Born Mobile, Alabama
“Hammerin’ Hank” Aaron will be remembered as one of the greatest players in major league baseball history. Scouted at sixteen, when the United States was still largely segregated, he came up through the Negro League and joined the Indianapolis Clowns in 1952. He subsequently signed with the Milwaukee (later, Atlanta) Braves, for whom he debuted in 1954. He emerged as a tremendous asset to that ball club and drove the team to a World Series victory over the New York Yankees in 1957. Aaron was named the MVP that same year.
A perennial All-Star, Aaron was remarkably consistent during his twenty-three-year major-league career. He hit around fifty home runs every season—and always ranked near the top of the hitting statistics. Known to generate tremendous bat speed with his extraordinary reflexes, he broke Babe Ruth’s seemingly impregnable record of 714 career home runs in 1974, when he was forty. The accomplishment was widely celebrated as a sign of racial progress in the New South, but many of the hurdles remained. Ruth routinely traveled in luxury, while Aaron was fortunate if he could ride in the front of a bus.
In his 1992 autobiography, Aaron wrote, “I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you’re inferior, it makes you wonder if the other guys have something you’ve never seen before. If they do, I’m still looking for it.” When Aaron was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1982, his home run mark stood at 755. There was no denying Aaron’s exceptional skill with a baseball bat. “Trying to sneak a pitch past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak a sunrise past a rooster,” quipped Curt Simmons, a former pitcher for the Phillies. Following Aaron’s retirement in 1976, he led an estimable post-baseball career doing charitable and civic work in Atlanta.
The Bulgarian-born artist Ross Rossin met Aaron in Atlanta through the city’s former mayor, Andrew Young, whose portrait he also painted. In 2015, Hank Aaron was honored by the National Portrait Gallery as a Portrait of a Nation Prize Recipient.
