Then Braves announcer Milo Hamilton introduces the man of the hour. Aaron has turned 40 years old. His belly presses against his polyester jersey. His puffy eyes are weary. The past year has been hell, with hundreds of letters filled with racial insults and death threats that had to be vetted by the FBI. He left ballparks by back exits. He needed police escorts. His children lived under threat of kidnapping. He said he felt “like a pig in a slaughter camp.”

He steps to the microphone, facing the single-level grandstand of Rickwood. Not much has changed since Henry played his first game here in 1952 with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League. He looks up and sees the grandstand’s kite-shaped canopy, held up by steel beams and a web of muscular steel trusses. Atop the roof he sees the same five 75-foot-tall steel light stanchions that since ’36 have stood watch omnipotently over Rickwood, which still stands today and was chosen by Major League Baseball to host a regular season game this summer between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants.

On the roof directly in front of him is a wooden gazebo, looking to most people as quaint as a steeple atop a church. When Henry sees it, he knows its dark history.

The gazebo was the original press box. It launched the career of Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, popular play-by-play radio announcer for the Birmingham Barons in the 1930s. So popular was Bull that he ran for state legislature in 1934 “just for the fun of it.” He won. From that day until his death just 13 months before Hank Aaron night, Bull, an avowed segregationist and the most powerful man in Birmingham, personified the Jim Crow South. 

Henry scans the crowd, which numbers more than the official count of 9,140. He sees people standing and sitting in the aisles. He sees Blacks and whites sitting side by side. He sees Blacks and whites together in each dugout. In this way Rickwood is nothing like the Rickwood he knew as a young man. The idea that a Black man would be honored with the key to the city—of all cities, Bull’s city, known as “Bombingham” for how whites clung violently to segregation—was unfathomable then. 

Hands on hips, Henry leans into the microphone.

“I first played in this park almost 20 years ago against the Birmingham Black Barons,” he says, though it’s been 22 years. “I played here with the Indianapolis Clowns in those days 20 years ago. I never suspected then what was in store for Hank Aaron.” 

The Kuhn “controversy” is nothing. It is nothing compared to the racial animus Aaron endures. Nothing compared to the segregated history of Rickwood, where the Ku Klux Klan held huge rallies in the 1920s, where Negro League players like Hank were forced to dress in Black-owned motels because they were barred from using the clubhouses, and where Blacks who attended Barons games and whites who attended Black Barons games could sit only in a quarantined section of the farthest right field bleachers, a chicken-wire partition separating them.

Birmingham was, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “the most segregated city in America.” Not until 1963—16 years after Jackie Robinson debuted with Brooklyn and seven years after he played his last game—did Birmingham allow Blacks and whites to play together in any kind of game. Even a mixed-race game of checkers was unlawful, which is how the local ordinance became known as the Checkers Rule.

There was, however, one brief, serendipitous exception to the ordinance. Over a seven-day span in April 1954, Rickwood hosted five exhibition games involving integrated major league teams making their way north for Opening Day. It happened in a rare sliver of time when Bull let his guard down.

The Brooklyn Dodgers played the Milwaukee Braves in the second and third of those games. The starting left fielders were Robinson, then 35, and Aaron, then a 20-year-old kid just 11 days away from making his major league debut. 

And then segregationists like Bull quickly restored the Checkers Rule. It would be another before Rickwood hosted another mixed-race game.

But for those two days in 1954, Hank got to play on the same field in the most segregated city in America with Jackie, the man who inspired him, in a color-blind, almost ethereal world of equality. How those games came about—and how the Bull Connors of the world fought this integrated American future to their last breath with legislation, bombs, dogs, water cannons and burning crosses—is the incredible story of how baseball, as Aaron liked to say, pressed the issue of integration in a very public way.

“It was,” he said, “our civil rights laboratory.”

It is 20 years to the day after the first of those historic, mixed-race Dodgers-Braves games. Bull is dead. Hank is exalted. Many of the people here at Rickwood are the children and grandchildren of those who saw the Babe play exhibitions here. They heard the legend of how Ruth hit the “longest” homer ever at Rickwood: a blast over the right field wall that landed in a passing train car, never to come to a stop until the train pulled into Atlanta. 

A chilly wind blows in from right field. As he always does, Henry chooses his words carefully and purposefully. They leap from the microphone, clatter and echo around the concrete and steel skeleton of old Rickwood and land softly on the souls of anyone with a shred of empathy.

The Babe is right in front of him. But because this is Birmingham, tonight is more about what is behind him.

“I didn’t know what was in store … but I’ve worked very hard to get there. And thank you.”