Henry Louis Aaron

DON NOBLE: Aaron biography has flaws in its style, length

Henry Aaron Sr., “Papa Henry,” the ballplayer’s grandfather, raised his family in Camden, Alabama. His son Herbert Aaron, Henry Aaron’s father, in 1927 at 19 years old moved to Mobile in search of work. The segregation code in Mobile was demeaning and rigid, but most people felt “it was not necessary to live in fear” there. Daily life, author Howard Bryant says, did not have the “coarse and brutal edge of, say, Birmingham.”

Henry Louis Aaron was born on Feb 5, 1934. His weight at birth was 12 and one quarter pounds, which was surely a sign of something.

Herbert, an unusually determined and disciplined man, bought two lots on Edwards Street in Toulminville and built a home for his family. They moved into the house in 1942.

On October 30, 2008, that house was moved, literally, eight miles, past “Hank Aaron Park in Toulminville …around the Hank Aaron Business Loop… to reach its final destination, Hank Aaron Stadium.”

This book is the story of the years between. It is a study of the life of Henry Aaron but, from the vantage point of major league baseball, it is also the story of changes in race relations and professional sports in America.

This is biography in the modern mode, enormously long and detailed, and the reader had better be a baseball fan. Seasons, games, even innings and at-bats are rendered in detail.

Also, Bryant could have used better editing, both for length and style. There are a few howlers in this writing. Baseball wives do not need to be rescued from the “drollery of an average life.” That’s “drudgery.” A sentence should not begin “One [sic] the other hand…”

The book is organized mainly chronologically but returns repeatedly to Aaron’s main concerns.

First there is Jackie Robinson. Of course Henry Aaron, who himself integrated the rigidly segregated “Sally” or South Atlantic League, six years after Robinson began playing for the Dodgers, revered Robinson. The early Robinson showed restraint in the face of racism on and off the field but as time passed became a determined and eloquent spokesman for civil rights.

Aaron meant to emulate Jackie but, unlike Robinson, did not have the confidence that came with having been a college athlete and an army officer.

Robinson retired early in Aaron’s career. Willie Mays, on the other hand, was the player Aaron would be compared to throughout. Willie Mays was a favorite, beloved by all, and rarely said or did anything to threaten white America. Mays was a colorful player, a brash, cocky superstar, but always on the field, as part of the game, not as a social activist.

Dialogues: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Africana

INTRODUCTION
Africana
The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience
Edited by KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH and HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.
Basic Civitas Books

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An Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora

Between 1909 and his death in 1963, W. E. B. Du Bois, the Harvard-
trained historian, sociologist, journalist, and political activist,
dreamed of editing an "Encyclopædia Africana." He envisioned a
comprehensive compendium of "scientific" knowledge about the history,
cultures, and social institutions of people of African descent: of
Africans in the Old World, African Americans in the New World, and
persons of African descent who had risen to prominence in Europe, the
Middle East, and Asia. Du Bois sought to publish nothing less than the
equivalent of a black Encyclopaedia Britannica, believing that such a
broad assemblage of biography, interpretive essays, facts, and figures
would do for the much denigrated black world of the twentieth century
what Britannica and Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie had done for the
European world of the eighteenth century. These publications, which
consolidated the scholarly knowledge accumulated by academics and
intellectuals in the Age of Reason, served both as a tangible sign of
the enlightened skepticism that characterized that era of scholarship,
and as a basis upon which further scholarship could be constructed.
These encyclopedias became monuments to "scientific" inquiry, bulwarks
against superstition, myth, and what their authors viewed as the false
solace of religious faith. An encyclopedia of the African diaspora in
Du Bois's view would achieve these things for persons of African
descent.

But a black encyclopedia would have an additional function. Its
publication would, at least symbolically, unite the fragmented world
of the African diaspora, a diaspora created by the European slave
trade and the turn-of-the-century "scramble for Africa.

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