- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
This Week in History: Hammerin’ Hank’s strides toward equality
“The only thing to do was keep swinging,” Henry Aaron once said, “My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field.”
That was Henry “Hank” Aaron’s approach to life on and off the baseball diamond.
In the early 1970s when Hammerin’ Hank was getting closer to overtaking Babe Ruth as baseball’s all-time home-run champion, Aaron needed to remember that mantra more than ever.
He wasn’t worried about nerves making his bat unsteady, or eye unfocused – he was a consummate athlete after all. But as he grew closer to that 715 mark, the hate mail began to arrive in greater numbers than ever before.
This week in history marks several important anniversaries in the march towards equality.
On April 8, 1975, Frank Robinson of the Cleveland Indians, made his debut as the first black manager of a major league baseball team.
On April 11, 1947 Jackie Robinson became the first black major league baseball player when he played an exhibition game as a Brooklyn Dodger.
Among these momentous occasions is Hank Aaron’s story of perseverance in the face of hate.
One year to the day before Frank Robinson broke the color barrier as a manager of a baseball team, Hank Aaron became the world’s leading home-run champion.
Looking back at it as a single event, as a “day in history,” does not do service to the accomplishment.
Aaron’s struggle to that moment on April 8, 1974, was as much an accomplishment as that record-breaking home run itself.
At the time, people were still marching for freedom, advocating for black rights. Battles had been won, but the war was just beginning.
Only a decade had elapsed since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Such deep-seated prejudice and hatred usually takes generations to breed out of society. And here was Aaron, a black man, looking to overtake the record of white baseball’s beloved icon, in the face of the same bigots who hosed peaceful protesters and firebombed black churches.
Hank Aaron had played in the big leagues since 1952. He was a veteran, of both baseball and the racism directed at black athletes. And yet, the nearly 3,000 letters he received each day starting in the summer of 1973 overwhelmed even him.
Years later, when he was asked about the hate mail, Aaron quietly remarked, “this changed me.” He received so many letters each day that he had to hire a secretary to sift through them. Not all were full of hate, but enough were.
“You’re black so you have no business here.”
“I’D LIKE TO KILL YOU!! BANG BANG YOUR DEAD. P.S. it mite happen.”
"Dear Nigger Henry, You are (not) going to break this record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it. ... Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies. . My gun is watching your every black move."
They go on and on. Life mantras were made for times like these. With the aid of his own, Aaron slipped into the sort of calm and quiet efficiency that he had maintained his entire career in the big leagues.
So when he stepped up to bat in the 4th inning on April 8, 1974 in Atlanta, he knew what he had to do. Just keep swinging.
He did more than that; he clobbered the ball, sending it rocketing over the left centerfield wall and propelling his name into history.
As he rounded the bases, the Braves fans went wild, two college students jumping onto the field and running alongside him until security escorted them off the field. The new homerun king was mobbed at home plate by his teammates.
More than 30 years later, Hank Aaron still had his record, only losing it in 2007 when another black baseball player hit his 756th home run.
Even now, Aaron still keeps some of those hate letters. When asked why, he responds, "I read the letters, because they remind me not to be surprised or hurt. They remind me what people are really like."
He wasn’t terribly surprised, then, when he faced the same hatred once more, this time 40 years later.
In April of 2014, following an interview in which he remarked on the challenges then-President Barack Obama faced, Aaron received dozens of racist letters.
They contained the same vitriol, the same spelling errors and the same lack of human decency as the hate mail he had been carrying for decades. The irony was, the letters he received actually seemed to prove the very comments he made in the interview that sparked the outrage in the first place.
“Sure, this country has a black president,” Aaron had said to the reporter, “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.”
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.