With a single swing of a football bat via a misty Atlanta evening in 1974, a quick, gracious stroke that sent a ball soaring on the fence in left-center field and knocked Babe Ruth right out of the record books, Hank Aaron—who died in his sleep on January 22 at age 86—offered America nothing less than the usual remedy for its ills. He showed dignity and commitment over putrid cynicism, courage in the face of hatred.
Aaron faced the venom in the first 1970s as he closed in on Babe Ruth’s then all-time career record of 714 home runs. Aaron received so much mail—much of it hate mail, filled with death threats—that the U.S. Postal Service gave him a plaque for the flood of correspondence, based on CNN.
“I hope that you don’t break the Babe’s record,” read one note. “How can I tell me kids a [slur] did it.” This note was signed: “KKK (Forever).” “You’re not likely to break his record established by the truly amazing Babe Ruth if I can make it,” read another. “Whites are more superior than [slur]…My gun is watching your every black move.”
In the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Aaron’s chase for the record laid bare the raw racism prevalent in the first 1970s and stubbornly persists today. “Hank Aaron’s home run record exposed America,” says Harry Edwards, the famed sociologist and activist who helped organize the Black power salute at the 1968 Olympics, “and the steepness of the hill to be climbed.”
But despite the deep personal toll the chase laid on Aaron, whose family was also threatened during the ordeal, there he stood on the nights April 8, 1974, bearing down on a fastball from Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Al Downing, putting 715 to the books. Nearly one in four American tv sets were tuned in to watch Aaron make history. As he approached second base on his home run trot, stoic — Aaron may have smiled slightly — he slapped hands with Dodgers second baseman Davey Lopes, who offered congratulations. As he rounded the bottom, two white young men, who seemed to appear out of the left-field, ran alongside Aaron. His bodyguard, up in the stands, considered reaching for the pistol in his binocular case. If Aaron, with tensions so high in Atlanta after receiving so many vitriolic threats, had slugged the teens, reasonable people might have understood why. Nevertheless, the pair just patted him on the chest and shoulder. Aaron kept his calm, continuing his march, undeterred, towards home plate.
“It’s over,” said legendary Dodgers broadcaster/poet Vin Scully. “And for the very first time in a long time, that poker face of Aaron shows tremendous relief … Just what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. Just what a wonderful moment for the nation and the world. A Black man is getting a position ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol.”
“I’d just like to thank God it’s over with,” Aaron, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 from George W. Bush, said afterward.
The racism he faced in the run-up to the record might have darkened Aaron’s joy, but, for him, bitterness never lingered. He faced indignities all his life, growing up in segregated Mobile, Ala. “As a young boy, Henry would watch as his father was forced to surrender his place in line at the general store to any whites who entered,” wrote author Howard Bryant in his 2010 biography The Last Hero: A Life Of Henry Aaron.
