came running out of the clubhouse, wanting to know who the hell had hit the ball that sounded like that.
He built on that in 1955, hitting 27 homers, 106 RBI and a .314 average. In 1956, he hit .328, won the batting title and was NL Player of the Year. In 1957, Hank Aaron was even better. He hit .322, led the league in home runs and RBI, and clinched the pennant for the Braves with a 2-run homer in the 11th inning. His teammates carried him off the field in glory. In the World Series, the Braves played a powerful Yankee team, but Aaron hit .393 and helped lead the Braves to an upset victory. Various people who saw the young Aaron hit thought he might well hit .400 one days, as Ted Williams had. Almost no one thought he would be a great home run hitter.
People in Wisconsin had seen very few black people. Henry would always recall a young girl in a restaurant who gawked and stared at him and seemed unable to touch her food. His teammates were generally nice to him — they knew he was winning games for the team, putting money in their pocket. But Henry noticed that his teammates said things about black people when they were drunk that they didn’t say sober. So he stopped going out with his teammates.
Aaron and Eddie Mathews, the Braves third baseman, had a friendly rivalry. They liked and respected each other but both of them wanted to get the big hit in the game, both of them expected to drive in the winning run. They enjoyed and supported each other, but each wanted to outdo the other.
The word among many white writers was that Aaron was colorless, a bad interview. Certainly, he was quiet and wary of people he didn’t know. But he was intelligent and observant. Because of his guardedness, and the strictures of sports journalism in that era, very little of his intelligence was reported in the newspapers. He didn’t speak the King’s English, so many of the media portrayed him as dumb. Aaron didn’t analyze his swing the way Ted Williams did but he studied opposing pitchers with great care. At the end of a season, if he hit 40 home runs, he could reconstruct the pitcher and the pitch sequence for all 40 of them.
Henry used to talk to Jackie Robinson, who impressed on him the importance of never being satisfied with partial progress on civil rights, the need to keep pushing, to make civil rights a lifelong commitment. Years later, Aaron was disappointed when Jackie wandered into the Oakland A’s clubhouse and none of the players seemed interested in talking to him, or saying ‘Thank you.’ Aaron was dismayed by how few modern players attended Jackie’s funeral in 1972.
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The Braves were bought by a Chicago syndicate, and not promoted well, and in the early ‘60’s the Braves were not as good on the field. Attendance plunged. In 1965, the last year in Milwaukee, the team had already announced they were moving to Atlanta, and there were home games with under 700 people in the stands.
Henry didn’t want to move to Atlanta. He still had scars from the racism of Mobile. He met with Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy and they encouraged him to come south. He would always measure himself against them and against Jackie Robinson and would feel he wasn’t doing enough for civil rights. The Braves’ move to Atlanta was a bumpy one for Hank and Barbara Aaron. They had both spoken publicly about their wish that the Braves would stay in Milwaukee, and this had been reported in Atlanta.
The Aarons found a handsome ranch house in a prosperous black neighborhood in Atlanta. But at games, Barbara Aaron would sit in the stands hearing her husband called all kinds of racial slurs. Once when she was getting a hamburger she made sure to put extra mustard on it, and when a fan behind her kept using the “n” word, she turned around and shoved the hamburger right in his face.
Living in Atlanta put Henry in a major city with a deep connection to the civil rights movement. Fame was a platform and he would use it.
His marriage to Barbara ended, and he married again, to Ms. Billye Williams. It’s true that Billye encouraged his civil rights work, and exposed him to many new people through her wide network of friends. But Henry bristled at the idea, often trumpeted by sportswriters, that Billye was controlling him, that she’d put him up to this or that act of civil rights. The example was Jackie Robinson, and the urge to live up to that example was Henry’s alone.
A sharply painful kind of criticism was the kind of article which said ‘Hank Aaron’s being a loudmouth all of a sudden. If he cares so much, why didn’t he say anything earlier? It was as if these journalists thought it was wrong of Henry to speak up — but also wrong NOT to speak up. Former teammates were quoted saying they never knew he cared so much about black people being well treated, which Aaron thought said more about those teammates than it did about him.
Aaron’s game was never flashy. He didn’t have a colorful nickname. He very rarely dove headfirst, or lost his cool on the field. He didn’t run out from under his cap like Willie Mays. He didn’t argue with umpires, carry on feuds or boast in the newspapers. He played in minor media markets and didn’t drop the bat and watch his home runs. He didn’t smile as he ran the bases or come out of the dugout for curtain calls.
Fulton County Stadium was a good home run park and when Henry hit 47 homers in 1971, he decided to try to break Babe Ruth’s record. When he started to get close, there was a popular bumper sticker around Atlanta: “Aaron is Ruth-less.”
The letters were much worse. He started getting 3,000 letters a day from all over the country, not just from the Deep South, and many of them were racist diatribes. Dear Nig_ _ _, or “Dear jungle bunny” they’d begin, then proceed to tell Aaron he had no right to do what he was doing. One letter writer said “Dear Hank Aaron, How about some sickle cell anemia, Hank?”
Summers in Atlanta are muggy, and he couldn’t sleep because of all the tension. There were people hounding him, calling his hotel rooms. Old friends he hadn’t seen in years were calling in favors… They had a friend who just wanted to meet Henry. ‘Thanks, now can you pose for a picture?’
There were death threats, threats that he or some other member of his family would be kidnapped. He had to have security guards surrounding Gaile at the college she attended, Fisk University in Nashville. Another letter ended by saying “My gun is watching your every black move. This is no joke.” Another wrote: “I hate you!!!! Your such a little creap. I hate you and your family. I’D LIKE TO KILL YOU!! BANG BANG YOUR DEAD. P.S. It mite happen.” He made sure to save the hate mail; he wanted a record kept of how hard it had been for him and his family.
And then in the stack of these hateful letters would be a beautiful letter from a stranger, saying they admired his talent and poise and had a baby son and were naming him “Aaron” out of respect for Henry.
Dick Cecil, one of the Braves’ vice presidents, felt he had to talk to the FBI about what to do about these letters. The FBI people said that Hank Aaron was indeed the subject of plots against his life but he needn’t worry about the letter-writers; serious assassins don’t write letters of warning. This was not exactly reassuring for Henry and his family.
The FBI learned from informants that there were credible plans being made to kidnap Gaile Aaron. One day Gaile’s dorm mother at Fisk brought her into a room where four FBI men told her she was in danger but they would protect her. That whole year, Gaile had to make sure never to be alone, and Henry flew to Nashville almost every off-day during the baseball season to visit his daughter and tell her he loved her. He never knew if his coming to see her made her safer or less safe, but she liked it when he came and he needed to see her.
This period of chasing and then passing Babe Ruth should have been the greatest time of his life, but it turned out to be the worst. He felt like a prisoner of the home run quest, unable to feel safe in public, afraid for the safety of his family.
The home run quest was far bigger news nationally than it was in Atlanta. The Braves simply didn’t draw well; the night Henry hit his 711th career home run, there were only 1,362 people in the stands to see it. A lot of white people were unhappy about the record being broken, and many black baseball fans didn’t have the money to buy a ticket to a Braves games.
At the end of 1973, Henry had 713 home runs, one short of tying Babe Ruth. Driving out in the country, he stopped at a vegetable stand. The farmer, a friendly guy with a wad of chewing tobacco, said “Hey, Boy, I sure wish you’d have broke that record last year.” Aaron knew the man was trying to be nice but he couldn’t take being called “Boy” and he got very angry, and went and sat in the car. Georgia was still Georgia.
He finally hit his 715th homer, driving a slider from Al Downing of the Dodgers into the left field bullpen. This time, Henry ran around the bases with a big smile on his face. The crowd at the game gave him a standing ovation. Vin Scully, broadcasting the game, gave him a gracious tribute. Henry’s teammates mobbed him and suddenly Estella Aaron was bounding down onto the field and swallowing up her son in a hug. She had wanted him to be a teacher, and he had gone off to be a ballplayer and taught his country a great lesson. She told everyone, “God works in mysterious ways.”
A few hours later, Henry said “I thank God it’s all over.”
Henry Aaron said “I’m not trying to get anyone to forget Babe Ruth. I just want them to remember Henry Aaron.” He was very proud of having set that record, but his friends learned not to ask him about it; there were too many ugly memories. Who was better, Ruth or Aaron? Henry tried to stay out of those conversations. He knew that Babe Ruth had been a bigger legend, and had revolutionized the game. Babe had a higher batting average. Babe played when travel was more tiring. Babe was also a great pitcher in part of his career. But Henry had to endure night games, relief specialists, the slider, fielders with bigger gloves and ballparks with more distant fences.
Henry always thought the biggest thing not mentioned when comparing their two eras was that Babe didn’t have to play against black players. Fans would say, ‘The Babe towered over the other players of his day.’ No, he didn’t, thought Henry. He towered over other Major Leaguers. Babe would NOT have towered over Negro League stars like Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston if they’d been allowed to play in the Majors.
Shaken in 1972 by the death of Jackie Robinson, Aaron spoke out more and more about institutional racism in baseball and in all walks of life in this country. He gently, steadily pressed baseball to give chances to people of color, in all capacities — as managers, general managers, advance scouts.
Mobile, Alabama decided to name a street in the black part of town after Henry Aaron, and Herbert Aaron, so quiet in Henry’s childhood, spoke up and said the street named after his son shouldn’t be in a black area; the city should make it a major downtown street in Mobile. Henry was surprised and pleased when the city fathers did just that.
Always, he was someone his friends turned to in tough times. A family friend called when their son had taken some powerful drugs and locked himself in the bathroom. Aaron talked to them for a long time, talked them through it. His former teammate, Joe Andrews, once met with Aaron and brought along a mafia guy who wanted a ball signed. Aaron quickly pulled Andrews aside and said, “You aren’t involved with him, are you?” He knew right away the man was bad company, and thereafter Andrews put some distance between himself and that man.
In time, an obviously juiced-up Barry Bonds passed Aaron’s home run record. Aaron did not attend the game, and distanced himself from the controversial Bonds without directly criticizing him.
Henry always admired musicians who made records that will be around forever. He felt baseball games are soon forgotten, and seemed surprised that people were keeping video recordings of his 715th home run.
In 1991, Henry published a memoir he’d worked on with Lonnie Wheeler called “I Had a Hammer.” The memoir walked a delicate line, speaking his piece, noting the grievances he’d had with the game of baseball but without being the kind of loudmouth whiner that he’d always disliked.
Henry never stopped talking to children, trying to help them. He did everything he could to try to reduce racism. He hated the way that racism hurts the self-image of children of color. In his 80’s, he got around more slowly, using a cane, and then a wheelchair. Shortly before his death, he was able to celebrate two Democratic senators being elected in Georgia, one of them a black man. And then Henry Aaron was gone.
