Anniversaries can seem arbitrary — it shouldn’t take a nice, round number to make anyone reflect on important events and the passage of time, but that’s usually how it works, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, 50 years ago Wednesday, is as important as it gets.
A small, but not insignificant, element of April 4, 1968, and its aftermath is how the sports world responded. Major League Baseball, from the start, was the outlier; opening day was scheduled three days later, on Monday, and commissioner William Eckert’s grand plan was to let each club decide how to proceed, rather than take control and do the right thing.
History hasn’t looked kindly on Eckert for that, as it shouldn’t. As detailed in a well-reported, interesting piece at The Undefeated, without the Pirates, Eckert may have come off even worse. MLB eventually pushed the start of its season back until Wednesday, the day after King’s funeral — but that wouldn’t have happened without a set of stands that began with the Pirates.
When the Astros, who were set to play host to the Pirates, initially opted not to postpone the game, Roberto Clemente, Maury Wills and Donn Clendenon held a Friday meeting of the team’s 11 black players in Clendenon’s hotel room. There, they unanimously voted to sit out an exhibition game Sunday and the first two games of the season, Monday and Tuesday in Houston.
On Saturday, the entire team voted the same way. A joint statement from Clemente and pitcher Dave Wickersham, who is white, ran in the Pittsburgh Press the next day.
“We are doing this because we respect what Dr. King has done for mankind,” they declared. “Dr. King was not only concerned with Negro or whites but also poor people. We owe this gesture to his memory and his ideals.” Eventually, the rest of the league fell in line.
The Undefeated story is worth your time. It’s also worth remembering and reinforcing just how close Clendenon was to King, a longtime friend and mentor.
Both were from Atlanta, and both attended Morehouse College. Typically, older students were assigned freshmen to help as “big brothers.” King had already graduated, but he still took on the job with Clendenon.
Makes sense; Clendenon told the Press that King “talked me into” attending Morehouse in the first place. In high school, Clendenon was a baseball, football and basketball star, and he wanted to attend UCLA. His mother and stepfather pushed for Morehouse, an epicenter of the civil rights movement and African-American academia and culture.
His mother, Helen, wanted him to be a doctor; Clendenon’s father, who died when he was six months old, was a college professor. Clendenon’s stepfather, Nish Williams, was a 13-year Negro League veteran and a successful restaurateur. It took King, already a family friend, to seal the deal.
When Clendenon made it to Morehouse, having King around didn’t seem to hurt, either. From a SABR biography of Clendenon:
King fulfilled the big brother’s job—helping Clendenon adjust to the school over occasional dinners in the King home. Clendenon had an open invitation to drop by, and if Martin Jr. wasn’t there, he had the ear of Martin Sr. (Class of 1926 and future trustee of the school); Martin Jr.’s wife, Coretta Scott King; or Martin’s influential sister Christine King (a 1948 graduate of Spelman, Morehouse’s sister school, and the alma mater of Clendenon’s and King’s mothers). And if not that, the young athlete could appreciate the home-cooked meals.
The connections didn’t stop; after graduation from Morehouse, Clendenon briefly worked as a school teacher with King’s sister, Christine. King also helped Clendenon improve working conditions at Scripto, an Atlanta pen manufacturer where he worked in the offseason.
Later in life, Clendenon wound up earning a law degree from Duquesne, beating a midlife cocaine addiction and working as a chemical dependency counselor. He died in 2005 of leukemia at 70 years old.
As for the 1968 season, it was Clendenon’s last with the Pirates. The Expos took him in the expansion draft and traded him midseason to the Mets, who he helped lead to a title a few months later. He won World Series MVP; the 50th anniversary will be Oct. 16, 2019.
First Published: April 5, 2018, 6:33 p.m.