For my AP US History oral history project, I interviewed Mr. Terence Moore, a sports journalist who has written about Hank Aaron and MLB integration.
How it went
The interview was originally scheduled for 30 minutes. It was an oral history, so I had questions to ask him, but he would also ask me questions. The timing worked out and the interview went two hours long.
His book
Mr. Moore wrote The Real Hank Aaron: An Intimate Look at the Life and Legacy of the Home Run King, with a foreword by Dusty Baker.
Where it led
That interview, along with my thesis on MLB integration, pointed me toward the expedition.
Highlights from the interview
A few moments that tied baseball to the history I was researching:
Robinson and Aaron were one story. Mr. Moore described Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron as “the same person” in different eras — Robinson was Aaron’s idol. He passed along what Andrew Young once told him: when Aaron and the Braves came to Atlanta in 1966, it was one of the first times Black and white fans sat together in the same stands, a moment Young saw as Atlanta becoming a modern city.
A 12-year-old’s brush with history. In South Bend in 1968, Mr. Moore and his brother rode their bikes to Robert F. Kennedy’s motorcade and touched fingertips with him as he passed. Years later, researching microfiche, he realized it was April 4, 1968 — the day Dr. King was assassinated — and that Kennedy flew straight to Indianapolis to give one of the most famous unifying speeches in American history.
“Rosa Parks before Rosa Parks.” The year before Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, he was court-martialed in the Army for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus. Mr. Moore’s framing connected the baseball story directly to the civil rights history I was studying.
Tracking the numbers early. As far back as 1982, Mr. Moore researched the state of Black players in baseball for the San Francisco Examiner, timed to the 35th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier — documenting the share of Black players in the majors decades before it became a widely discussed topic. More on Mr. Moore and Hank Aaron ↗
← All my work on baseball and integration