Aaron was still an active player, but player-managers were not yet extinct, with several active players earning managerial jobs before the end of the 1970s. And Aaron wasn’t pleased with how Atlanta addressed its opening.

“The situation could’ve been handled more tastefully,” Aaron told reporters at the 1974 game in Pittsburgh. “I think I deserved to be asked.”

After firing Eddie Mathews in late June, the Braves selected Clyde King as their interim manager. Aaron, 40, had broken Babe Ruth’s career home run record that season, which would be his last in Atlanta.

“Maybe they were afraid I’d say yes, I’d like the job,” he said during the all-star break. “And maybe I would have, just so there’d be a breakthrough. There are plenty more qualified ones than me, but you don’t see any of them getting a job.”

Aaron argued that the California Angels should have hired Frank Robinson when they had a managerial opening earlier that year; that job went to Dick Williams instead. After the season, the Cleveland Indians named Robinson the sport’s first Black manager — meriting a congratulatory telegram from President Gerald Ford. Robinson became the team’s player-manager at the start of the 1975 season.

In 1974, Aaron also talked up his younger brother Tommie Aaron, who was managing Atlanta’s Class AA team in Savannah, as a candidate for the Braves’ vacancy. When asked about the younger Aaron, Atlanta General Manager Eddie Robinson said, “Tommie is involved in a tight pennant race, and we think it would be unfair to take him out of Savannah at this time” — a comment that the New York Times noted became a “target of derision.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t want to stay in the minor leagues the rest of his life and rot away,” Henry Aaron said. Tommie Aaron would manage four more years in the Braves’ system, including two at Class AAA Richmond. He later became a coach for the Braves but never had an opportunity to manage at the big league level. He died of leukemia in 1984 at the age of 45.

“I’m disappointed that the Braves’ front office made the statement that I wasn’t interested in managing and Tommie was too valuable in Savannah,” Aaron said. “I felt a little insulted, and I think it was an insult to all Blacks in baseball. … I don’t know what baseball is afraid of. I’ve heard stories so bad about what front offices think that I wouldn’t want to repeat them.”

Aaron also pushed back on the argument that would-be Black managers needed to get experience in the minors.

“I don’t recall Ted Williams going to the minors,” he said, referring to the Hall of Fame slugger who got the Washington Senators’ gig in 1969 with no managerial experience, “or Eddie Mathews, for that matter.”

Eddie Robinson, the Braves’ GM, said he was surprised that Aaron was interested in the manager’s job. But then he gave a telling non-answer when asked if the city of Atlanta was ready to accept a Black manager.

“I don’t think I want to comment on that,” Robinson said.

In a Boston Globe column, Ray Fitzgerald backed up Aaron’s criticism.

“News item: Whitey Lockman resigned as manager of the Cubs,” Fitzgerald wrote. “His successor is Jim Marshall — third base coach, white and safe. Not named was Ernie Banks, 20-year superstar and black.” He lumped the Braves’ new manager in the same category as Lockman and Marshall, remarking on his “undistinguished” stint as San Francisco Giants manager.

In two years with the Giants, King posted a .534 winning percentage; the Braves would fire him in 1975 after he compiled a .487 winning percentage over parts of two seasons.

When Aaron made his pointed comments, there was growing anger at the lack of opportunities for Black players after their careers were over. The issue got a forceful push in the early 1970s, but Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, had long championed the cause — albeit with eyes wide open.

“I feel that there is as much resistance on the part of the top brass of baseball to the idea of letting Negroes get to the top as there was in the early forties to allowing Negroes to play,” he wrote in a 1965 column for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, nearly a decade after he retired as a player. Robinson said that baseball owners were willing to “exploit the talent of Negro and other colored players,” but after their playing careers were over, they had nowhere to go in the sport. “Because the owners don’t have the courage or decency to think in terms of the contributions these players have made to their fortunes, they just let them go.”

And at the 1972 World Series, just nine days before his death, he used the occasion of a ceremony honoring his historic debut to make a final, poignant plea:

“I am extremely proud and pleased to be here this afternoon but must admit I am going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a Black face managing in baseball.”

The following year, Aaron helped pick up the mantle from Robinson, his lifelong inspiration. Aaron had a reputation as a soft-spoken player, but he became more assertive on civil rights issues as his career progressed. In a 1973 profile, Time magazine described his evolution from “reticent rookie ballplayer to outspoken social critic” and noted his pessimistic reply when asked for his advice to Black kids about going into sports.

“Until we crack the area of managers, front-office personnel and coaches, there’s really no hope for black kids coming into sports. We’re giants on the field for 20 years. Then they’re finished with us,” he said, echoing Robinson’s critique. “What baseball needs to do is to give blacks an opportunity to show their ability to lead in other places than just the field.”

Aaron, who died in 2021, paid homage to Robinson’s efforts in a 1999 Time essay titled, “Jackie Robinson: The Trailblazer.”

“He campaigned for baseball to hire a black third-base coach, then a black manager,” Aaron wrote. “In 1969 he refused an invitation to play in an old-timers’ game at Yankee Stadium to protest the lack of progress along those lines.”

By the time of the 1974 All-Star Game, the lack of Black managers was generating protesters, who held picket signs outside the Hilton hotel where Oakland Athletics superstar Reggie Jackson was honored as the top vote-getter in the all-star balloting. The Rev. Donald McIlvane of the Catholic Interracial Council, one of four groups protesting, told the New York Times that they wanted guests visiting Pittsburgh “to know someone cares.” He said none of the baseball officials stopped to talk to them.

In 1987, at the beginning of his last major league season, Jackson wrote a Sports Illustrated cover story with Peter Gammons about racism in baseball and society, looking back at the frustrating early 1970s when there were no Black managers.

“Fifteen years ago I heard black players discuss baseball’s closed-door policies with bitterness,” he wrote. “They accepted the fact that they would not have the same opportunities after they retired as white players. …

“What can be done?” he asked. “To begin with, instead of complaining, blacks should continually mention the people who are qualified for high baseball positions.”

Last month, in an emotional interview with Fox Sports, Jackson recounted in raw detail the racism he experienced as a young minor league player in Birmingham, Ala., site of that night’s Negro Leagues tribute game. He credited White teammates such as Rollie Fingers and Joe Rudi for keeping him out of fights with local racists.

“I’d have got killed here, because I’d have beat somebody’s a–,” Jackson said. “You’d have saw me in an oak tree somewhere.”

Aaron, too, dealt with a torrent of racism — including death threats — especially as he closed in on Ruth’s record. After he broke it in April 1974, he said, “I just thank God it’s all over.”

“To some people he was more than a threat to Babe Ruth’s record, he was a black man who was about to break a white man’s most revered record,” Dave Anderson wrote in a Times column during that 1974 all-star break. “Now,” Anderson added, “quietly but firmly, he has assumed a new role involving his blackness, the willingness to be the major league’s first black manager — if the Atlanta Braves management affords him the opportunity.”