Hank Aaron passed away Friday morning at the age of 86. He leaves behind an incredible baseball legacy that—despite being most well known for home run 715—can not be easily summed up in stats and figures.
Aaron’s storied baseball career was intertwined at all angles with the cruel and unrepentant racism he had to endure on and off the field, a fact that can not be glossed over or ignored as tributes and remembrances for the icon pour in.
Growing up in the deeply segregated south of Mobile, Alabama, Aaron had to overcome the dual evils of poverty and systemic racism, rising above both to pursue his career. In 1952, Aaron started his baseball career in the Negro American League before joining the Milwaukee Braves in 1954. It wasn’t just in the early days of his playing career that Aaron faced racist taunts from fans and indifference from management. The cruelty reached a peak in 1974 while he was pursuing Babe Ruth’s home run record. The home run king was inundated with hate mail and death threats. According to the U.S. Post Office, he got up to 3,000 letters a day, but many pieces were classified as hate mail, sent from men and women who did not want to see a Black man break a white man’s record.
As we memorialize Aaron, one of the truest ways to preserve his legacy and everything he fought for and through, is to remember the racism he faced with clear and unflinching eyes. Yes, breaking the home run record was a magical moment, but it was also a point of deep conflict and tension for Aaron.
He spoke to the New York Times in 1990 about the true cost of chasing that record.
“April 8, 1974, really led up to turning me off on baseball.”
“It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about,” he said. “My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ball parks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day. All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won’t go away. They carved a piece of my heart away.”
Aaron’s words show that racism is not something he had to “rise above” or “learn to ignore.” He endured despite the treatment he received, and he never forgot it. In 2014, he told USA TODAY’s Bob Nightengale that he kept the death threats and letters to remind himself of how far we still have to go.
“To remind myself that we are not that far removed from when I was chasing the record. If you think that, you are fooling yourself. A lot of things have happened in this country, but we have so far to go. There’s not a whole lot that has changed.”
It’s tempting when icons pass to sanitize their experiences, or paint their past in a better light. The truth is that what Aaron went through can’t be codified with words and expressions like “grace” and “turned the other cheek.” It was abhorrent racism, and it very much lingers in sports today.