Three years after Jackie Robinson built-in Major League Baseball, Mays turned the primary Black participant to seem in the Class B Interstate League, 4 ranges under the majors. But a lot of the nation remained entrenched in Jim Crow legal guidelines and mentalities. Throughout the Giants’ weekend sequence at Municipal Stadium towards 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 long to realize that Hagerstown was the only city in our league below the Mason-Dixon Line,” Mays wrote in his 1988 autobiography, “Say Hey.” “When I walked onto the field for the first time, I heard someone shout, ‘Who’s that n—– walking on the field?’ But I didn’t let it bother me.”

Seventy-four years in the past this month, an everlasting 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 best way it handled him. Over subsequent a long time, he recounted his experiences there in books, documentaries, interviews and even his 1979 Hall of Fame induction speech.

The metropolis didn’t neglect Mays, both. Though he by no means performed for an area staff, a number of iterations of Hagerstown’s baseball franchises have had Mays’s No. 24 jersey retired since 2004.

The most up-to-date of these franchises is the Hagerstown Flying Boxcars, an enlargement staff in the impartial Atlantic League that performs in a ballpark a mile from the place Mays took the sector. On Tuesday, in their first dwelling sport since Mays died, the Flying Boxcars offered a video tribute and held a second of silence in his honor.

“He’s probably one of the top five greatest players of all time, so it’s always been a source of pride in our community that Willie Mays played his first game in Hagerstown Municipal Stadium,” Flying Boxcars General Manager David Blenckstone mentioned. “He’s always held a special historical place in the history of minor league baseball in Hagerstown.”

But to some, Mays’s expertise in Hagerstown stays an missed facet of the town’s historical past. The lodge in the redlined Jonathan Street neighborhood the place Mays as soon as stayed is now a church parking zone. Municipal Stadium was demolished in 2022. Meritus Park, a brand new downtown stadium that opened final month, doesn’t but characteristic 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 well celebrated, told [or] known within Hagerstown or our county.”

“All I know is bits and pieces of the story,” Martinez mentioned. “Had I known there was someone like Willie Mays that walked on Jonathan Street, that played in our city … I would have felt more proud about being from Hagerstown as a Black woman.”

Mays grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, but the racism and segregation he encountered in Hagerstown left a long-lasting impression. When he performed in close by D.C. and Baltimore, there have been no restrictions on the place he was allowed to remain. “But here in Hagerstown, located midway between those cities, I couldn’t stay with the rest of the team,” he wrote in his autobiography.

The Giants made makes an attempt to assist Mays. A gaggle of White teammates sneaked into his room on the Harmon Hotel and slept on the ground to maintain him firm. His supervisor, Chick Genovese, ate with him on the metropolis’s segregated eating places.

Still, his stint with the Giants was Mays’s first expertise as the one Black participant on his staff. When Mays performed in 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 first time I had been off by myself somewhere, for even when I was on the road with the Barons in a segregated situation, at least all of us were segregated at the same time in the same 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 thought it was important for the community to have that moment — a second chance with Willie Mays, as it were,” mentioned Kurt Landes, the previous Suns common supervisor who organized Mays’s go to. “Certainly everyone was aware that his first time in the community wasn’t received positively. … So this was a chance for the community to be excited to host him again [and] excited to have an opportunity to redeem themselves. Everyone felt it was a little bit of a homecoming.”

On Aug. 9, 2004, a 73-year-old Mays was the visitor of honor in a metropolis that after jeered him. He stuffed the ballroom of a downtown lodge, the place based on an account in the Hagerstown Herald-Mail, some attendees paid as a lot as $1,000 for an autograph and a personal 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 Tourists. He met with gamers, threw out the ceremonial first pitch and acquired a standing ovation.

“He returned under much different circumstances than when he was here in 1950,” mentioned Dan Spedden, a longtime Hagerstown baseball fan who attended the ceremonies. “He was very gracious 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 any of that animosity or anything. He was just happy to be here and happy that he was so well received.”

While many followers left that day with autographed memorabilia, Landes held on to a novel memento. After studying that Mays cherished home made chili, Landes and his spouse stuffed a gradual 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 frame, and it was in my basement,” mentioned Landes, the president and common supervisor of the Class AAA Lehigh Valley IronPigs. “And then my wife and I, whenever we made chili from there on, we called 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. But 9 months later, the town council voted to protect the previous title, 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 Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Maybe the stain of that segregation has not exactly faded away. There’s still some of it lingering in a lot of people, and it came out in a way that I was appalled by and embarrassed by.”

A number of years earlier than he died, Mays mentioned he had reconciled his historical past with Hagerstown.

“They wanted to try making up for the sadness I felt all those years earlier,” Mays wrote in a 2020 follow-up memoir, “24.” “The way I figured it, I couldn’t hold it against the whole town. I wasn’t hurt by the town in 1950. I was hurt by the people. It was good that I went back.”