The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  Ed Scott was different. He was, in his own way, openly political, and his tongue could be sharp. He did not seek to confront whites, but nor did he shy away from contact with them, either. Segregation in Florida was far more debilitating, he thought. Scott believed Mobile’s whites seemed less convinced of the necessity for segregation. If he was wrong, he said, he felt at the very least that in Mobile he had encountered more whites who seemed willing to treat black people with dignity, if not total equality. Scott referred to them as “the good ones,” whites who would treat him with a measure of humanity, people who may have been frustrated as much by the racial environment as he. Mobile, he said, was full of “the good ones,” and they made his life in the city far easier. “That was why I fell in love with the city,” Scott recalled. “I found out that Mobile was one of the better places as far as the South. Later on, we had problems.

  “Once, I was working at a country club, and I said something like ‘Okay’ to a white lady,” Scott recalled. “She turned away and later came back at me and said if I couldn’t address her as miss or missus or ma’am, then I should not say anything. When she was finished, I looked at her and said, ‘Okay.’

  “See, that’s what you needed to survive. You needed the good ones, the ones who understood you were a person just like them. They had to go along with it all, because that’s the way things were, but they didn’t put their knee in your back, either.”

  He always remained attuned to black life around the country, even though in those days blacks who simply read the Negro papers—the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, especially—were often branded as “agitators” and threats to the social order. “I would always buy the Defender and the Courier at the newsstand because all the Negro baseball—Paige, Luke Easter, Mule Suttles, Buck Leonard—was in there. I could keep up with them.

  “Then one day, a white man said to me that the Pittsburgh Courier just caused a lot of problems. I told him that I bought the paper to read about the hangings and all the other things going on, because the Courier was the only way I could get my news.”

  When he met Henry, Scott worked as a porter at the Scott Paper Company. He played with the Mobile Black Shippers and began to settle into a good life in Mobile, working during the week, playing baseball one day a week and doubleheaders on the weekends. On the side, as a way to maintain a toehold in black professional baseball, he became a part-time scout for the Indianapolis Clowns. Word got around that Scott was a conduit to professional ball. The kids began calling him “Scotty,” and he quickly became the most connected black baseball insider in Mobile.

  One day in 1940, when he was using the Black Shippers team bus to transport WPA workers back from Brookley Field, a woman, Rebecca Deal, came out of the gate. “It was funny. I just happened to go out that way and she was standing at the gate. Before you know it, we ended up married.”

  He used his old contacts in the Negro Leagues for a special purpose. Though the idea of playing in the big leagues would be unavailable to him, Scott never found himself embittered that post-Robinson blacks would enjoy opportunities denied him. He had always been close to the generations of black ballplayers who arrived too early to play in the major leagues and took seriously their brotherhood as men who would pave the road for the next generation. Scott was particularly close to Buck O’Neil, who, when he signed with the Chicago Cubs, became the first black scout in the major leagues, and the two maintained a friendly scouting rivalry over the years. Scott had taught O’Neil how to play golf, and then he became known as the man who had discovered the great Henry Aaron. Scott had the inside track on Henry, but a few years later, O’Neil and Scott were jousting over Clyde Williams’s little brother Billy, who had scouts buzzing from Florida to Texas. Buck O’Neil told everyone that Scotty had no chance at signing Williams. Scott, for his part, figured he had Williams to himself, as they shared the same outfield with the Black Shippers. But there was another scout for the Chicago Cubs, Ivy Griffin, who had been watching Billy Williams all along. And it was Griffin, working for the Chicago National League Ball Club, not O’Neil, who delivered Billy Williams to the Cubs.

  There would be no place for men like O’Neil and Scott as players in the big leagues, but both would end up working for major-league clubs, and their satisfaction would have to come through developing the next generation of black players. For both men, that would have to do.

  On the platform of the L&N Railroad, the train station on the southeast side of Mobile, Ed Scott said good-bye to Henry. It was March 1952. Stella and Herbert were there, as was Henry’s eldest sister, Sarah. He wore a dark work shirt with large pockets on each breast. His pants were neatly creased and pleated, and he wore a dusty pair of wing-tip shoes. To his right was not a cardboard suitcase, as was part of the lore, but a duffel bag. The bag contained two sandwiches, a baseball, and a baseball glove. Henry stood on the tracks, a frown on his face, his eyes closed against the sun, while Ed Scott took his picture. He then headed for Winston-Salem to meet the Indianapolis Clowns.

  The story was that Henry promised his mother that he would return to finish high school, but the Josephine Allen Institute closed in 1953, and there would be no surviving document of a high school diploma. Henry would never answer the question directly as to whether he finished high school with a diploma or finished high school simply by not going back.

  There was one thing about Henry that never made sense to Ed Scott, and throughout the decades he would be the only person to confront this piece of bedrock that was central to the legend of Henry Aaron.

  “I never once saw him hit cross-handed,”23 Scott said. “I know, because I’ve seen guys who hit cross-handed and he didn’t. But that was something I missed, something I know for a fact I would have noticed. I’m telling you, I never saw it, but that became part of the legend. No point arguing about it now.”

  HENRY AARON WOULD have the distinction of being the last Negro League player to be promoted to the major leagues who was talented enough to reach the Hall of Fame. After him, the best of the black talent would be cultivated directly by big-league clubs. Jackie Robinson represented the beginning of the end of separate baseball leagues and separate societies in general. Henry represented the end itself. When Henry met Bunny Downs in North Carolina to begin his career with the Clowns, it marked the final time the Negro Leagues would factor into the story of a black player ascending into the integrated world of big-league baseball.

  The Negro American League in 1952 consisted of only six teams—the Indianapolis Clowns, the Kansas City Monarchs, the Philadelphia Stars, the Chicago American Giants, the Memphis Red Sox, and the Birmingham Black Barons—and the biggest name in the league, the legendary Oscar Charleston, was the Birmingham manager. The Clowns, and by extension the rest of the league, were ghosts-in-waiting. The team took Indianapolis as its name, but the Clowns were on the road every day of the year. They did not play in Indianapolis, nor did they have a home stadium there. Henry Aaron never played a game in Indianapolis.

  The eighteen-year-old Henry would not enjoy the same experience as, say, Jackie Robinson on his way to the majors. When Robinson joined the Kansas City Monarchs in 1945, he was twenty-six years old. His teammates were Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. Buck O’Neil was the manager. The Monarchs were the kings of black baseball and therefore on a par with the great black entertainers. The Negro Leagues were always financially challenged and record keeping was, at best, temperamental, but during Robinson’s time, the Negro Leagues were still a vital part of black entertainment life.

  In 1952, the dominant baseball team in black America was not even a Negro League team, but the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Negro League had lost its place. Henry knew if he showed any ability at all, it would only be a matter of time before a major-league team discovered him. Before he left Mobile, he had already seen the pathway to the big leagues. Willie Mays, for example, had played just a few months with the Birmingham Black Barons in 1950, and by the time Henry joined the Clowns, Mays
had already played in a World Series.

  It was only a matter of time. Within a week of the Clowns season opener, May 11, 1952, in Nashville, against the Philadelphia Stars at a ballpark called Sulphur Dell, the wheels were already turning. From his home on 472 East Ridge Road in Mobile, Ed Scott had begun a letter-writing campaign, keeping big-league teams informed of Henry’s talent. Scott had written to Billy Southworth of the Braves, and Branch Rickey in Pittsburgh. By 1952, Branch Rickey had left Brooklyn and was now running the Pirates. Nearly as much as Jackie Robinson himself, Branch Rickey had a name that was of great currency to black players. To be associated with the man who had desegregated the major leagues was no small thing. It was the reason why so many black kids wanted to play for the Dodgers, and why so many black adults from all over the country had adopted Brooklyn as their team.

  On May 23, Scott received a letter from George Sisler24—“Gorgeous” George Sisler, who hit .400 twice in his fifteen years in the big leagues—confirming Rickey had received Scott’s letter, dated May 21, 1952, “regarding Henry Aaron, 17 years old, 170 lbs, 5’11”. We will send the contents of your letter to our scout in the area who will endeavor to see him play. Mr. Rickey wishes to thank you for having thought of him.” Scott had already contacted the Boston Braves, and Dewey Griggs, the club’s top scout, was watching Henry. Griggs, in fact, had been following Henry since he first joined the Clowns. The New York Giants were watching Henry, too, the luscious prospect of Mays and Henry in the same outfield tantalizingly close.

  Henry joined the Clowns in Winston-Salem, but his Negro League career lasted all of fourteen games. He was skinny and poker-faced, quiet around older, calloused men who had grinded on the black baseball circuit for years. Teammates barely knew what to make of him—until he stepped into the batter’s box. There was the double header against the Memphis Red Sox, June 1, 1952, in Buffalo. Jim Cohen went the distance, winning 6–4. Henry went four for five with a home run. In the finale, an 11–0 washout, Henry went three for four, and Dewey Griggs was on the phone to Boston faster than Henry’s first home run left the park. John Mullen, the Boston Braves general manager, authorized Griggs to “do whatever it took” to wrest Henry from the grip of Clowns owner Syd Pollock. The secret was out.

  MAJOR LEAGUE SCOUTS TAKE GANDER25 AT

  CLOWNS’ SHORTSTOP, HENRY AARON

  KANSAS CITY, MO—… Rookie Henry Aaron, Clowns’ sensational shortstop, continued his blazing slugging, getting four of five in the opener including a long home run over the right field wall.

  Major league scouts are swarming into parks where the Clowns are playing…. All seem to agree he stands at the plate like a young Ted Williams.

  By June 7, four teams had scouts tracking Henry. Fay Young, the venerable Defender sports columnist, had already signaled to any fans interested in seeing Henry to head to the nearest ballpark to catch their “last glimpse of Henry Aaron, the league-leading Clowns shortstop.” With the first half of the Negro League season complete, Henry had run away with the league.

  CLOWNS’ AARON LOCKS UP

  NAL SLUGGING HONORS26

  Rookie Henry Aaron will win slugging honors in the Negro American League, according to the latest figures of the How News bureau.

  Aaron leads the league in batting with .483, in runs with 15, hits, 28, total bases, 51, doubles, 6, home runs, 5, and runs batted in, 24.

  Henry was destined for greatness, but there was a certain melancholy to it all. A decade earlier, Henry would have been a major attraction for the league, a drawing card in the vein of Josh Gibson or a Satchel Paige or Oscar Charleston, or any of the old-time greats of the black leagues. But Henry was heading beyond the segregated life. He represented progress, and for as many avenues as the future opens, it closes just as many. Henry Aaron’s month in the Negro Leagues was nothing less than the final period on the obituary of the great black leagues.

  Bunny Downs had promised Henry that the Clowns would pay him two hundred dollars per month. Henry lasted with the Clowns exactly one month. On June 11, 1952, the Boston Braves and the Clowns completed a deal for Henry Aaron. Henry’s last act as a Negro Leaguer, according to the Defender, was to rap two singles in the opener and play a “whale of a game” in splitting a doubleheader at Comiskey Park against the Chicago American Giants. The Braves sent Henry to its farm club in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and sent Syd Pollock and the Clowns a check for ten thousand dollars.

  Six weeks earlier, Henry had never been outside of the Mobile city limits without his parents. The farthest from Mobile he had been was to visit Papa Henry and Mama Sis in Camden—on horseback. But now, during the second week of June 1952, Henry was boarding a North Central Airlines plane for the first time in his life, choking on his own panic from Charlotte to Eau Claire, close to retching on each turbulent bounce across the Appalachians to the broad expanse north. He was eighteen years old and had never had anything close to an extended conversation with a white person. He would now engage in activities that Alabama had drafted laws to prevent: He would live among whites, play ball with and against them on the same field, and talk to them—at least under the strict definitions of the law—as equals.

  Henry had never played against white players—interracial competition had been prohibited by custom in Alabama since the late 1880s and would soon be enacted into law during the 1950s. Unlike Robinson, he did not have the advantage of social refinement afforded by education and experience. One would have had to look hard to find a kid less prepared to navigate this sudden new world. He was completely on his own.

  Clell Buzzell, the sports editor of the local Eau Claire paper, picked Henry up from the airport and took him home so his wife, Joyce, could meet the newest member of the Eau Claire Bears. As author and Eau Claire native Jerry Poling wrote in his book A Summer Up North, “The introduction might have been a pleasure27 for Joyce but not for Aaron. Seeing the scared, skinny young man in her living room, she thought he was fourteen or fifteen years old and feeling out of place. She felt sorry for him.”

  “He was shaking,” Poling quoted Joyce Buzzell as saying. “He had never been in a white person’s home before.”

  The Eau Claire Bears had been integrated three seasons earlier by Sam Jethroe. Jethroe himself had played a small role in the early story of integration in April 1945, when he and Marvin Williams accompanied Jackie Robinson to Fenway Park for a notorious, humiliating tryout with the Boston Red Sox. Jethroe would never be contacted by the Red Sox, but in 1950 he became the first black player with the Boston Braves, and won Rookie of the Year. Another top black prospect, Bill Bruton, had played for Eau Claire in 1950.

  The population of Eau Claire in 1952 was virtually 100 percent white—35,000 residents, seven blacks, twenty more nonwhites. Henry kept his distance, adopting the proper code of conduct for southern blacks: Do not approach whites unless directly addressed. He would walk the streets of Eau Claire and the young children would stare at him as though he were a foreign species. Sometimes their mothers would apologize with polite nods to him; the children had never seen a black person.

  The adults weren’t much better. At least the children had the excuse of being young. It was as though he had entered an alternate universe in that Henry walked around town among whites but did not sense the inherent hostility that was an ingrained element of the Mobile social atmosphere.

  Henry rented a room at the Eau Claire YMCA at 101 Farwell Street, which was located downtown, a mile and change from Carson Park, where the Bears played their home games. The two other blacks in the club—outfielder John Wesley Covington and the catcher, Julius “Julie” Bowers—also lived there, while the white players roomed with families.

  Henry did not often socialize with Covington or Bowers, though the three men lived in the same YMCA building. In later years, Covington recalled the young Henry as distant, hard to read. Even in private settings, even around his black teammates, Henry wasn’t exactly the guy cracking jokes at the card table. He was guarded, mostly trying not t
o betray all that he did not know. “He just would not open up to you.28 Hank was as far away from me at times as he was from anybody else on the ball club,” Covington recalled in 1993. “I don’t think at that time we were trying to be close.”

  For the prospects, Class C ball was just a stepping-stone to bigger things, a place to start an expected ascension. For the others, baseball might never be as good as it was in the Northern League, which made it the perfect place to travel and party and bond.

  In June 1952, Henry was neither the can’t-miss phenom nor the teenager happy to stretch a baseball dream as far as his middling talent would take him. He knew he had the ability to play, but he also knew that he could be right back with the Clowns should anything go wrong in Eau Claire. He had, the contract said, thirty days to prove that he was worth the investment.

  And so he kept his distance, adopting an immersion technique his family would have immediately recognized as belonging to Papa Henry: he kept to himself, studying others and forming opinions without volunteering much. While it was a protective device, designed not to expose his limits in education and sophistication, it was within this total immersion into the white world where a damaging Aaron caricature first took root. Marion “Bill” Adair, the Eau Claire manager and a southerner from Alabama, began what would become a career-long commentary on the Aaron demeanor, and by extension, his intellect. “No one can guess his IQ29 because he gives you nothing to go on. He sleeps too much and looks lazy, but he isn’t. Not a major-league shortstop yet, but as a hitter he has everything in this world.”

  Eau Claire was a lonely and distant place. From the hallway phone at the YMCA, Henry would call Stella not only to hear a familiar voice but to tell her he was coming home, he was quitting. Each day the conversation was similar: he wasn’t afraid he would fail. He just didn’t care for being so far away from home. Homesickness was especially acute for the first generation of black players integrating the game. Virtually all of them, before reaching greatness, told a story about wanting to quit. Some of them, like Billy Williams, actually jumped their clubs and went back home. More than half a century later, Williams remembered leaving his farm club in Amarillo, Texas, and returning to Mobile, not picking up the phone even when the big club, the Cubs, called personally to bring him back. And the stories always ended the same, too: Once a player arrived home, it was his family who sent him back out into the world, making sure a special opportunity to escape was not wasted.