To baseball fans, Hank Aaron was the biggest star in the world, but to friends and family in Mobile, Alabama, he was … well, he was the biggest star in the world.
“Growing up … he was larger than life to all of us,” Angelia Williams said.
Today, she’s a 65-year-old school nurse in Kansas City, Missouri, reflecting on her experiences with “someone that we all looked up to.” Aaron died on Friday. He was 86 years old.
To talk to Williams about Hank Aaron is to go back in time about 50 years to Greater Morning Star Baptist Church in the Toulminville neighborhood, a low- to middle-income part of town where Black families lived.