During spring training of 1968, Jackie Robinson again put Willie Mays in his crosshairs. In a television interview in San Francisco, Robinson was asked if black Giant players had done enough for the civil rights movement. He said they hadn’t and characterized Mays, Willie McCovey, and Jim Ray Hart as “do-nothing” Negroes. Mays in particular should have been more active, Robinson said, because he had been denied housing in San Francisco. The words echoed Robinson’s criticism of Mays three years earlier, and talking with the Los Angeles Times, Robinson added a twist: “Willie Mays has a personality that is loved by white Americans, and I think he will be one of the first Negroes to move into a front office position.”
It was not a compliment. As the Chicago Daily Defender ’s A. S. “Doc” Young noted, “Any Negro who makes it in the white man’s world is, automatically, an Uncle Tom.”
Mays was twice awakened by reporters seeking a comment about Robinson’s “do-nothing” claim, and he said he wanted to hold a press conference before a spring training game in Phoenix to “make my position clear.” Now almost thirty-seven, he responded in part because he believed he had to stick up for McCovey and Hart, two of the shyest players on the team. Straddling a metal chair in Herman Franks’s office, Mays spoke in a low, even voice—according to Bob Stevens, “his face clearly revealing the sincerity that was in his heart, and also some of the hurt that was in Robinson’s finger pointing.”
Mays began by paying tribute to Robinson, noting that he himself could not have done what Robinson had done in breaking the color barrier. “It took a special kind of man to do that, and Robinson had that quality,” Mays said. “He had a college education and that helped.” What Robinson began, others have built upon, Mays said. “Great progress has been made since Jackie broke in. Jackie is a great reason behind that progress. I really admire the guy.”
Mays paused and breathed deeply. “But I don’t think he should go around pointing accusing fingers at other guys, particularly nice guys like Willie and Jimmy Ray. Different people do things in different ways. I can’t, for instance, go out and picket. I can’t stand on a soapbox and preach. That simply isn’t my nature. People like Mr. King and Mr. [Roy] Wilkins are better equipped than I am. But it’s not true what Robinson said about my not doing anything about race relationships. I’ve worked for the Job Corps, and I don’t know how many kids’ groups I’ve addressed and will continue to address. In my own way, I believe I’m helping.”
Mays mentioned McCovey and Hart again: “You know Willie and Jim Ray. They’re quiet guys. Jim Ray is just a happy-go-lucky guy and McCovey is simply quiet. But in Willie’s case, I believe he’s gotta start speaking up more. When I leave the Giants, McCovey will be the number-one Giant, and he’ll have to go out and talk to the people and get to know them, just like I’ve had to and enjoy doing.
“You see,” he continued, “I’ve been doing things a long time along this line, but I want no credit. Everyone must do his own job in his own way, and in my heart, my way is just as important as Jackie Robinson’s way. I believe understanding is the important thing. In my talks to kids, I’ve tried my best to get that message across. It makes no difference whether you are black or white because we are all God’s children fighting for the same cause.”
Mays pointed toward the dressing room, where the players were noisily preparing to take the field. “Let’s talk about that progress for awhile. Just look around out there in the clubhouse. There are an awful lot of southern boys on this team. Yet we live and play together in harmony. It was not possible fifteen, sixteen years ago. Today’s kids don’t have the hardships Jackie and I had, and they realize it and appreciate it. Today, for instance, we play as many as five or six Negroes at the same time on our ball club, and once in Atlanta we had eight or nine in there at the same time, and Atlanta is a southern town.” He added, “I believe that if a man wants to go with his Negro friends, he does no slight on the white players. I like to be alone a lot.”
Mays said that even when he had been victimized, his tactful approach had opened doors for others. “Look, ten years ago, you remember I had a little difficulty buying a house in San Francisco. You can’t blame the people or the city for what happened back then. It was the contractor. But you can’t blame him either, because he has a family and has to make a living. Now I live in a better area and in a bigger and fancier house. I think that I have the respect of the people of San Francisco, and this is important for all of us. I play all the golf courses. I’m the first Negro to be a member of the Concordia Club. I also belong to the Press Club. Now you know that wasn’t possible ten years ago. And I haven’t done these things and gotten these things by ‘doing nothing.’ ”
The reporters were stunned. Mays rarely talked at length about anything, let alone a subject as sensitive as race. His comments tried to strike a delicate balance. Had he criticized Robinson, he would have inflamed a dispute that could have scarred baseball—its two most consequential black players at each other’s throat—and set off a media frenzy. But Mays’s praise of Robinson showed his grace; his defense of his own conduct, his spirit and sensibilities. One journalist said Mays’s press conference was one of his finest hours.
Several weeks later, Mays was asked if he had prepared his remarks or if anyone had coached him. He shook his head. “I didn’t need any help,” he said. “When you speak from the heart, you don’t need to read a statement or ask for help. Words come easy.”
But the dustup wasn’t over. After reading Mays’s comments, Robinson sent a stinging letter to the San Francisco Examiner. “It’s tragic when one so popular as Willie,” he wrote, “feels a contribution in race relations is measured by the clubs he belongs to or how many golf courses he is able to play. One does not have to get on soapboxes to be a man, and it should be obvious to him that he does not have it made until every Negro has it made.... It seems to me that Willie Mays has made himself a hero in your eyes and in the eyes of some white Americans who believe we should be seen catching baseballs but should be silent when the rights of our people are at stake.”
Robinson could not recognize that any great social movement needed a continuum of voices—the militants who would prod a reluctant country to change, and the conciliators who tried to find common ground among hostile factions. The Examiner ’s Jim McGee, who had ghostwritten Mays’s column in 1958, published an open letter to Robinson. “As you know,” he wrote, Mays
made a plea for understanding and patience. That’s his way and always has been.... His statement was not that of a man detached from the problems of his race. It was that of a concerned man who has never lost sight of the fact that he is a black man. It was a statement of far more depth and perception than anybody else in baseball had realized. It convinced many that Mays, if he wanted, could be the first black major league manager.... If he felt it would advance the cause of his race, he’d jump at it for that reason alone....
[Willie Mays] was not trying to refute you. He was simply stating his own case. He was not seeking white hero worship. He was talking man to man for the right to differ without recrimination. As I recall, he said, “There is neither black nor white. We are all God’s children.” A profound statement pointing out the infinitely loving defect in God. He is color-blind.
Mays’s hopes for patience and understanding were quickly overwhelmed. On April 4, on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, an assassin’s bullet ripped through the right cheek of Martin Luther King, Jr. He was declared dead an hour later. Mays had met King only once, briefly, at the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco, but he later described him as “my president” and adopted some of King’s rhetoric from his haunting final speech in Memphis, the evening before his assassination, when he declared, “I’ve been to the mountaintop... and I have seen the promised land!”
In later years, Mays told black groups that “Dr. King” got to the mountaintop, “but instead of going to the mountain and stopping, we need to go over the mountain. That’s what progress means. If not, we’re going to come back down and everything is going to repeat itself.”
King’s martyrdom ignited riots that swept through more than 150 cities, and militants such as Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown urged violent retaliation as the only response to America’s assault on black people. Further traumas ensued: Robert Kennedy’s assassination, street warfare at the Democratic National Convention, mounting death tolls in Vietnam, and growing protests on campuses.
Most athletes, fearing that controversy would hurt their professional standing, shunned politics and said little about the country’s anguish, but by the middle to late 1960s, a handful of prominent African American athletes were embracing the black power or antiwar movement. Muhammad Ali refused his induction into the military. Jim Brown and Bill Russell talked about the country’s exploitation of black athletes. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists on the medal stand as a sign of defiance and unity. Several black athletes, including UCLA’s basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (still known as Lew Alcindor), boycotted the Olympics entirely. Even Hank Aaron spoke out. In an interview with Jet in 1966, he ripped Major League Baseball for paying blacks less money and denying them opportunities to manage or work in the front office. (Shortly after the interview was published, Monte Irvin was appointed to a new position in the commissioner’s office.)
The grievances of black players were given much broader play in Sports Illustrated in an ambitious five-part series that began in July 1968. The magazine set out to topple the conventional wisdom that sports had benefited Negro athletes at either the college or professional level. “Increasingly,” Sports Illustrated reported, “black athletes are saying that sport is doing a disservice to their race by setting up false goals, perpetuating prejudice and establishing an insidious bondage all its own.... Almost to a man, they are dissatisfied, disgruntled, and disillusioned. [They are] treated like subhumans by Paleolithic coaches who regard them as watermelon-eating idiots.”
Such a story needed a foil—an emblem of passivity who seemed to blissfully accept his own exploitation. That man was Willie Mays.
In one respect, Sports Illustrated said, Mays created a false promise for black youths. “A white kid tries to become president of the United States,” said one high school coach, “and all the skills and knowledge he picks up on the way can be used in a thousand different jobs. A black kid tries to become Willie Mays, and all the tools he picks up on the way are useless to him if he doesn’t become Willie Mays.”
More troubling, Mays was the tool of white racists who profited from blacks on the field but discriminated against them off it. “The black athlete was the institutionalized Tom, the white man’s nigger,” thundered Harry Edwards, a sociology professor described as a “fanatical superblack” who was urging an “athletic black rebellion,” including an Olympic boycott. Edwards, himself a charismatic speaker, reserved his harshest criticism for the blacks who refused to speak out. They were, he said, “house niggers” and were worse than Alabama governor George Wallace. “At least we know where Wallace stands,” he told one audience. “As long as you have black athletes making it to the top and then shutting up like Uncle Willie Mays... then athletics has done very little for the black community. It has helped black individuals to delude themselves, this is all.” Edwards had a poster of “Negro Traitors,” with articles on Willie Mays attached to it.
Sports Illustrated opined that “the Negro star who refuses to take a firm stand on racial matters finds himself, at worst, ostracized by his race, consigned to... ‘spiritual death,’ or, at best, left in a kind of limbo between white and black. Some, like Willie Mays, try to take refuge in a passive role.... More and more, Willie Mays finds himself becoming what Mike Garrett of the Kansas City Chiefs calls ‘a marginal man,’ exciting the deep respect of neither race and, indeed, the outright dislike of some.”
Mays could mount little defense for himself. “I’m a ballplayer,” he said. “I am not a politician or a writer or a historian. I can do best for my people by doing what I do best.”
Aaron never publicly criticized Mays but, in an interview forty years later, says, “If any part of me was not satisfied with Willie, it’s that he didn’t speak out enough. I couldn’t understand that part of it. I never spoke to him about it. I just let it be.” He adds, “I got to know Jackie, and it takes more than just one person to conquer a storm.”
Mays found himself in the wrong decade. He was an authority figure when opposing authority was celebrated. He was a man of deference at a time of defiance. He dwelled on positives in an era of righteous indignation. He even lived in the wrong place, a conformist in the epicenter of the counterculture.
Some of the complaints, such as Sports Illustrated ’s characterization of Mays as a despised, marginal figure bordering on spiritual necrosis, were clearly overblown. Mays was still a leading gate attraction—he rebounded with a good season in 1968—and was, according to the Pittsburgh Press, “no doubt the most popular player in the league.” That Mays was called an Uncle Tom put him in good company. Given the climate in the late 1960s, virtually any black person who worked successfully within the system was given that designation. Sidney Poitier was called an Uncle Tom (he was too docile in his movies). So was Jackie Robinson (he was too close to Nelson Rockefeller).
While Mays was not an activist, he was still within the mainstream of black America. As the scholar Gerald Early notes, “Sometimes people misunderstand the civil rights era. Many think that every black person was in the streets demonstrating, but actually it was only a small minority of blacks who demonstrated. Most did not, as one would expect from any population. The activists are a relatively small number.”
Mays was also subject to a double standard. No one ripped Mickey Mantle for not speaking out for poor rural whites or Sandy Koufax for not campaigning against anti-Semitism, and few complained that other black baseball stars—such as Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, and Billy Williams—rarely voiced their opinions. Besides, Mays’s performance on the field echoed beyond the foul lines. As the San Francisco Examiner ’s Wells Twombly wrote: “The first time that it became obvious that racism was starting to slip in this country came one spring morning in 1966. On a Texas meadow here was this blue-eyed, freckle-faced grandson of a Klansman catching a fly ball in a Little League game and shouting, ‘Look at me, I’m Willie Mays!’ ”
Mays was somewhat engaged politically. In the 1970s, he and his boyhood friend Herman Boykin drove to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit Governor Wallace. They arrived at the capitol unannounced, but when Wallace saw them, he canceled his appointments and spoke to them. Mays had seen the film footage of Wallace in 1963 standing outside the doors of the University of Alabama, trying to block the enrollment of black students. He failed, but Mays wanted to know why he tried.
Now paralyzed from the waist down from an assassin’s bullet, Wallace eventually disavowed his segregationist past. Meeting with Mays, he said, “Willie, it wasn’t me. It was the system at that time. I was the governor and I had to go with my duties.” Mays, believing that politics, like business or any adult activity, was easily corrupted, accepted the answer.
Some criticism of Mays was valid. He was inclined to conceal his own experience while painting baseball in utopian colors. “Sure, it was different for the Negro when I broke in,” he told the Sporting News in April 1968, “but I don’t care to go into it. Everybody knows it is better now. I don’t want to bring up all that stuff. I don’t want to digress. All in all, baseball has been great to me. I owe it a lot. ... There’s no doubt that race relations are better and will continue to get better.”
Such comments grated on Sam Lacy, the prominent black sports columnist who had ridden in the same train berths as Mays and had shared the same hotel rooms. “What Willie appears to have forgotten,” Lacy wrote, “is that there have been MANY times since he’s been a Giant that he has been made to understand the differences between black and white.... For instance, [in spring training] when he and Monty Irvin, Hank Thompson and Ray Noble were required to live in a third-class hotel, separated from the white members of the squad.... And on the annual spring sojourns into Dixie where he parted company at the airport or railroad terminal and caught a cab to ‘colored town.’... And on those bus trips to New Mexico and southern Arizona when Willie—Monty—Hank and Company waited outside until a... white batboy brought out sandwiches from the restaurants in which the rest of the team was enjoying steaks.”
Mays didn’t have to enter the political fray or engage any enemies, Lacy explained. He simply had to talk about his own life.
But it wasn’t to be. What emerges is a man who was bounded by the strictures of his southern roots and by the expectations to play a role for which he did not feel qualified. In fulfilling his dream, Mays had succeeded in the very society that his fellow blacks were now trying to reform, reshape, or topple. He could not join them. His own celebrity, he believed, was perishable, so he tried to avoid headlines for anything beyond baseball and found safety in his separation.
But that came at a price his critics never appreciated. In 1974, on his induction into the Black Athletes Hall of Fame, he gave a speech that acknowledged the hardship and shame he had experienced and suggested the deeper impact of his reserve.
“This award means a great deal to me,” he said at the Americana Hotel in New York, “because the time that I broke into baseball, I was like a young Jackie Robinson. I broke into the Interstate League. I was at it by myself, and I had a lot of hardship that no one knows about. I don’t like to speak about it because I was very ashamed of it. I’ve been told, ‘Willie, you don’t care about your people.’ But that’s a lie. The suffering that I received in the last, I would say, twenty-three years, I couldn’t talk about because it was inside of me. I had to hold it. But this award here again tells me that the young blacks have a helluva chance. This award here tells me that we are getting together. As one man said, it may take a while, but we’re coming.”
Even his critics conceded that Mays was an activist of a different sort. Sam Lacy noted that Mays probably spent “more time with hospital inmates than any other six athletes in the professional sphere. Despite the fact that it is off-season for him, the annual Shrine Football Game in San Francisco in late December is occasion for Mays to be on hand to offer what inspiration he can to the crippled children for whose fund the game is played.”
Willie may not have been in the streets or on the campuses, Lacy concluded, but “in his own quiet way (Willie shies away from discussing it), the finest baseball player of our time displays his own private doctrine of brotherhood.”