ATLANTA – When offering a toast to Hank Aaron at his 82nd birthday earlier this month, Andrew Young recalled his shock at seeing how Atlanta welcomed the young black slugger to town in 1966.
Young, the former Atlanta mayor, United Nations ambassador and civil rights activist, remembered a parade for Aaron and the Braves through downtown after the team moved from Milwaukee.
“I was standing behind some good old boys from somewhere and I was wondering what their reaction was going to be,” Young said. “One of them said, ‘If we’re going to be a big league city, that man is going to have to have a home anywhere he wants to have it, and if we’re going to be a big league city, we’ve got to open the doors to this city to people and not worry about their color.’
“I said, well I’ll be damned. I never heard anybody say that about Martin Luther King.”
Young’s birthday toast for Aaron was given at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights at a screening for the film “The Hammer of Hank Aaron,” which debuts tonight on the Smithsonian Channel.