Three years after Jackie Robinson built-in Main League Baseball, Mays turned the primary Black participant to look within the Class B Interstate League, 4 ranges under the majors. However a lot of the nation remained entrenched in Jim Crow legal guidelines and mentalities. All through the Giants’ weekend sequence at Municipal Stadium in opposition to the Hagerstown Braves, Mays stayed in a separate lodge away from his White teammates and endured racial epithets from followers.
“It didn’t take me lengthy to appreciate that Hagerstown was the one metropolis in our league under the Mason-Dixon Line,” Mays wrote in his 1988 autobiography, “Say Hey.” “After I walked onto the sector for the primary time, I heard somebody shout, ‘Who’s that n—– strolling on the sector?’ However I didn’t let it trouble me.”
Seventy-four years in the past this month, a permanent connection was solid between arguably the best baseball participant of all time and a small metropolis 70 miles northwest of D.C. Mays, who died final week at 93, by no means forgot Hagerstown, each for its position in launching his Giants profession and for the way in which it handled him. Over subsequent many years, he recounted his experiences there in books, documentaries, interviews and even his 1979 Corridor of Fame induction speech.
Town didn’t neglect Mays, both. Although he by no means performed for an area group, a number of iterations of Hagerstown’s baseball franchises have had Mays’s No. 24 jersey retired since 2004.
The latest of these franchises is the Hagerstown Flying Boxcars, an enlargement group within the unbiased Atlantic League that performs in a ballpark a mile from the place Mays took the sector. On Tuesday, of their first house sport since Mays died, the Flying Boxcars offered a video tribute and held a second of silence in his honor.
“He’s in all probability one of many high 5 biggest gamers of all time, so it’s all the time been a supply of delight in our neighborhood that Willie Mays performed his first sport in Hagerstown Municipal Stadium,” Flying Boxcars Common Supervisor David Blenckstone mentioned. “He’s all the time held a particular historic place within the historical past of minor league baseball in Hagerstown.”
However to some, Mays’s expertise in Hagerstown stays an missed facet of the town’s historical past. The lodge within the redlined Jonathan Avenue neighborhood the place Mays as soon as stayed is now a church car parking zone. Municipal Stadium was demolished in 2022. Meritus Park, a brand new downtown stadium that opened final month, doesn’t but function any everlasting tributes to Mays.
Tekesha Martinez, who’s serving as Hagerstown’s first Black mayor, mentioned Mays’s historical past with the town is “not properly celebrated, advised [or] recognized inside Hagerstown or our county.”
“All I do know is bits and items of the story,” Martinez mentioned. “Had I recognized there was somebody like Willie Mays that walked on Jonathan Avenue, that performed in our metropolis … I’d have felt extra proud about being from Hagerstown as a Black girl.”
Mays grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, but the racism and segregation he encountered in Hagerstown left an enduring impression. When he performed in close by D.C. and Baltimore, there have been no restrictions on the place he was allowed to remain. “However right here in Hagerstown, positioned halfway between these cities, I couldn’t stick with the remainder of the group,” he wrote in his autobiography.
The Giants made makes an attempt to assist Mays. A bunch of White teammates sneaked into his room on the Harmon Lodge and slept on the ground to maintain him firm. His supervisor, Chick Genovese, ate with him on the metropolis’s segregated eating places.
Nonetheless, his stint with the Giants was Mays’s first expertise as the one Black participant on his group. When Mays performed within the Negro Leagues with the Birmingham Black Barons, he and his teammates confronted racism collectively. In Hagerstown, he went by means of it alone.
“It was the primary time I had been off on my own someplace, for even after I was on the street with the Barons in a segregated scenario, at the very least all of us have been segregated on the similar time in the identical place,” Mays wrote.
The legacy of Mays’s expertise in Hagerstown lingered not only for the baseball star however for the town. In 2004, the Hagerstown Suns, the town’s since-defunct minor league franchise, invited Mays to return. When he accepted, it turned a possibility — 54 years later — for Hagerstown to make amends.
“I believed it was necessary for the neighborhood to have that second — a second likelihood with Willie Mays, because it have been,” mentioned Kurt Landes, the previous Suns normal supervisor who organized Mays’s go to. “Definitely everybody was conscious that his first time in the neighborhood wasn’t acquired positively. … So this was an opportunity for the neighborhood to be excited to host him once more [and] excited to have a possibility to redeem themselves. Everybody felt it was a bit of little bit of a homecoming.”
On Aug. 9, 2004, a 73-year-old Mays was the visitor of honor in a metropolis that when jeered him. He crammed the ballroom of a downtown lodge, the place in line with an account within the Hagerstown Herald-Mail, some attendees paid as a lot as $1,000 for an autograph and a non-public meet-and-greet. As Landes launched him to thunderous applause, Mays started to cry.
Later that day, Mays returned to Municipal Stadium, forward of a sport between the Suns and the Asheville Vacationers. He met with gamers, threw out the ceremonial first pitch and acquired a standing ovation.
“He returned below a lot completely different circumstances than when he was right here in 1950,” mentioned Dan Spedden, a longtime Hagerstown baseball fan who attended the ceremonies. “He was very gracious about it. … He lined it properly in his e book, the way in which he was handled right here in 1950, however when he got here again in ’04, I didn’t see any of that animosity or something. He was simply blissful to be right here and blissful that he was so properly acquired.”
Whereas many followers left that day with autographed memorabilia, Landes held on to a singular memento. After studying that Mays cherished do-it-yourself chili, Landes and his spouse crammed a sluggish cooker with the household’s recipe and introduced it to the ballpark. Mays loved three heaping bowls, and Landes stored Mays’s spoon as a memento.
“I put it in a body, and it was in my basement,” mentioned Landes, the president and normal supervisor of the Class AAA Lehigh Valley IronPigs. “After which my spouse and I, every time we made chili from there on, we known as it Willie Chili.”
Shortly earlier than Mays’s go to, then-mayor William Breichner introduced that the town would rededicate a road that ran alongside Municipal Stadium in Mays’s honor. However 9 months later, the town council voted to protect the previous identify, East Memorial Boulevard, after a bunch of veterans argued the road ought to stand as a commemoration of their service.
Some noticed the incident as a reemergence of Hagerstown’s previous.
“Willie Mays is a veteran,” mentioned Spedden, who’s president of the Hagerstown/Washington County Conference and Guests Bureau. “Perhaps the stain of that segregation has not precisely light away. There’s nonetheless a few of it lingering in lots of people, and it got here out in a manner that I used to be appalled by and embarrassed by.”
A couple of years earlier than he died, Mays mentioned he had reconciled his historical past with Hagerstown.
“They wished to strive making up for the disappointment I felt all these years earlier,” Mays wrote in a 2020 follow-up memoir, “24.” “The best way I figured it, I couldn’t maintain it in opposition to the entire city. I wasn’t harm by the city in 1950. I used to be harm by the individuals. It was good that I went again.”
