Hank Aaron: Born in Mobile, Broke the Record Under Death Threats

Henry Louis Aaron was born in Mobile, Alabama, on February fifth, nineteen thirty-four, the son of a boilermaker named Herbert Aaron, in a neighborhood that no longer exists. Urban renewal came through that part of Mobile and erased the block where he grew up. The sandlots where he learned to hit a baseball are gone too. What remains is the record.

Aaron reached the major leagues with the Milwaukee Braves in nineteen fifty-four, the same year the Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus Board of Education. He played through the entire arc of the civil rights movement as one of the best hitters in the game, a twenty-five-time All-Star across twenty-three seasons, the most All-Star selections of any player in history. He was excellent, and he was mostly quiet about it, which is to say that he was Black in mid-century American professional sports and understood exactly what that required.

In the early nineteen seventies, he began approaching Babe Ruth's career home-run record of seven hundred fourteen. The closer he got, the more mail arrived. During the nineteen seventy-three season, he was receiving thousands of threatening letters a week, and by year's end the Postal Service said he had received more mail, nine hundred thirty thousand pieces, than anyone else in the country except politicians. He required a security detail. The commissioner of baseball arranged for his mail to be screened by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

On April eighth, nineteen seventy-four, in Atlanta, Aaron hit his seven hundred fifteenth career home run off Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Al Downing. The crowd at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium numbered fifty-three thousand, seven hundred and seventy-five, the largest in the stadium's history. Aaron rounded the bases and was mobbed.

He returned to Mobile throughout his life for civic events and was buried in Atlanta after his death in January of two thousand twenty-one. Mobile remembers him. The neighborhood does not.