After the way that Atlanta treated Henry “Hank” Aaron with death threats and racial taunts, moving the All-Star game from Atlanta was certainly appropriate

… remembering the awesome record from 57 years ago

[This note is printed exactly like it was written to make a point, so please excuse the hatred, which is not the way I feel.]

[May 25, 1973]

Dear Mr. Nigger,

I hope you con’t break the Babe’s record. How do I tell my kids that a nigger did it. But it took, more at bats, live ball, and other nigger tricks. I wish you the worst at anything you do “Nigger!”

(KKK Forever)

CNN, April 2014

The day that Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs — April 8, 1974 — was truly the “best of times, the worst of times” for one of the best baseball players of all time.

Aaron etched his way into the record book by breaking a record that had stood for about a half-century. Yet, the hatred that he had to endure for surpassing a white man’s record to reach that point had him thinking whether or not it was all worth it. 

The note above is just one example of this. From the time that he started his career in the minor leagues in the Deep South and throughout the country, black players had to endure horrific taunts and threats. 

While he ended his career with 755, he was no doubt relieved that he would no longer have to endure the taunts despite being the greatest home run hitter in history. 

“Beating hate”

On the 40th anniversary of Aaron’s breaking the record, CNN presented a masterful piece that documented the challenges that he faced on his way to the top. 

And, it was simply gut-wrenching to read about the terrible abuse that any athlete had to endure, much less one of the greatest in baseball history,

It was 40 years ago today that Henry Louis "Hank" Aaron did what most thought was impossible. On April 8, 1974, the Atlanta Brave hit home run number 715.

It broke Babe Ruth's all-time home run record. It was an incredible athletic accomplishment made even more incredible because it happened in the shadow of hate and death threats. Those threats came from people who did not want an African-American to claim such an important record.

Aaron finished his career with a record 755 homers, a stat so impressive it has been bested by only one player, Barry Bonds, who finished his career with 762 – though that record has come under a cloud of steroid-use allegations.

Jen Christensen, “Besting Ruth, beating hate: How Hank Aaron made baseball history,” CNN, April 8, 2014

40 years later, he talked about the hate mail

Henry, who preferred that name to his baseball nickname, “Hank,” donated all of his memorabilia to the MLB Hall of Fame. That was great because he could have sold some of it for big bucks. 

However, there was one part of his “memorabilia” that he kept and never gave away,

Years ago, after one of the most illustrious careers in the history of the sport, Hank Aaron donated all his memorabilia to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. His 1957 World Series ring; the bat that struck his 3,000th hit, in ’70; his Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by George W. Bush in 2002—they all rest now in Cooperstown, N.Y. 

Aaron, who died on Friday at 86, kept only one collection for himself: the boxes of racist hate mail he received.

Aaron never forgot how America treated him. America shouldn’t, either.

Aaron was one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He held the home run record, with 755, until Barry Bonds surpassed that mark in 2007, and Aaron still holds the RBI record, with 2,297. He often said that his favorite of his statistics was that in 23 years, he never struck out more than 97 times in a season.

Stephanie Apstein, “Hank Aaron never forgot how America treated him. 

We shouldn’t, either,” Sports Illustrated, January 22, 2021

Aaron much preferred playing for the Braves in Milwaukee because he remembered what it was like when he started playing ball in the South many years before that. 

The early years in the South

Starting in the minor leagues in the 1940s and 50s, life was challenging for black players. Jackie Robinson had broken the race barrier, but he was unsuccessful breaking the hatred barrier,

Fans threw rocks. They wore mops on their heads to mock the black players. They threw black cats onto the field. The FBI investigated death threats. The players knew to ignore the hate, but "we couldn't help but feel the weight of what we were doing," Aaron wrote in his autobiography.

The stadiums had segregated seating. Brown v. Board ended "separate but equal" on paper in 1954 -- the year Aaron got promoted to the big league. But, like with other facilities, the "whites only" signs didn't come down immediately. It wasn't until 1961 that the Braves took down the "whites only" signs, according to Aaron. The segregation also extended to the team.

While the white Braves got to eat in restaurants in the South, the black players took their meals on the bus. They were also housed separately in towns that kept public accommodations segregated. Some Florida newspapers wouldn't even print the pictures of the black players. But by the end of his Sally League season, Aaron says in his autobiography "little by little -- one by one -- the fans accepted us. Not all of them, but enough to make a difference … and we were part of the reason why.

Jen Christensen, CNN, April 8, 2014

What respect they were given. It was disgraceful, which is why the game should have been moved out of Atlanta, where much of this took place in the final years as he pursued Babe Ruth’s record. 

The night the record was broken

While the stadium and city appeared to be happy when Aaron broke that record in 1974, that was not exactly accurate,

Vin Scully, on the call for the Dodgers, delivered his famous line: “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.”

That was all true. Also true was that the Braves had hired an Atlanta police officer, Calvin Wardlaw, to accompany Aaron everywhere he went. They registered Aaron under aliases in hotels: his mother’s maiden name, his assistant’s last name. They considered, then discarded “Babe Ruth.” Eventually they settled on A. Diefendorfer. Security ushered him through the back doors of ballparks to avoid crowds. 

The scares intensified as he neared the record. Someone threatened to kidnap his daughter Gaile. Several letter-writers identified the specific game during which they planned to shoot Aaron. The team turned the death threats—stacks of letters every day—over to the FBI. He was on edge even with autograph-seekers, whose pens flashed like guns. The Atlanta Journal pre-wrote an obituary, just in case.

The night he broke the record, the Braves tripled security at Fulton County Stadium. Wardlaw kept his hand on his .38-caliber gun. When Aaron reached home plate, his mother, Estella, smothered him with a hug—not from delight, she said later, but to shield him from snipers.

Stephanie Apstein, SI, January 22, 2021

Comments in biography

In 2014, the 40th anniversary of his breaking of the record, Aaron was blunt about the problems he faced that he felt had continued into the 21st Century,

In The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, author Howard Bryant wrote, “Hitting, it could be argued, represented the first meritocracy in [Aaron’s] life.”

Some baseball fans—some Americans—might be tempted to see all of this as the distant past, to view his story as a Disney movie about triumphing over oppression. Aaron never did. He kept that hate mail, he said in 2014, “to remind myself that we are not that far removed from when I was chasing the record. If you think that, you are fooling yourself. A lot of things have happened in this country, but we have so far to go. There's not a whole lot that has changed.

“We can talk about baseball. Talk about politics. Sure, this country has a Black president, but when you look at a Black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he's treated.

“We have moved in the right direction, and there have been improvements, but we still have a long ways to go in the country.

"The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.”

Stephanie Apstein, SI, January 22, 2021

For all of those reasons, MLB was right in pulling the all-star game out of Atlanta. His years there were particularly difficult. And to reward the city — where the team does not reside any more — after the way he was treated, would have been inappropriate.