The great Henry "Hank" Aaron has passed away at age 86. In addition to being one of the most highly accomplished players in baseball history, Aaron was also an important civil rights figure. In the words of his CBS obituary,
He fought every day for decades through horrendous racism in the deep south and the rest of the country. He was repeatedly called the N-word, faced death threats, and had rocks and other items thrown at him throughout his career.
From his New York Times obituary:
When he hit his 715th home run, on the evening of April 8, 1974, against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, he prevailed in the face of hate mail and even death threats spewing outrage that a Black man could supplant a white baseball icon.
“It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about,” he said. “My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ball parks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day. 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.”
And this from Aaron's own 1997 oped in the New York Times:
Jackie Robinson helped blaze the trail for the civil rights movement that followed. The group that succeeded Jackie -- my contemporaries -- did the same sort of work in the segregated minor leagues of the South. Baseball publicly pressed the issue of integration; in a symbolic way, it was our civil rights laboratory.
I related my own story of Hank Aaron in the Chicago Tribune in 1999:
Once Again, Life Imitates Baseball
Chicago Tribune
July 18, 1999|By Steven Lubet. Steven Lubet is a law professor at Northwestern University.
Around the world, a surprising number of ethnic groups share the legendry belief that they are descended from the Jews of ancient Israel. Among these are the Lemba, a Bantu speaking people who live in South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique. According to their oral tradition, they were led out of Judea during the biblical era by a man named Buba, who brought them from a city called Senna to their current homeland in southern Africa. To this day, the Lemba refrain from work on their sabbath, practice ritual circumcision and avoid eating pork -- as well as piglike creatures such as the hippopotamus.
Although many have dismissed such stories as engaging folklore, an international team of geneticists recently reported that the Lemba do indeed have Jewish ancestry, probably having migrated from Yemen to Africa about 1,000 years ago.
Their Hebrew origin was confirmed by scientists in England, Israel and the United States, who discovered that Lemba men carry a DNA sequence that is unique to the Cohanim, a priestly group among Jews who trace their lineage to Aaron, elder brother of Moses.
Even more intriguing, it seems that this particular version of the Y chromosome, which the scientists call a genetic signature, can be dated to roughly 3,000 years ago -- just about the time of the exodus from Egypt, when Moses first assigned the priesthood to the family of Aaron.
It took years of painstaking research and lab work to substantiate the Lemba's link to Aaron, but I could have saved everyone all that trouble. And my evidence is far more compelling than a few strands of DNA.
It's the 1957 World Series.
I was in 3rd grade when the Braves played the Yankees. As fate would have it, my two best friends at the time were Betty Spahn and Jimmy Bauer.
Betty, of course, bragged loudly that she was a cousin of Warren Spahn, ace of the Braves' pitching staff. Not to be outdone, Jimmy insisted that he was related to Hank Bauer, the Yankees' outfielder, although he was never very specific about the precise nature of the relationship.
Where did that leave me? And what does this have to do with ancestral Jewish priests? Simple. My maternal grandfather took much pride in the members of our family who were cohanim. Although I didn't qualify, by virtue of my father's non-Cohan birth, my uncle was definitely a direct descendant of Aaron. And that had to mean, I reasoned with the exceptional logic of a desperate 8-year-old, that I must be related to Hank Aaron -- Hammerin' Henry himself -- a fact that I proudly announced at show-and-tell to my entire 3rd grade class.
Let me tell you that in 1950s suburbia, the claim that a blue-eyed Jewish boy was kin to a "Negro" ballplayer did not meet with the hushed adulation I'd expected. Oh, there was a hush all right, a dead hush. Then the other students, apparently alert to cultural nuances that had escaped me entirely, began to mutter and gasp in agitated consternation.
The teacher, trying to calm the situation, explained to the class that what I said was simply impossible.
"Oh no it isn't," I chimed in, "white people and Negroes can be related through marriage," and I pointed to several of my parents' friends as examples.
It turned out that the teacher was a Wisconsin native and a rabid Braves fan. I think her greatest fear was that my liberal approach to genealogy might erode support for her team, if not among her students then probably among their unenlightened, pre-civil-rights-era parents. So she quickly called on the next pupil, who'd brought a dirty rock for show-and-tell. He bragged that it came from Pluto, the planet, not the dog. The teacher didn't bother to tell the class that his boast was impossible. I'm sure she'd had quite enough controversy for one day.
Well, the Braves went on to win the series, thanks to heroics by Cousin Hank and a great catch by Wes Covington (to whom I can claim no connection).
And I've been a loyal Braves fan ever since, not that Mr. Aaron has ever shown up for a single b'nai mitzvah or tu b'shvat seder. But, hey, family is family.
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