Hank Aaron’s death last week was occasion to revisit one of baseball’s singular careers. Aaron spent 33 years as baseball’s all-time leader in home runs, but he was still oddly underrated throughout his life. He was always defined in comparison with other players, whether it was Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, or Barry Bonds. But Aaron’s career was unlike any other in terms of consistency and sustained production. From 1954 to 1973, he never played fewer than 120 games or had an OPS+ lower than 147. His presence atop the leaderboard of so many offensive categories—second in home runs, first in total bases, third in hits, fourth in runs scored, first in RBIs—is unrivaled.
Still, what everyone focused on last week was his pursuit of Ruth’s record, and specifically the racist reaction he faced in that pursuit. On Twitter, an excerpt went around from an interview he gave William C. Rhoden, where he said, “It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about. My kids had to live like they were in prison because of the threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp… All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won’t go away. They carved a piece of my heart away.”
When sports’ civil rights icons are allowed to speak for themselves, they tell stories like this with remarkable regularity. Last year, Bob Gibson told MLB.com that “Nothing has changed” regarding race in this country. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s long-fractured relationship with the media began in 1968, when he said “Yeah, I live here, but it’s not really my country.” And baseball’s most famous civil rights icon, Jackie Robinson, wrote in his autobiography, published days after his death in 1972, that he was still an outsider in his country: “As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.”
And yet somehow, as has happened to so many civil rights icons, they all get turned into inspiring symbols of inevitable progress. It has become almost a cliché, at this point, to point out Martin Luther King’s low approval numbers at the time of his death, and to highlight the hypocrisy of those who use him as a cudgel against modern protest movements. We forget King’s harsh words about the American war machine, or Rosa Parks’ activism against housing discrimination in Detroit, and turn them into all-American heroes. People like King, Parks, and Robinson have become denuded symbols of passive resistance, of some phony, nonthreatening version of change.
You can see the same thing happening to Hank Aaron. So many of last week’s tributes to him referred to Aaron as the “real” home run king—a not-so-subtle swipe at Barry Bonds, who of course holds the actual record, but is tainted by his connection to PEDs. In other words, Aaron’s legacy can be celebrated now that it can be used to imply that the modern era is somehow tainted, and that this generation of Black people is not as well-behaved as the last one.
This is not to make Barry Bonds into some kind of civil rights hero. But it’s awfully rich to read the kinds of letters and death threats Aaron got for approaching Ruth’s record, and then hear that NOW, once he’s been passed by another Black hitter, one who’s not as quiet and polite and dignified, suddenly Aaron is the “real” home run king. Icon after icon of the civil rights movement has had to behave a certain way—to be twice as good, to not hit back, to turn the other cheek—not because it was “dignified” but because anything else could get them fired or run out of town or killed. Often, they were killed anyway. If they do survive, then they have to see their suffering held up as the standard of “dignity” other Black people must aspire to.
For what it’s worth, Hank Aaron did not consider himself the “real” home run king. He spoke very critically about steroid use in baseball, but still said users should make the Hall of Fame. There are already people who cheated in the Hall of Fame, he would point out. It’s not a place for saints, and maybe we should ask ourselves who we keep expecting to be saints.