The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  When Henry arrived in Redfield, he would be surrounded by hordes of eager small children. Some inmates, institutionalized for life, were nearly adults, and some were within five or six years of Henry’s age. Henry would stay for hours, spread out with the residents on one of the two large baseball diamonds on the property, patiently instructing the young ones how to run and throw and swing a baseball bat, encouraging strong throws and vigorous swings, the actual lessons far less valuable than the time spent. “I remember it well.149 I was working with one of the youngsters and he was about three feet away from me. He took the ball, wound up, and threw as hard as he could. He hit me right in the chest,” Henry recalled with laughter. “I was happy to go up there and spend time with the children, but it was dangerous.” Howard Chinn, superintendent of the school from 1961 to 1973, recalled that Henry was eager to organize a game with the kids, except for one major problem, which scotched the idea: gopher holes. Chinn remembered gophers burrowing into the grass, creating dangerous divots in the field, and Henry had no intention of having to explain to Lou Perini that he was out for the season because he’d snapped one of his brittle ankles by catching his foot in a gopher hole in South Dakota.

  The practice of an athlete visiting sick children dated way back, like so much in American sporting culture, to the legend of Babe Ruth, and over the years, in the face of image burnishing, it would be met with great and often deserved cynicism, considered hardly much more than an exercise in manipulation: the fail-safe photo op. Against the current backdrop, such visits are often viewed as the ultimate cliché, athletes paying social penance for enormous salaries that in years to come would engulf and distort the sports culture. And, worse, they are often viewed as a self-serving opportunity for athletes to cleanse their reputations, thereby increasing their own marketability. In today’s world, even a nonpublicized visit can hold great currency in the image-making business, transparent acts of self-aware selflessness. But 1963 was different. With Henry, there were no television crews in tow, no photographer, and no publicist. There were no friendly local columnists trading access for some good publicity (who knew the real Henry Aaron sneaked away on goodwill missions to South Dakota, and snagged a bagful of birds, too?), and there were no well-timed, perfectly managed news leaks designed to get the word out that a big-time ballplayer hadn’t forgotten the little people. On the dusty plains hundreds of miles from his own cultural sphere, there was no advantage for Henry to gain except in whatever he offered of himself to the children of the Redfield school, and whatever emotional currency they could return to him. Henry told virtually no one about his visits. He never even told anyone on his own team. In later recollections, his closest teammates—Mantilla, Mathews, Covington—had never heard of the school, and they certainly didn’t know Henry knew anything about South Dakota. Howard Chinn did not remember Henry as a celebrity making an electric appearance that kept the town buzzing for weeks. Nearly fifty years later, living in Enid, Oklahoma, hard of hearing but sharp of mind, he recalled “a lone black fellow who played baseball”150 coming by for several years.

  Even when he was finally exposed as a Samaritan, Henry still refused the opportunity to engage. Once in 1964, Al Stump, biographer of Ty Cobb and prominent freelance writer, profiled Henry for Sport magazine. The two met in Los Angeles before a series with the Dodgers. In Henry’s hotel room, Stump asked him about Koufax and Drysdale and then about his trips to South Dakota. About everything except the hunting, Henry was frustratingly vague. When the article was published, Henry, if not enshrouded in mystery, remained distant—not hostile, but certainly private. The story did not mention Redfield as the location of the school, stating only that it was “near Frankfort.” Stump did not mention the name of the school or explain why Henry seemed drawn to it. Though the piece promised an opportunity for Henry to present himself in fuller dimension to a national audience, he did not seem interested. Stump came away with a story151 for Sport, a lengthy profile (“Hank Aaron: Public Image vs. Private Reality”), where the hook was the contradiction between the Henry Aaron who slept except in the batter’s box and this other Henry Aaron, who took an interest in the mentally disabled, grew anxious about civil rights, and breathed a simmering political fire. Thirty years later, in his own autobiography, Henry never mentioned the quiet but important visits to the little school in South Dakota, though the people of the town never forgot.

  WHAT HENRY AARON desired most during the first half of the 1960s was to be complete, to be more than just a guy who could rip a line drive to center. He wanted to be considered great in his profession, certainly, but given the framework of the 1960s, when at last the time had come to redraw the lines of society, he also sought to be a person of substance. For his decade in baseball, Henry’s place on the diamond was undeniable, but being known as an athlete of social impact seemed far less certain, even inadequate within the confines of the sport upon whose record books he began a massive and methodical assault. Henry was in conflict not only with society but with his caricature—uninterested in things apart from hitting—both by a press corps that continually seemed to misread him and by many of his peers, who took his silence to mean he was uncomplicated.

  The reality was that Henry craved to be part of the larger world, contributing to important subjects and issues beyond athletics. Even some of the people closest to him did not understand his own yearnings, and they would find themselves off balance in those instances when they saw Henry on the political offensive. He sought to cultivate an important voice about the significant issues that were shifting the ground underneath his feet, and it was a desire that that had always been present, even if invisible to his closest contemporaries.

  In baseball, he never worried about his voice or his impact or his abilities; on the diamond, Henry Aaron always knew he could play, and his sheer talent gave him instant credibility. Yet credibility was not the same as respect, and one lost its full value without the other. During the spring of 1960, Henry, along with Covington, had spoken to Tebbetts and Lou Perini about the spring-training conditions for the black Braves players. Henry and the other black players had begun to take Billy Bruton’s lead. Henry, now one of the veterans on the club, second in seniority to Bruton among the Braves black players and clearly its most important, began to speak more actively about the daily inequities of spring-training life.

  The black players had lived in Mrs. Gibson’s Bradenton house each year Henry had been in the big leagues. Like their peers in most ball clubs, Tebbetts and the Braves management had not used their leverage in the cities where spring training took place, and they told the players there was little they could do to improve conditions for black players. The team members were merely six-week tenants in a town, and they could not interfere with local customs. Years earlier, Henry had lobbied Perini and John Quinn (who left Milwaukee for Philadelphia after the 1958 season) to abolish the policy of maintaining separate facilities at the ballpark, for it stung each time he walked around the Bradenton park, where the Braves played their games, and saw white and colored seating sections, water fountains, and rest rooms. The worst parts for blacks weren’t just the rusted fountain pipes and filthy toilet bowls, but the signs reinforcing every inferior accommodation, as if blacks weren’t sure which water fountain—the one a person would want to drink from or the one that awaited them—was meant for them to use without being given a humiliating reminder.

  Quinn, following the missteps of baseball men before him in completely misreading the social landscape, told the press (via Bob Wolf of the Journal) that not a single black player had complained about the accommodations of the boardinghouses in the Negro section of town. It was an old saw. When that explanation failed to mollify the players, Quinn would say the club lacked the political influence to affect local custom.

  Segregation issues consumed the Braves black players and had been gaining momentum with all the clubs that trained in Florida and Arizona, and the fight for equality was led by Bruton and Bill White and jou
rnalists in the black press like Wendell Smith. Even Judge Cannon, the figurehead of the largely ineffective Major League Baseball Players Association and target of Father Groppi’s protests in Milwaukee—Groppi periodically sent hundreds of protesters to Cannon’s house when it was revealed that Cannon had maintained his membership in the Hawkeye Club, a restrictive organization prohibiting blacks and Jews—began to press teams to adopt an aggressive position with regard to integrating the team accommodations in Florida. Across the American landscape were signs that the old customs were finally vulnerable, and this was a fight in which Henry wanted to play a part.

  Even as he expressed an opinion on racial matters—a voice that, to him, was clear about the injustices and humiliations of segregation—Henry was nevertheless wary about being labeled a troublemaker. In many ways, the appearance of caution he presented to the public undermined his true passion for civil rights. One example could be found in his words. He was convinced that the time had arrived to press for equality, and yet he referred to the louder voices in the movement, the ones who clearly stood on the right side of the issue, as “agitators.” He would refer to himself as a person interested in the cause of change but not one who would instigate. “I don’t consider myself an agitator,” he would often say, thus indirectly creating a certain degree of distance between himself and the public figures whose positions he admired and encouraged.

  Why Henry did not hurl himself into the burgeoning civil rights movement in the driven, public manner of the handful of his contemporaries had much to do with his natural reticence, and the reticence of professional athletes in general. Certainly a more aggressive approach would have left no question as to his feelings about the necessity for change—and the imperative of speed to effect that change—but Henry did not see appealing to the public as anything but a last resort. His political strategy would always begin behind closed doors. Part of his reasoning was practical: Using the public for leverage could be embarrassing to the people he most wanted to cultivate, and while he might have scored points with the public by being audacious, making people look bad would tend to harden their stance and thus make achieving the ultimate goal that more difficult.

  More important, Henry dreaded public speaking. He was, thought Felix Mantilla, self-conscious about his southern accent, an insecurity Mantilla (whose English was layered with a strong Puerto Rican accent) could appreciate. Henry was particularly self-conscious in northern or East Coast settings—in interviews with New York newspapermen, for example. He did not trust how his words would be interpreted.

  Indirectly, his pragmatism led to another enduring label from which he could not escape: that Hank Aaron was accommodating on civil rights. In his heart, no conflict existed: Civil rights was precisely the onrushing movement he had craved since he was a boy. It was, in fact, not a topic at all, but the story of his life. Henry was as passionate about equal rights as any of the more outspoken voices around him. In later years, he would express a certain regret that he had not been more firm in his conviction. “I know I did not make it easy152 for people to understand me, but there was nothing to me more important than civil rights and what Jackie Robinson and Dr. King started.”

  In many ways, he was more passionate than most of his contemporaries, for Henry was a child of the South, and the distance between his rights and equal rights was as wide a gap as existed in the country. Henry knew how much change was needed, for his examples were so distinct and so personal. He would never forget how Herbert had labored each day with such nervous uncertainty, unsure from week to week if work would be plentiful or sparse, and yet each day, no matter how hard he had worked or how dutiful and disciplined he had been, Herbert would always have to relinquish his place in line at the store whenever a white man entered. Better than most, Henry understood the debilitating effect of segregation, not only on society but on the individual family, and too often he could summon a litany of offenses, which now suddenly seemed right to address.

  Henry would always be reluctant to speak out, both because of his lack of formal schooling and his desperate fear of addressing people in public, but in the first half decade of the 1960s, he began to sharpen his own attitudes on racial equality. He found himself taken with the writings of James Baldwin, whose position that blacks had persevered despite their overall condition and could no longer wait on the goodwill of whites resonated deeply with him. There was a particular passage in Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time that seemed to illustrate Henry’s attitude precisely at this moment in time: “Things are as bad153 as the Muslims say they are—in fact, they are worse, and the Muslims do not help matters—but there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more farseeing than whites.”

  For a time, Henry had been interested in Baldwin, but he had never actually read his books. He had learned of Baldwin from seeing the writer on television. Like most baseball players, Henry was a night creature; he would flip channels, hoping for a Western on the late show. He first saw Baldwin by accident, on a late-night talk show, and the writer’s words clicked with him in an important, personal way. Baldwin initiated the type of dialogue Henry had sought, and he was impressed by Baldwin’s considerable ability to articulate the frustrations of his fellow black citizens, the imperative of taking advantage of this special moment in time. In later years, Henry would say he felt the urgency of the times not because of his own experiences but because of his childhood recollections of Herbert. Herbert was powerless to challenge the impenetrable white structure that had been in place for his entire life and that of his father, Papa Henry. These two people had been the most important male figures in Henry’s life and he remembered the immense power whites had held over both.

  And here Henry was, up late, watching the black-and-white television, hoping for a Western but finding something else instead, unsure of exactly what he was watching. It might as well have been science fiction, but all the while Henry was completely riveted as he watched the small-shouldered, large-eyed Baldwin broadcasting the singular, clear, and ferocious message across the entire nation that the time had come to challenge openly the smothering social conventions that had suffocated three generations of men like Herbert Aaron and Papa Henry. The particular Baldwin theme of rejecting the idea of waiting for change resonated powerfully with Henry. “We’ve been waiting all this time.154 My parents are waiting right now in Alabama,” Henry said in a profile piece. “The whites told my parents, ‘Wait and things will get better.’ They told me, ‘Wait and things will get better.’ They’re telling these school kids, ‘Wait and things will get better.’ Well, we’re not going to wait any longer. We’re doing something about it. That’s what Baldwin says, and he’s right.”

  It was a revelatory moment, for Baldwin had articulated the very sentiments that Henry had long believed but had never thought the time would be right to voice outwardly. Henry may not have considered himself an agitator, but certainly in private he adopted a position to the left of the black mainstream.

  As a teenager, Henry had bet on his athletic ability, forgoing higher education and sailing through high school with only minimal interest, but as a parent he was bitterly strict when his children spoke of skirting the educational system and relying only on their own talent (as he once had). More upsetting to him was when his children believed in their elevated position, when Gaile or Henry Junior anticipated an easy and bountiful road ahead because of their father’s celebrity. When he believed that the children grew a bit too spoiled, he would recoil, Gaile recalled, reminding them, “I’m Hank Aaron, and you’re not.”

  “I was sensitive to what they would face155 out there in the world, but I also did not want to do anything or say anything to my children that would break their spirit,” Henry said. “I didn’t want them to think my experiences had to be their experiences, but I also didn’t want them to just think it would be easy, just sticks and stones. It’s not just sticks and stones out there.”

  Henry’s public posi
tions during the mid-1960s shook those who thought they knew him. In 1964, he was approached by a representative from J. B. Lippincott, the Philadelphia book publishers, on behalf of Jackie Robinson. Robinson was writing a book of profiles of players, white and black, about their roots and experiences in the game during the first generation of integrated baseball, and he wanted Henry to be a part of the project. Henry agreed, and his first-person transcript appeared in the book as a thirteen-page chapter, which was entitled “Baseball Has Done It.” Henry’s contribution would be remarkable both for its content and because it represented the first moments Henry would begin to strike back at the press.