baseball player, baseball executive, civil rights advocate, and businessman. Henry Louis “Hank” Aaron was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, the son of Herbert and Estella Aaron. He was a member of the second generation of black baseball players to enter the major leagues following Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color line in professional baseball in 1947. Aaron began playing for the Milwaukee Braves in 1954; at about the same time Willie Mays joined the New York Giants and Ernie Banks joined the Chicago Cubs. They were among the last black players who began their careers in the Negro Leagues. In 1974 Aaron broke Babe Ruth's lifetime home run record of 714. When he retired from baseball in 1976 after twenty three seasons Aaron held the career records for most home runs 755 most runs batted in 2 297 most total bases ...
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Aaron, Hank
Paul Finkelman
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Aaron, Hank
Peter Valenti
baseball player and executive, was born Henry Aaron in the Down the Bay section of Mobile, Alabama, the third of eight children of Herbert Aaron and Estella (maiden name unknown). His parents had left the Selma, Alabama, area during the Depression for greater opportunity in Mobile's shipbuilding industries. In 1942, as the family grew and Down the Bay became more crowded with wartime job seekers, the Aarons moved to a rural suburb of Toulminville. Working as a boilermaker's apprentice, Herbert Aaron suffered through the frequent layoffs that plagued black shipyard workers before wartime demand dictated full employment. Ever resourceful, Herbert Aaron bought two lots in Toulminville, hired carpenters to frame out the roof and walls of a house, and set about with his family to find materials to finish the property. The Aarons continued to live in the house even as Henry achieved superstardom.
Making balls from such scavenged ...
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Brown, Jim
Julian C. Madison
athlete, actor, civic activist. Jim Brown is generally recognized as the greatest football player and the greatest lacrosse player of all time. At 6 feet 2 inches tall, weighing 228 pounds, and with a 32-inch waist, Brown combined great speed with a powerful running style and fearsome stiff-arm to terrorize National Football League (NFL) defenders for nine years. The only person in history voted into three halls of fame (college football, college lacrosse, and the NFL), Brown is arguably the greatest athlete of the twentieth century.
James Nathaniel Brown was born on Saint Simons Island, Georgia, to Swinton “Sweet Sue” and Theresa Brown Swinton Brown left his family barely two weeks after his son was born and they rarely heard from him afterward When Jim was two his mother left him in the care of his great grandmother and moved to Great Neck Long Island where ...
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DeFrantz, Anita L.
Winifred W. Thompson
Anita L. DeFrantz is one of the most influential people in sports in the early twenty-first century. She became involved in the Olympic field as a competitor when she won a bronze medal on the U.S. women’s eight-oared shell at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. She was the first woman to represent the United States on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1986 and, in 1997, she became the first woman, as well as the first African American, to be vice president of the IOC. DeFrantz has worked on the Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and Atlanta Olympic Games as a member of the United States Olympic Executive Committee.
DeFrantz was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Robert and Anita P. DeFrantz Her father directed the Community Action against Poverty organization her mother taught and eventually became a professor of Education at the University of San Francisco DeFrantz s ...
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Flood, Curt
Gerald Early
Curt Flood was the youngest of six children born to Herman and Laura Flood. The family moved From Houston, Texas, to Oakland, California in 1940. His success as a high school athlete led the Cincinnati Reds to sign him in 1956. He was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1957.
The Cardinals flourished in the mid-1960s, playing in the World's Series in 1964, 1967, and 1968. In October 1969 after a disappointing season for the Cardinals Flood who had been the starting centerfielder for the team for twelve years was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies Flood shocked and disappointed by the trade refused to accept it He decided to sue team owners over the reserve clause in contracts which prevented Flood from being able to negotiate with any team he wished who might desire his services The Players Association the ballplayers ...
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Johnson, Magic
Emmett P. Tracy
basketball player, activist, urban developer. Born Earvin Effay Johnson Jr. to Christine and Earvin Johnson Sr. in Lansing, Michigan, Johnson won the 1979 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball championship and five National Basketball Association (NBA) championships before launching a career of public activism and urban development that made him one of the most successful African American businessmen of the late twentieth century.
Both Christine Johnson, a school custodian, and Earvin Sr., an assembly worker, worked hard to support Earvin as a child. The sixth of ten children, Earvin exhibited an enthusiasm for life and, most significantly, basketball, from an early age. In 1974, Johnson enrolled in Everett High School in South Lansing, and quickly earned the nickname “Magic” as an emerging basketball prodigy. In 1977 as a junior he led Everett to the Michigan state championship and in his senior year he averaged almost ...
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Jordan, Michael
Jill Dupont
basketball player, businessman, and NBA owner. It is always something of a mystery how those born in unremarkable circumstances achieve transcendence within and beyond their fields of expertise. By whatever alchemy of talent, hard work, and historical circumstance, perhaps no one in recent history has better embodied the earthbound problems and gravity-defying aspirations of the United States than Michael Jordan.
Growing up in Wilmington, North Carolina, Michael Jeffrey Jordan took to heart his parents lessons in diligence and human relations Instructed to treat everyone equally and with courtesy he experienced relatively few of the racial incidents that had occurred routinely in previous generations Jordan s anger flared once as a boy though when in response to a girl s racial slur he planted his popsicle on her head He acquired his work ethic like his height over time fueling himself with the real and imagined slights of ...
