Hank Aaron played 23 seasons, from 1954 through 1976, with the Milwaukee Braves and Atlanta Braves in the National League (NL) and two seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers in the American League (AL).
He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982.
Aaron started his professional career in 1951 with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League. He was scouted by the Boston Braves and New York Giants, signed with the Braves, who assigned him to their minor league teams. By the time he was brought up to the majors, the Braves had moved to Milwaukee.
Jim Crow America prevented Aaron and other black athletes from being treated with the same dignity as their white teammates. In a story published at Wikipedia, Aaron tells this story:
We had breakfast while we were waiting for the rain to stop, and I can still envision sitting with the Clowns in a restaurant behind Griffith Stadium and hearing them break all the plates in the kitchen after we finished eating. What a horrible sound. Even as a kid, the irony of it hit me: here we were in the capital in the land of freedom and equality, and they had to destroy the plates that had touched the forks that had been in the mouths of black men. If dogs had eaten off those plates, they'd have washed them.
In 1970, Aaron collected his 3,000th hit, an important milestone in a baseball player's career. But he is most famous for chasing and breaking Babe Ruth's home run record. Aaron ended the 1973 season one home run short of Ruth's record of 714. In the off-season between 1973 and 1974, Aaron received so much mail that the Braves had to hire a secretary to manage it.
Sports Illustrated wrote:
Is this to be the year in which Aaron, at the age of thirty-nine, takes a moon walk above one of the most hallowed individual records in American sport? Or will it be remembered as the season in which Aaron, the most dignified of athletes, was besieged with hate mail and trapped by the cobwebs and goblins that lurk in baseball's attic?
He received death threats and hate mail from people who did not want to see Aaron, a black man, break Ruth's nearly sacrosanct home run record. Baseball apologists always spin this piece of history as though the threats were made to protect Ruth's legacy, but the truth is that these threats were leveled against Aaron because he was black, not because he was breaking a record.
Television broadcaster Vin Scully addressed the racism directly in his call of the game:
What a marvelous moment for baseball; what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia; what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron ... And for the first time in a long time, that poker face in Aaron shows the tremendous strain and relief of what it must have been like to live with for the past several months.
Although I was a massive baseball fan from 1966 through 2003, I never saw Hank Aaron play. I knew him as the Home Run King who suffered mightily for breaking Babe Ruth's home run record. I knew him as a quiet, dignified man who said little to the press and stood proudly in public. I knew of him as a level-headed, clear-minded executive in the Major League Baseball hierarchy.
Hank Aaron is an American hero who battled the demons and evil of institutionalized racism with dignity and honor.
Watch Aaron break the home run record, and hear Scully's commentary: https://youtu.be/QjqYThEVoSQ
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