Hank Aaron kept calling out racism when others stopped

(NOTE TO COACH’S BOX READERS: When I heard last week that Hank Aaron had died, I posted this on Facebook. I wanted to share this with you here, too.)

Overall, perhaps nobody within the structure of sports is so angry with the entire situation than Hank Aaron. He sees the traditional baseball establishment holding back blacks, allowing them to play — but that’s all.
“To be very honest with you,” said Aaron, "I think some of these guys don’t wear sheets and hoods. They just wear neckties.”

I wrote that in 1987. This was shortly after Los Angeles Dodgers Vice President Al Campanis had questioned whether Blacks had the “necessities” to be managers or general managers.

This is what I appreciated about Hank Aaron. So many others in sports at the time were afraid to call out racism. He wasn’t.

This is what I think about now.

Word today of his death stunned me, as it stunned so many of us. There is so much to celebrate about his life. It usually starts with how he endured so much hatred, so many threats, just because he was a Black man about to break Babe Ruth’s career home run record. I can close my eyes and still see him rounding the bases on the historic No. 715, past two fans who had run on the field to congratulate him (and, fortunately, not to attack him) along the way.

Mostly, I am thinking back to the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a reporter and Aaron was an Atlanta Braves vice president. He was so generous with his time, and I tried to pick my spots. I would call him about home runs or about the state of baseball or about any story that could be better with his voice in it. Any story would be better with his voice in it.

Mostly, I remember how candid he was about racism in baseball. In what was current baseball.

This was a time when we did not hear a lot from current sports figures about racism. For all Jackie Robinson had done for the game and society by breaking the color barrier, for all Aaron and others had gone through to make baseball more accessible to Blacks, modern athletes were relatively quiet on the subject. And not just in baseball. This despite the rarity of blacks in head coaching, managing and general managing positions.

When Campanis said what he said on national TV, as baseball was about to honor Robinson’s breakthrough, Campanis lost his job. More than that, it got people talking.

“It’s the best thing that could’ve happened,” Aaron told me then. “I could’ve gone on TV every night for two years and yelled about the problem, and it wouldn’t have meant a hill of beans.

“Mr. Campanis is with the Dodgers, the same team that brought in Jackie Robinson. He played next to Robinson in the minor leagues, they were teammates, and this is the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking through. The script couldn’t have been written any better.”

Aaron spoke to me for a series examining why Blacks were not advancing into leadership positions. So did then-Houston Astros owner John McMullen, who became upset at the question. He told me it was unfair to blame the owners. He blamed the pay. “If you have a young man, a black, his financial opportunities in the business world are far greater than in sports after he’s done playing,” McMullen said.

And there was more: “Whites with the same talents as blacks do not have the same opportunities as a black does. That’s because of present laws — equal opportunities, quotas and so forth.”

Countered Aaron, one of the few high-ranking Blacks in baseball or football management: “It bothers me, because you hear it from someone who has intelligence, from someone like Mr. McMullen, who owns a ballclub. You can’t be dumb, and you can’t be blind when it’s right there, staring you in the face.”

Wait. There’s more.

I asked then-Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott about baseball dedicating the season to the 40th anniversary of Robinson breaking the color barrier. “Well, that’s because Jackie Robinson’s been a great player,” she replied, “I don’t think so much because he was black.”

Countered Aaron: “That tells me some things. This goes a little bit further than Al Campanis. It goes to the top.”

This was hardly the worst of the comments Schott was making and would continue to make. As some of these became public, even when baseball eventually started to act on it, players on her and other teams generally did not speak out. It was the time.

Today, player activism has exploded. The death of Black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin seemed to begin a new era of athletes speaking out about social injustice. Outrage over racist comments by then-Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling showed players were willing to speak up within their sports, as well, as the NBA moved quickly to ban Sterling.

Since then? Whether it be Colin Kaepernick kneeling, players skipping White House celebrations or teams boycotting games over social injustice, it is a different world than the one Hank Aaron and I used to discuss.

I wish I had a chance to talk to him about it now.

I am grateful for all those times we did talk.

May he rest in peace.