Knowing both stories critical to knowing history

An image of Willie Mays is displayed on the video board while everyone observed a moment of silence during the sixth inning of a game between the Chicago Cubs and the San Francisco Giants at Wrigley Field on June 18, 2024, in Chicago. The Cubs defeated the Giants 5-2. (Nuccio DiNuzzo/Getty Images)

Among my prized possessions was a Willie Mays home run ball, clubbed into a summer night where it stopped next to Walt Horn’s car. Horn made annual trips to watch Major League Baseball.

Mays’ recent death captured the headlines and, for those of us who watched him patrol center field for all those years, tugged at our hearts, too. As it should have. That’s because Willie Mays did not simply make baseball history. He made American history.

Horn’s barber shop was a regular stop for me during my childhood, before the Beatles and Woodstock convinced me that haircuts were overrated.

One Saturday morning between the cutting and snipping, Horn said he had something for me. He stepped into his backroom and returned with a baseball that had clearly been used: a scuff mark and umpire rubbing “mud” on its horsehide. He handed me the ball. He said Willie Mays had hit it out of the park. At the time I worshipped Mickey Mantle and later Roberto Clemente, but a Willie Mays home run ball? The Giants center fielder took his rightful place among the holy trinity of my baseball gods.

Perhaps that’s why his recent death touched me deeply. Or perhaps it has something to do with recapturing some innocence of youth.

Or perhaps my reaction was that I was grateful I knew the Willie Mays story, not simply the stats and stardom and the scintillating grace and power with which he played the game. I also knew the social and racial milieu in which he played and thrived.

That’s the American history some people want to change or ignore or literally whitewash. People who believe that students should be shielded from our nation’s past, lest it make them feel guilty. People who depend on critical race theory to scare us into rewriting history. What’s critical is that we tell the entire American story … all of it … not just the comfortable part. That’s the Wille Mays story.

Those who insist that a clear-eyed study and reckoning of the past will sow division want us to move forward with an American narrative missing too many chapters.

Mays played for the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro Leagues. They shared Rickwood Field with the Birmingham Barons, a white minor league team affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals. In bittersweet timing, MLB’s St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants (Mays’ MLB team) played a game at Rickwood Field just two days after his passing. That gave baseball fans and historians a chance to honor and remember the star known affectionately as the “Say Hey Kid.”

The game and its significance to baseball history was a chance to recognize and honor the Negro Leagues. About an hour before the first pitch, however, another baseball legend gave us a lesson in American history.

That’s when former MLB star Reggie Jackson opened up on a pre-game show about what playing minor league baseball in Alabama was like less than 60 years ago. You can watch the remarkable three minutes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enxNcYWeoaA

Among the harrowing details was hope, too. Jackson said teammates and coaches helped him survive, including giving him a place to sleep until neighbors threatened to burn down the apartment complex unless the Black man left.

We deny, deflect and ignore this history at our own peril. Willie Mays rose from the segregated South to become an American icon, generous with his talents and his time — he famously played stickball with kids in the streets of his Harlem neighborhood after returning from a game at New York’s Polo Grounds.

Nor is the problem simply time and place. When the Giants moved west to San Francisco in 1958, Willie Mays was a household name, having won a World Series ring, an MVP Award, a Rookie of the Year Award, a batting championship and four trips to the All-Star game. Still, when he and his wife tried to purchase a home in the city’s Sherwood Forest area, they faced discrimination as neighbors pressured the owner not to sell to a Black family. News that a famous American was being denied housing because of his race made national headlines. The Mays family eventually moved in.

To my lasting regret, somewhere, sometime, somehow the Willie Mays ball was lost. Still, I remain thankful that I know both his story and the American story in which it unfolded.

Both are indeed too critical to ignore as part of our history.

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