Willie Mays faced racism in Hagerstown as a member of the Trenton Giants

Three years after Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball, Mays became the first black player to join the Class B Interstate League, four levels below the Major Leagues. But most of the country remained stuck in Jim Crow laws and mentality. During the Giants’ weekend series at Municipal Stadium against the Hagerstown Braves, Mays stayed in a separate hotel away from his White teammates and endured racial epithets from fans.

“It didn’t take me long to realize that Hagerstown was the only town in our league below the Mason-Dixon line,” Mays wrote in his 1988 autobiography, “Say Hay.” “When I first walked onto the field, I heard someone yelling, ‘Who’s that —— walking on the field?’ But I didn’t let it overwhelm me.”

Seventy-four years ago this month, an enduring connection was formed between possibly the greatest baseball player of all time and a small town 70 miles northwest of D.C. Mays, who died last week at the age of 93, was named Hagerstown. Never forgotten, both for his role in launching his legendary career and the way it treated him. In the following decades, he recounted his experiences in books, documentaries, interviews, and even in his 1979 Hall of Fame induction speech.

The city did not forget May also. Although he never played for a local team, Mays’s number 24 jersey has been retired in several iterations of Hagerstown’s baseball franchise since 2004.

The most recent of those franchises is the Hagerstown Flying Boxcars, an expansion team in the independent Atlantic League that plays in a ballpark across from the one where Mays took over the field. On Tuesday, in their first home game since Mays’ death, the Flying Boxcars presented a video tribute and held a moment of silence in his honor.

Flying Boxcars general manager David Blankstone said, “He’s probably one of the top five greatest players of all time, so it’s always been a point of pride for our community that Willie Mays played his first game at Hagerstown Municipal Stadium.” “He will always have a special historical place in the history of Minor League Baseball in Hagerstown.”

But for some, the mess experience in Hagerstown remains an overlooked aspect of the city’s history. The hotel where Maze once stayed, in the Redlined Jonathan Street neighborhood, is now a church parking lot. The Municipal Stadium was slated to be demolished in 2022. Merritt Park, a new downtown stadium that opened last month, does not yet have a permanent tribute to Mays.

Tekesha Martinez, who serves as Hagerstown’s first Black mayor, said Mays’ history with the city “has not been well celebrated, not told (or known) within Hagerstown or our county.”

“I only know parts of the story,” said Martínez. “If I had known there was someone like Willie Mays who walked down Jonathan Street, who played in our town… I would have felt more proud to be from Hagerstown as a black woman.”

Mays grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, yet the racism and segregation he faced in Hagerstown left a lasting impression. When he played in nearby DC and Baltimore, there were no restrictions on where he was allowed to live. “But here in Hagerstown, halfway between those cities, I couldn’t keep up with the rest of the team,” he wrote in his autobiography.

The veterans attempted to support Mace. A group of White’s teammates broke into his room at the Harmon Hotel and slept on the floor to keep him company. His manager, Chick Genovese, dined with him at different restaurants around the city.

Nevertheless, his tenure with the Giants was Mays’s first experience as the only black player on his team. When Mays played in the Negro Leagues with the Birmingham Black Barons, he and his teammates faced racism. In Hagerstown, he went through it alone.

Mays wrote, “It was the first time I went somewhere alone, even when I was on the road with the Baron in a different situation, at least all of us in the same place at the same time Was separated.”

The legacy of Mays’s experience in Hagerstown remained not only for the baseball star but for the city as well. In 2004, the Hagerstown Suns, the city’s defunct minor league franchise, invited Mays to return. When he accepted, it became an opportunity – 54 years later – for Hagerstown to make amends.

Former Suns general manager Curt Landes, who organized Mays’ visit, said, “I thought it was important for the community to have that moment – ​​a second chance with Willie Mays, as it were.” “Certainly everyone knew that at first he was not welcomed positively into the community. … So this was a chance for the community to be excited to host him again (and) excited to have the opportunity to redeem himself. “Everyone felt it was a bit of a homecoming.”

On August 9, 2004, the 73-year-old Mays was the guest of honor in the city that had once ridiculed him. They filled the ballroom of a downtown hotel, where, according to an article in the Hagerstown Herald-Mail, some attendees paid up to $1,000 for an autograph and a private meet-and-greet. As Landes introduced him to applause, Mays began to cry.

Later that day, Mays returned to Municipal Stadium before the game between the Suns and the Asheville Tourists. He met the players, threw the ceremonial first pitch and received a standing ovation.

“He came back under much different circumstances than when he was here in 1950,” said Dan Spaden, a longtime Hagerstown baseball fan who attended the ceremony. “He was very kind about it. … He covered it well in his book, the way he was treated here in 1950, but when he came back in ’04, I didn’t see that animosity or anything. He was very happy to be here and also happy that he was welcomed so well.”

While many fans walked away that day with signed memorabilia, Landes had a unique memento. After learning that Mays loved homemade chili, Landes and his wife loaded the family recipe into a slow cooker and brought it to the ballpark. Mays enjoyed three heaping bowls, and Landes kept Mays’s spoon as a souvenir.

“I put it in a frame, and it was in my basement,” said Landes, president and general manager of the Class AAA Lehigh Valley IronPigs. “And then me and my wife, whenever we made chili out of there, we called it Willie Chili.”

Shortly before Mays’ visit, then-Mayor William Breichner announced that the city would rededicate a street running alongside Municipal Stadium in Mays’ honor. But nine months later, the City Council voted to preserve the old name, East Memorial Boulevard, after a group of veterans argued that the street should be erected as a memory of their service.

Some saw the event as a resurgence of Hagerstown’s past.

“Willie Mays is a veteran,” said Spaden, who is president of the Hagerstown/Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Maybe the stain of that separation is still not erased. Some of this still exists in the minds of many people, and it came out in a way that surprised and embarrassed me.”

A few years before his death, Mays said he had reconciled his history with Hagerstown.

“They wanted to try to compensate for the grief I felt all those years ago,” Mays wrote in her 2020 follow-up memoir, “24.” “The way I understood it, I couldn’t present it to the whole city. I wasn’t offended by the city in 1950. I was hurt by people. It was good that I went back.”