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Hank Aaron: A Role Model For All Ages

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The baseball card statistics of Hank Aaron tell the story of one of the greatest hitters in major league baseball, hitting more home runs than anyone, including Babe Ruth. Aaron also had more total bases the most runs batted in. And he is third all-time in total hits.

The baseball card only scratches the surface of Henry Aaron. Not only was he a member of baseball's Hall of Fame, but he was a hall of famer in life, too. “Hank Aaron was not only a home run king, but a king of justice,” Senator Cory Booker tweeted Friday. “In the face of racism and vitriol, he broke through barriers with grace on his way to becoming one of the greatest baseball players of all-time. We’ve lost a true trailblazer and American icon.”

Born in segregated Mobile, Alabama, young Aaron matriculated to the Negro Leagues as a teenager, even playing the league’s World Series. He joined the Milwaukee Braves as a nineteen-year-old and for the next two decades stayed with the franchise, moving with the team to Atlanta, where on April 8, 1974, he stepped up to the plate at Fulton County Stadium—the anticipation building—swatted home run number 715 over the fence to break the great Babe Ruth's home run record. Years later, when inducted into the Hall of Fame, Aaron said, “I never wanted them to forget Babe Ruth. I just wanted them to remember Henry Aaron.”

What fans did not know was that Aaron received racist taunts and death threats against him and his wife and daughters for the period leading up to that event. Outwardly through it all, Aaron remained stoic and seemingly unfazed. Only later did he unburden himself.

“The Ruth chase should have been the greatest period of my life, and it was the worst,” Aaron wrote in his 1991 autobiography, I Had a Hammer. “I couldn’t believe there was so much hatred in people. It’s something I’m still trying to get over, and maybe I never will.”

An inspiration for many

After all, Aaron had grown up in the Jim Crow South, and when the Braves moved to Atlanta, he was not enthusiastic. As reported on CNN, Aaron met with leaders of the civil rights movement, saying he was "just a ballplayer." They reminded him that he was more important. Aaron was succeeding, make that triumphing, in the professional game from which Blacks had been banned.

President George W. Bush awarded Aaron the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And upon his passing, President Barack Obama said, Aaron was "one of the best baseball players we’ve ever seen and one of the strongest people I’ve ever met." Obama recalled that after the death threats he had received when chasing Ruth’s record, Aaron “never missed an opportunity to lead.”

"I was never bitter," Aaron told a Connecticut sportswriter, Chris Dehnel, in 1991, "If I were ever bitter, I never would have been able to accomplish what I accomplished."

Shortly before his passing at 86, Aaron performed his last act of heroism. He was photographed with his wife Billye getting the Covid-19 vaccine. He smiled proudly and gracefully as he had throughout his long and star-storied career.

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