A Look Back at the Philanthropy of Hank Aaron, Baseball Legend and Civil Rights Hero
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photo by David Valdez, Hank Aaron speaking at the Lbj presidential library in 2015.
Hank “Hammer” Aaron passed away at the age of 86 last week, leaving behind an illustrious legacy both on the field and off. Holding the home run record for three decades, he was also a stalwart civil rights pioneer. He was a beloved cultural icon; 1990s rapper MC Hammer even borrowed his name from the slugger. Aaron and his wife Billye were also active philanthropists, focusing on education.
Aaron came from humble origins. Born into a poor section of Mobile, Alabama, before he could afford baseball equipment, Aaron would practice hitting bottle caps with a stick. In 1950, after seeing Jackie Robinson play in an exhibition, Aaron vowed he would play major league baseball before Robinson retired. He went on to play for the Atlanta Braves for 21 seasons, registering a whopping 755 home runs during his career.
As a rising Black athlete, Aaron was a supporter of the civil rights movement—and a frequent target of racists. He once recalled that a Washington, D.C., restaurant broke all of its plates after his team dined there. As Aaron rose toward rarified air—and Babe Ruth’s home run record—the public reaction was not unlike that for boxer Jack Johnson more than a half-century earlier. Aaron was receiving as many as 3,000 letters a day, many of them spewing racist hatred, including death threats.
"Sometimes you sit down and you want to cry about it, you think about it and you say what did I do to make people have this kind of hate toward me,” Aaron recalled, “For a year and a half, I couldn't open a letter, they wouldn't allow me to open mail because every piece of mail I had was opened by Secret Service, people like that."
Nevertheless, Aaron persisted, retiring from baseball as the game’s home-run king. In 1994, he and his wife Billye founded the Hank Aaron Chasing the Dream Foundation, which focuses on youth and has awarded hundreds of scholarships in its history. A decade ago, Aaron told local NBC affiliate 11Alive that he felt his biggest contribution since leaving baseball was his philanthropy, a good example of the kind of third act funders can have in life. Aaron’s original goal was to help 755 children, but his foundation has since exceeded that.
The Aarons were also big backers of historically Black colleges and universities. As we’ve often covered, one story of this country’s racial wealth gap and history of economic exclusion can be told through university endowment numbers. The cumulative endowment holdings for the HBCU sector is $2.1 billion. Meanwhile, Harvard University alone has an endowment of nearly $42 billion. While Black billionaires like Robert F. Smith and Oprah Winfrey are now actively backing these schools, Hank and Billye Aaron have focused on HBCUs for years. Billye herself worked with the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) and graduated from Texas College, an HBCU that’s received support from the couple.
The Aarons made a $3 million gift to Morehouse School of Medicine, expanding the Hugh Gloster Medical Education building and creating the Billye Suber Aaron Student Pavilion. Grantmaking has touched other HBCUs, including Spelman College, Dillard University, Tuskegee University and Talladega College—Alabama’s oldest HBCU.
With the same focus Aaron displayed on the field, the couple have kept their eyes trained on scholarships and connecting youth with educational opportunity. Aaron served on the board of governors of Boys & Girls Clubs of America. In 2007, the MLB and Aaron teamed up to invest $2 million to award scholarships every year to Boys & Girls Club members through Chasing the Dream.
In one of his final acts of service, Aaron, alongside Billye, publicly took the the coronavirus vaccine, hoping to inspire Black Americans who might be skeptical because of historical medical abuse and discrimination.
Billye Aaron is still quite civically active. A former talk show host, she founded the UNCF Mayor’s Masked Ball and chaired the Phenomenal Women Luncheon to honor Morehouse School of Medicine’s then newly appointed president, helping to raise over $600,000 in scholarships for Morehouse medical students. She and the couple’s five children will surely maintain a strong presence in philanthropy, carrying on the family legacy.
