17373: Taking Whitewashing To Wuthering Heights.

 

 

From The New York Times…

 

Jacob Elordi, Heathcliff and the Controversy Over ‘Wuthering Heights’

 

The character’s racial identity is at the heart of accusations that the film’s casting is “whitewashing.” But what does the original novel really say?

 

By Esther Zuckerman

 

In Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” Heathcliff is described as a “dark-skinned gipsy.” In Emerald Fennell’s new film “Wuthering Heights,” the character is portrayed by Jacob Elordi, a white actor from Australia.

 

Ever since Elordi was announced in the role, the choice has stirred up controversy online, where authenticity in casting is highly prized. Some frustrated fans have argued that the casting whitewashes the role. But Brontë scholars say that much of what the author writes about the character’s race remains up for interpretation, even if the consensus is that he was probably not intended to be white.

 

As a boy, Heathcliff is brought into the home of Catherine Earnshaw (who becomes his romantic obsession) by her father, Mr. Earnshaw. Quite a few passages in the novel suggest that Brontë, who died a year after its publication, intended to write Heathcliff as a person of color. In addition to being called “dark” and a “gipsy,” he is also referred to as a “Lascar,” a term for South Asian laborers on British ships.

 

At one point, Heathcliff compares himself with Edgar Linton, whom Catherine will eventually marry, saying, “I wish I had light hair and fair skin.” The servant Nelly Dean suggests that Heathcliff could be a “prince in disguise,” continuing, “Who knows but your father was emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen.”

 

Susan Newby, learning officer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, England, said, “There is a sense that he is not white Anglo-Saxon, he’s something else, but you don’t know what that is.”

 

Some scholars believe that Brontë was using Heathcliff to comment on the Liverpool slave trade. Mr. Earnshaw brings Heathcliff from Liverpool, and Nelly, who narrates this part of the action, explains that Earnshaw saw Heathcliff starving and asked after his “owner.”

 

It makes sense that Brontë would be interested in slavery. Her father, Patrick Brontë, was associated with the abolitionist politician William Wilberforce, who, according to the Parsonage Museum, helped pay for Patrick to study at Cambridge.

 

Reginald Watson, an associate professor of literature at East Carolina University, has studied questions of Blackness in the works of the Brontës, including Emily’s sister Charlotte, the “Jane Eyre” author. “My belief is that because of the father’s involvement in abolitionism that both of the authors included connections to slavery in some form,” Watson said. His position is that while Heathcliff “may not be totally Black,” he is mixed.

 

Another theory, however, is that Brontë was using Heathcliff to comment on prejudices against the Irish, since her father was from Ireland and she was writing at the start of the potato famine there. “Think about Heathcliff who was brought from Liverpool and speaks a sort of gibberish,” said Elsie Michie, a professor of English at Louisiana State University. “The description of Heathcliff conforms almost exactly to the caricatures of the Irish.”

 

Michie added that the “dynamics of this novel are about otherness in various ways, and that otherness is in Heathcliff.”

 

Onscreen, however, Heathcliff has largely been played by white actors, including Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes and, perhaps most famously, Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 version opposite Merle Oberon as Catherine. (Oberon actually was South Asian but hid that to ascend in Hollywood at the time.) A notable exception is Andrea Arnold’s 2012 adaptation, in which the adult Heathcliff was played by the Black actor James Howson. In an interview with NPR at the time, Arnold said, “In the book it was clear he wasn’t white-skinned. I felt that Emily was not committing exactly; she was playing with her own difference as a female.”

 

Fennell’s version does away with references to Heathcliff’s race, instead largely focusing on his tortured romance with Cathy (Margot Robbie). Still, the cast doesn’t lack diversity entirely. Nelly is played by the Vietnamese American actress Hong Chau, and Shazad Latif, who is of Pakistani descent, plays Edgar Linton.

 

Asked about the Heathcliff casting by The Hollywood Reporter, Fennell emphasized that her decision was based on how she saw the text. “I think the thing is everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it,” she said.

 

Speaking at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival, hosted by the Parsonage Museum last year, Fennell said she thought Elordi “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff” on the first copy she read.

 

Fidelity in casting has continued to be a hot topic. After Odessa A’zion was hired for the forthcoming adaptation of Holly Brickley’s novel “Deep Cuts,” there was an uproar because her character is described as half-Jewish, half-Mexican, and A’zion has no Mexican heritage. She dropped out of the project and explained on Instagram, “I hadn’t read the book and should have paid more attention to all aspects of Zoe before accepting.”

 

But while Newby, for instance, said she believes that Brontë presents Heathcliff as nonwhite, she also thinks the author leaves room for discussion. “She deliberately keeps it ambiguous,” Newby said.

 

At the same time, Newby isn’t bothered by Elordi’s casting, in part because Fennell has been so explicit about the film being from her own perspective. The director makes a number of major changes, getting rid of some characters and altering details of Cathy and Heathcliff’s interactions. “Somehow I feel more bothered by some past adaptations that have very unquestionably, unthinkingly showed him as being white without ever really reading the book and thinking, ‘Right, this is how it’s described,’” Newby said. “It was almost that was a default. You won’t be taken seriously as a lead if he’s not white.”

 

The mystery is also part of the appeal of Heathcliff: We never do learn his origins before Earnshaw brings him into that household.

17010: George Foreman (1949-2025).

 

From The New York Times…

 

George Foreman, Boxing Champion and Grilling Magnate, Dies at 76

 

He claimed a world title in his 20s and again in his 40s, and then made millions selling grills.

 

By Victor Mather

 

George Foreman, a heavyweight boxing champion who returned to the sport to regain his title at the improbable age of 45, and parlayed his fame and amiable personality into a multimillion-dollar grill business, died on Friday. He was 76.

 

His family announced his death on his Instagram account. The family statement did not give a cause or say where he died.

 

When Foreman returned to the ring after 10 years away, there was skepticism that a fighter of his years could beat any younger fighter, much less come back to the top of the game. But in 1994, he beat the undefeated Michael Moorer to reclaim the world title, shocking the boxing world.

 

Foreman’s career spanned generations: He fought Chuck Wepner in the 1960s, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali in the ’70s, Dwight Muhammad Qawi in the ’80s and Evander Holyfield in the ’90s.

 

And his popularity helped him make millions selling grills after his retirement.

 

George Edward Foreman was born Jan. 10, 1949, in Marshall, Texas, to Nancy Ree (Nelson) Foreman and J.D. Foreman, a railroad construction worker. As an adult, he learned that his biological father was a man named Leroy Moorehead.

 

Foreman was candid about being a bully and a petty criminal in his youth. After dropping out of school, he joined the Job Corps at 16. At 17, he tried his hand at boxing.

 

Success came quickly in the amateur ranks; only a year and a half later he was Olympic heavyweight champion, defeating Ionas Chepulis of the Soviet Union by a second-round knockout in Mexico City in 1968.

 

After the fight, Foreman, who was Black, waved a small American flag in the ring, days after the track athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised clenched fists during the national anthem to protest the country’s treatment of Black people.

 

“I was just glad to be an American,” Foreman said afterward. “Some people have tried to make something of it, calling me an Uncle Tom, but I’m not. I just believe people should live together in peace.”

 

Turning professional, he started a heavy schedule of fights, boxing as many as a dozen times in a year. He was 37-0 when he got his first shot at a world heavyweight title against Frazier in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1973.

 

Though he was a 3-1 underdog, Foreman dominated the fight, knocking Frazier down six times before the contest was stopped halfway through the second round. One of those knockdowns led the television announcer Howard Cosell to utter one of boxing’s most famous calls: “Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!”

 

“It was unbelievable,” the Times sports columnist Arthur Daley wrote. “In little more than four and a half minutes, George Foreman destroyed Joe Frazier tonight, and the man who supposedly couldn’t lose never had even one ghost of a chance for victory. So there is a new heavyweight champion of the world, and he won it with authority in an explosive demonstration of overpowering punching skills.”

 

Foreman defended the title twice, before a match with Ali in Zaire in 1974 that would become known as the Rumble in the Jungle. This time, Foreman was the favorite, but Ali reclaimed the title, dealing Foreman his first career loss.

 

Ali used his rope-a-dope strategy, resting on the top rope and allowing Foreman to punch him, but also tire himself out. Ali finished the fight with a left-right combination knockout in the eighth round.

 

Foreman had five more victories, including another one over Frazier, but after losing to Jimmy Young in 1977 he elected to hang up his gloves at age 28, citing his religious beliefs and his mother’s wishes.

 

He turned to religious vocation in his retirement years, as a nondenominational Christian minister in Houston and by starting a youth center.

 

But the ring lured him back. “I want to be champion again,” he said in 1987. “I’ve got a three-year plan. I want to start at the bottom. Train harder than any man in the world. Fight once a month.”

 

He admitted money was a factor as well. “You know that story about how you have four pockets in your pants, and you better save what’s in one pocket so you can live?” he said. “I saved one pocket. I’ve got money for steak and potatoes. But the other three pockets I just blew.”

 

Sure enough, Foreman fought frequently, as many as nine times in a year. He cranked out 24 straight wins, although most were against boxers of lesser ability. That set him up for a title shot at age 42 against the champion, Holyfield, in 1991. Foreman lost the decision but put forth a creditable performance.

 

The Times described Foreman as “fit and courageous.” But the general reaction was that his performance was little more than a brave effort. Surely, that seemed to be the end of Foreman’s title dreams.

 

He scored a few more wins and lost to Tommy Morrison, but then managed to land another title shot in 1994 against Moorer, 26, who had defeated Holyfield. Some called it undeserved and suggested that Foreman got the chance only because of his fame and the novelty of his age. “It’s not about deserving,” he said with a smile, “because I’ve got it.”

 

Foreman was trailing on the judges’ scorecards when he managed to land the big punch he was looking for and knocked Moorer out in the 10th round in Las Vegas. Moorer had thrown 641 punches, to 369 by Foreman. But the last one was the one that counted.

 

Foreman had stood rather than sit on a stool between rounds as if to defy his 45 years. He became the oldest heavyweight champion in history.

 

“Anything you desire, you can make happen,” he said after the fight. “It’s like the song, ‘When you wish upon a star your dreams come true.’ Well, look at me tonight.”

 

Foreman defended his belt against a German fighter, Axel Schulz. But the governing bodies that awarded the championship began to strip him of his belts as he declined to fight the challengers they mandated. Instead, Foreman faced and defeated a couple of lesser fighters. His final fight was a loss, a close decision to Shannon Briggs in 1997. He was 48.

 

He finished with a professional record of 76-5 and is widely regarded as one of the 10 best heavyweight fighters of all time; a Ring Magazine survey in 2017 ranked him seventh. He was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in 2003.

 

Foreman returned to his youth center, did commentary for televised boxing broadcasts and, most lucratively, sold hamburger grills.

 

Foreman began endorsing the George Foreman Grill in 1994, with a big smile and predictable but still charming lines like “It’s a knockout.” The grills were electric and portable and could be used inside as an alternative to outdoor charcoal grilling. Foreman helped propel the grills to become an American kitchen mainstay.

 

In 1999, Salton Inc. paid $137.5 million for worldwide rights to use Foreman’s name on grills; Foreman got about 75 percent of the payout. He also endorsed mufflers, fried chicken and chips.

 

Foreman’s affability helped him transcend boxing and cross over into the media world. In 1993-94, in the midst of his comeback, he starred in “George,” a short-lived sitcom on ABC in which he played a retired boxer helping troubled youth, and he made guest appearances on several other shows over the years. He appeared in a Venus-flytrap costume on “The Masked Singer” show in 2022 (his performance of “Get Ready” by the Temptations was not enough to stave off elimination).

 

In 2005, Foreman collaborated with the author Fran Manushkin on a children’s book called “Let George Do It!” about a household full of Georges, like his own.

 

It reads: “‘Today is Big George’s birthday,’ Mom tells the assembled boys. ‘Can I count on all of you to help with the party?’

 

“‘You bet,’ said George, George, George and George. ‘Urgle,’ said Baby George.”

One key to Foreman’s business success in so many areas, he said, was making personal appearances.

 

“That’s bigger than anything, any endorsement, I don’t care who you are,” he said.

“They want to touch you; they want to know you.”

 

“Then,” he said, “they buy you.”

 

Hank Sanders contributed reporting.

16893: L’Oréal Real Old Advertising Concept.

 

L’Oréal ran this self-promotional advertisement in The New York Times, hyping the company’s performative PR and heat shields on generational diversity.

 

See, there are career opportunities for Old White Guys and Old White Gals bemoaning the perceived ageism in Adland.

16838: An Open Letter To A Closed Mind…?

 

This full-page advertisement ran in The New York Times, showing President-elect Donald Trump will create lots of new jobs—for organizations like the ACLU.

16791: John Amos (1939-2024).

 

From The New York Times…

 

John Amos, a Star of ‘Good Times’ and ‘Roots,’ Is Dead at 84

 

He was the patriarch in one of the first sitcoms with an all-Black cast and an enslaved African in the American South in a blockbuster TV mini-series.

 

By Ash Wu

 

John Amos, who played a stern patriarch on “Good Times,” America’s first sitcom featuring a two-parent Black family, and who had a starring role in “Roots,” the slavery narrative that became America’s most watched show in the late 1970s, has died in Los Angeles. He was 84.

 

His publicist, Belinda Foster, confirmed the death on Tuesday, saying he had died on Aug. 21. She did not specify the cause or say why the announcement of his death was delayed.

 

Mr. Amos’s acting career spanned more than five decades, with his breakthrough coming in 1970 on the CBS comedy “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” playing Gordy, the weatherman on a local television news program working alongside Ms. Moore’s Mary Richards, an associate producer. After three seasons, Mr. Amos left for “Good Times,” a Norman Lear production and a spinoff of the producer’s sitcom “Maude.”

 

Chronicling the trials and tribulations of a Black working-class family living in the Chicago projects, “Good Times,” which ran from 1974-79, also on CBS, never shied away from the gritty realities of life in public housing, touching on topics like racial bigotry, drug abuse and poverty — but all with a sense of humor.

 

Mr. Amos played James Evans Sr., a fierce disciplinarian with a tender heart who took on odd jobs to support his wife, Florida Evans (Esther Rolle), his sons Michael (Ralph Carter) and J.J. (Jimmie Walker), and his daughter, Thelma (Bern Nadette Stanis).

 

At one point, reminiscing with a childhood friend about his roots, James recounts how he used to be so poor that while other children had patches on their clothes, he had “patches on my patches!”

 

“Good Times” accrued high ratings and was lauded for making television history — it was one of the first sitcoms with an all-Black cast, preceding Mr. Lear’s “The Jeffersons” (1975-85). But Ms. Rolle and Mr. Amos felt that there were still inroads to be made by Black members of the production, and they pushed Mr. Lear to allow them to modify the scripts, which had largely been drafted by white writers.

 

“They’d go on about their credits,” Mr. Amos said of the writers in an interview with the SiriusXM program “Sway in the Morning.” Then he’d ask them, “‘Well, how long have you been Black? That just doesn’t happen in the community. We don’t think that way. We don’t act that way. We don’t let our children do that.’”

 

His outspokenness, while at first welcomed, eventually got him fired in 1976 for being a “disruptive element,” Mr. Amos said in the radio interview. He was written out of Season 4, killed off in an automobile accident.

 

“I had a way of voicing my differences with the script that weren’t acceptable to the creative staff,” Mr. Amos said.

 

“Roots,” a 1977 mini-series based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Alex Haley, is a family saga that begins with Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka teenager from The Gambia who is captured there, put in chains on a ship to America and enslaved on a Southern plantation in the 1700s. It then follows his descendants from colonialism to Civil War to Jim Crow, ending with Mr. Haley in modern times.

 

Mr. Amos was cast as the older version of Kunta Kinte, while LeVar Burton played the younger one. The show racked up 37 Primetime Emmy nominations — Mr. Amos received one for outstanding lead actor — and won nine. A record-breaking 100 million viewers tuned in for the finale.

 

The show’s impact went beyond ratings.

 

“Hundreds of colleges started Roots courses,” Frank Rich, later a critic and columnist for The New York Times, wrote in Time magazine. “The National Archives in Washington found itself flooded by citizens’ requests for information about their ancestors.”

 

The series “elevated the American consciousness” about the history of slavery and its modern day impact, Mr. Amos told the New York television channel NY1 in a 2022 interview marking the 45th anniversary of “Roots.”

 

John Allen Amos Jr. was born on Dec. 27, 1939, in Newark, N.J., to John and Annabelle Amos and grew up in East Orange, N.J. John Sr. was an auto mechanic. As a boy, John Jr. dreamed of becoming a football star.

 

After playing for Colorado State University, from which he graduated, and becoming a Golden Gloves boxing champion, he was signed by the Denver Broncos, but a hamstring injury led to his release on the second day of training camp. He later signed with the Kansas City Chiefs, but again was released.

 

After being cut from a team for the second time, and armed with a bottle of Jack Daniels while soaking in a tub, Mr. Amos recalled, he wrote a poem called “The Turk,” about his failed athletic aspirations. Before he left the Chiefs’ premises, he recited the poem to other players, who were “blown away” by it, he told The Los Angeles Times. It gave him new confidence in his ability to perform, he said.

 

After a stint as a standup comic in New York on the Greenwich Village circuit, Mr. Amos found work in 1969 as a staff writer for “The Leslie Uggams Show,” a musical variety revue. He also pursued acting, making his stage debut in Los Angeles in 1971 in a production of Ron Clark and Sam Bobrick’s comedy “Norman, Is That You?”

 

He eventually landed the lead role in a production of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fences” in Albany, N.Y., and as a father figure opposite Denzel Washington in Dennis McIntyre’s police drama “Split Second.”

 

In the 1990s, Mr. Amos wrote and starred in a one-man show, about an 87-year-old man re-encountering Halley’s comet after first seeing it at age 11. (In 1999, he created the Halleys Comet Foundation to teach at-risk children how to sail on “a 68 foot vessel that looks like a pirate ship,” he told Black Film.)

 

Following the success of “Good Times” and “Roots,” Mr. Amos appeared in dozens of other TV shows well into his 80s, including “The West Wing,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “30 Rock,” “Two and a Half Men” and “The Righteous Gemstones.”

 

In film, he played Cleo McDowell, the father of Eddie Murphy’s character’s love interest in “Coming to America” (1988), and amassed numerous supporting parts, including in “Lock Up” (1989), starring Sylvester Stallone; “Die Hard 2” (1990); and “Dr. Doolittle 3” (2006). He also appeared in a slew of TV movies, such as “Disappearing Acts” (2000), starring Wesley Snipes.

 

In 2019, Mr. Amos made a cameo appearance, as himself, in the movie “Uncut Gems,” starring Adam Sandler.

 

He is survived by a daughter, Shannon, and a son, Kelly Christopher (who goes by K.C.), both from his first marriage, to Noel J. Mickelson, in 1965. He had no children from his second marriage, in 1978, to the actress Lillian Lehman. Both marriages ended in divorce.

 

In 2023, a family feud surfaced between Shannon and K.C., who accused each other publicly of neglecting to provide adequate care for their father as his health worsened. Mr. Amos dismissed the claims as “false and unmerited.” The Los Angeles Police Department closed their investigation into the matter in 2024, citing a lack of evidence.

 

In the early 2020s, Mr. Amos began working on a docuseries with his son about their relationship. It also provided a retrospective of his long career.

 

“We’re calling it ‘America’s Dad,’ because so many young men have come up to me and said, ‘Your father was my father,’” K.C. Amos told People magazine in 2023. “People of all walks of life — even guys who look like bikers with ZZ Top beards — have come up to me and said, ‘Can I give you a hug? Your father was my father, man.’ And they just want a chance to shake his hand.”

 

Kellina Moore contributed reporting.

 

16746: Questioning Interest Rates Of U.S. Banks.

 

Mediapost spotlighted a campaign from The New York Times for U.S. Bank, honoring the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance.

 

Okay, but another publication associated with The New York Times—The 1619 Project—might argue U.S. banks have not historically honored Black culture and Black wealth. And U.S. Bank is not exactly without dishonorable moments involving Blacks.

 

U.S. Bank Salutes Harlem Renaissance In ‘New York Times’ Campaign

 

By Fern Siegel

 

The 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance is honored in a new campaign from New York Times Advertising and its in-house content studio T Brand.

 

The creative, produced for U.S. Bank, is a first for the newspaper.

 

It comprises two 12-page zines that pay tribute to the underground press active during this period. It was known as a vibrant age for Blacks artists, writers and musicians and its influence extended nationwide.

 

The first zine for U.S. Bank focuses on Black wealth and entrepreneurs and debuted in the Sunday edition of The New York Times on August 18.

 

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of rich cultural artistry from 1917 to the 1930s. The zines were filled with poetry, stories, news, cultural information and political essays. Jacob Lawrence, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker were all part of that era.

 

“These visionaries paved the way for cultural pride and equality, showcasing the brilliance and beauty of Black culture to the world. The first issue, titled Legacy, focuses on the new Black wealth renaissance, exploring the innovative ways in which Black entrepreneurs and creatives are redefining success and prosperity today,” Greg Cunningham, U.S. Bank’s Chief Diversity Officer, told Agency Daily.

 

The initial issue details how Black communities are creating intergenerational wealth, such as The Bradfords, a fourth-generation family of ranchers in Oklahoma.

 

The custom typography of the new zine is called VTC Sarah and was created by Tré Seals. He was inspired by his great-great grandparents’ marriage certificate.

 

The second zine focuses on the contributions of Black artists in various fields. A paid post and FlexXL units will be displayed across The Times’ homepage.

16676: Willie Mays (1931-2024).

 

From The New York Times…

 

Willie Mays, Electrifying Ballplayer of Power and Grace, Dies at 93

 

Mays, the Say Hey Kid, was baseball’s exuberant embodiment of the complete player. Some say he was the greatest of them all.

 

By Richard Goldstein

 

Willie Mays, the spirited center fielder whose brilliance at the plate, in the field and on the basepaths for the Giants led many to call him the greatest all-around player in baseball history, died on Tuesday. He was 93.

 

At his death, which was announced by the San Francisco Giants on social media, he had been the oldest living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He died in Palo Alto in the assisted living facility he lived in, said Larry Baer, the president and chief executive of the Giants.

 

In 22 National League seasons, with the Giants in New York and San Francisco and a brief return to New York with the Mets, preceded by a 1948 stint in the Negro leagues, Mays compiled extraordinary statistics. He hit 660 career home runs and had 3,293 hits and a .301 career batting average.

 

But Mays did more than personify the complete ballplayer. An exuberant style of play and an effervescent personality made him one of the game’s — and America’s — most charismatic figures, a name that even people far afield from the baseball world recognized instantly as a national treasure.

 

Charles M. Schulz was such a fan that Mays often came up by name in Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic strip. (Asked to spell “maze” in a spelling bee, Charlie Brown ventured, “M ... A ... Y... S.”) Woody Allen’s alter ego in “Manhattan” ranked Mays No. 2 on his list of joys that made life worthwhile. (Groucho Marx was No. 1.) In 1954, the R&B group the Treniers recorded “Say Hey (the Willie Mays Song).”

 

“When I broke in, I didn’t know many people by name,” Mays once explained, “so I would just say, ‘Say, hey,’ and the writers picked that up.”

 

Mays propelled himself into the Hall of Fame with thrilling flair, his cap flying off as he chased down a drive or ran the bases.

 

“He had an open manner, friendly, vivacious, irrepressible,” the baseball writer Leonard Koppett said of the young Mays. “Whatever his private insecurities, he projected a feeling that playing ball, for its own sake, was the most wonderful thing in the world.”

 

And New York embraced this son of Alabama, putting him on a pedestal with two others who ruled the city’s center fields in an era when its teams dominated baseball. The Yankees had Mickey Mantle, the Brooklyn Dodgers had Duke Snider, and the Giants had No. 24, and a city not known for equanimity loved to argue about which team’s slugger reigned supreme.

 

Mays captured the ardor of baseball fans at a time when Black players were still emerging in the major leagues and segregation remained untrammeled in his native South. He was revered in Black neighborhoods, especially in Harlem, where he played stickball with youngsters outside his apartment on St. Nicholas Place — not far from the Polo Grounds, where the Giants played — and he was treated like visiting royalty at the original Red Rooster, one of Harlem’s most popular restaurants in his day.

 

President Barack Obama took Mays with him on his flight to the 2009 All-Star Game in St. Louis, telling him that if it hadn’t been for the changes in attitude that African-American figures like Mays and Jackie Robinson fostered, “I’m not sure that I would get elected to the White House.”

 

Mays and Yogi Berra, who was cited posthumously, were among 17 Americans whom Mr. Obama honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, at a White House ceremony in November 2015.

 

Power and Speed

 

Mays played center field with daring and grace, his basket catches made at the hip, his throws embodying power and precision. His over-the-shoulder snare of a drive to deepest center field in the Polo Grounds during the 1954 World Series against the Cleveland Indians — followed by a sensational throw to second base — is remembered simply as “The Catch.”

 

His frame seemed ordinary at first glance — 5 feet 11 inches and 180 pounds or so — but he had unusually large hands and outstanding peripheral vision that complemented his speed in running down balls. And he was all steel, his back exceptionally muscular.

 

Branch Rickey, the executive who helped break the modern major leagues’ color barrier by signing Robinson to the Dodgers, evoked the young Mays in his book “The American Diamond” (1965), recalling him “propelling the ball in one electric flash off the Polo Grounds scoreboard on the face of the upper deck in left field for a home run.”

 

“The ball got up there so fast, it was incredible,” Rickey wrote. “Like a pistol shot, it would crash off the tin and fall to the grass below.”

 

Mays became a hero out west as well after the Giants and the Dodgers decamped for California in 1958. Though he received a tepid reception from San Francisco fans at first, he flourished playing for them despite the high winds and cold nights at Candlestick Park. When the Giants moved to their current ballpark in 2001, they unveiled a nine-foot-high bronze statue of Mays. The park’s address: 24 Willie Mays Plaza.

 

Mays’s electrifying play, and the immensity of his talents, made statistics seem lifeless. Nonetheless, his achievements in the record books were extraordinary.

 

He drove in more than 100 runs in 10 different seasons and scored more than 100 runs in 12 consecutive years.

 

His 7,112 putouts as an outfielder rank No. 1 in major league history (he had 657 more playing first base), and he won 12 Gold Glove awards beginning in 1957, the year the honors were first bestowed.

 

His 660 home runs are sixth all time, behind Barry Bonds’s 762, Hank Aaron’s 755, Babe Ruth’s 714, Alex Rodriguez’s 696 and Albert Pujols’s 703.

 

His 2,068 runs scored put him seventh on the career list, and his 1,909 runs batted are 12th.

 

His 3,293 hits are No. 13.

 

He stole 338 bases at a time when the running game was not especially favored.

 

He played in 150 or more games in 13 consecutive seasons.

 

In December 2020, Major League Baseball announced that the seven Negro leagues that operated between 1920 and 1948 would gain major league status. In accord with that, Mays’s statistical totals with the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League have been added to his major league totals.

 

Mays was the National League rookie of the year in 1951 and was named Most Valuable Player in 1954 and 1965. He played on four pennant-winning teams (the Giants in 1951, ’54 and ’62 and the Mets in 1973), but only one World Series champion, the 1954 Giants, who swept the Indians. He was selected for 24 All-Star Games and was the M.V.P. of the game in 1963 and 1968.

 

An Associated Press poll of athletes, writers and historians in 1999 voted Mays baseball’s second-greatest figure, behind Babe Ruth.

 

“Willie could do everything from the day he joined the Giants,” Leo Durocher, his manager during most of his years at the Polo Grounds, said when Mays was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year of eligibility. “He never had to be taught a thing. The only other player who could do it all was Joe DiMaggio.”

 

But even DiMaggio bowed to Mays.

 

“Willie Mays is the closest to being perfect I’ve ever seen,” he said.

 

‘You’re Going to Be a Ballplayer’

 

Willie Howard Mays Jr. was born on May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Ala., near Birmingham. His parents were unmarried teenagers.

 

His father was said to have been named for President William Howard Taft at a time when Taft’s Republican party was considered more sympathetic to the needs of Black people than the Democrats. A steelworker and later a Pullman porter, Willie Sr. was known as Cat, for his graceful play in semipro baseball.

 

Willie’s mother, Annie Satterwhite, left the family when he was a baby and settled in Birmingham. She married there and had 10 children, but Mays kept in touch with her into his major league playing days.

 

His father moved with him to Fairfield, another Birmingham suburb, when Willie was still young and, with his mother’s two sisters, helped raise him.

 

Mays became an all-around athlete at Fairfield Industrial High School, where he was taught by Angelena Rice, the mother of Condoleezza Rice, the future secretary of state. In her memoir “Extraordinary, Ordinary People” (2010), Ms. Rice wrote that Mays had remembered her mother telling him: “You’re going to be a ballplayer. If you need to leave a little early for practice, you let me know.”

 

When Mays joined the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League in 1948; DiMaggio was his idol.

 

“When we were kids in the South, we would always pick one guy to emulate,” Mays told Bob Herbert of The New York Times in 2000. “Ted Williams was the best hitter, but I picked Joe to pattern myself after because he was such a great all-around player.”

 

Mays was signed in 1950 by a New York Giants scout, Ed Montague, who spotted him while scouting another player on the Black Barons. Mays hit .353 for the Giants’ Trenton team that year.

 

At the time, he was the only Black player in the Interstate League, and he endured taunts. In his Hall of Fame induction speech at Cooperstown, N.Y., he recalled one episode in Hagerstown, Md.

 

“The first night, I hit two home runs and a triple,” he said. “Next night, I hit two home runs and a double. On the loudspeaker, now, they say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we know you don’t like that kid playing center field, but please do not bother him again because he’s killing us.’”

 

He continued: “I went there on a Friday, they were calling me all kinds of names. By Sunday, they were cheering. And to me, I had won them over.”

 

Mays was batting .477 for the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association when he was called up by the Giants in May 1951. It was only four years after Robinson had become a Dodger, and there were few Black players in the majors, although the Giants had four when Mays joined them: Monte Irvin, the star outfielder; Hank Thompson, their third baseman; Ray Noble, a backup catcher; and Artie Wilson, an infielder, who was sent to the minors to make room for Mays.

 

Black and white teammates remained apart early in Mays’s career. “For a while we couldn’t stay in the same hotels,” he said. “We’d get to Chicago, we’d get off on the South Side, they’d get off on the North Side.”

 

Mays made his debut on May 25, 1951, going without a hit in five at-bats against the Phillies in Philadelphia. He was 0 for 12 in a three-game series before the Giants returned home. But on Monday night, May 28, at the Polo Grounds, he connected off the future Hall of Fame left-hander Warren Spahn of the Boston Braves for his first major league hit, a towering home run to left field in the first inning.

 

From the start, Durocher saw greatness in Mays.

 

“The word is magnetism,” Durocher said in his autobiography “Nice Guys Finish Last” (1975, with Ed Linn). “A personal magnetism which infects everybody around them with the feeling that this is the man who will carry them to victory.”

 

Rookie of the Year

 

But Mays struggled at the plate through the spring of 1951, and at one point he tearfully told Durocher that he couldn’t hit big league pitching. Durocher told him that he was the best center fielder he had ever seen and assured him that he would remain in the lineup.

 

The Giants staged a storied revival that season, coming from 13½ games behind the Dodgers in mid-August to force the playoff series that they won in Game 3 on Bobby Thomson’s three-run homer off Ralph Branca in the ninth inning — the “shot heard ’round the world.” Thomson’s drive at the Polo Grounds came with runners on second and third and one out. When he connected, Mays was in the on-deck circle.

 

When the Giants faced the Yankees in the World Series, DiMaggio was playing center field for the last time, and Mantle, Mays’s fellow rookie, was in right field. The Yankees won the Series in six games, but Mays was on his way to stardom. In winning the N.L. rookie of the year honors, he batted .274 and hit 20 home runs.

 

After playing in 34 games in the 1952 season, Mays entered the Army and played baseball at Fort Eustis, Va. But in 1954 he was back in the Giants’ lineup and captured the batting title with a .345 average, hit 41 home runs and drove in 110 runs, all while leading the team to another pennant and a World Series date with the Indians, who had set an American League record by winning 111 games that year.

 

In the opening game, on the afternoon of Sept. 29, the score was tied 2-2 with nobody out in the eighth inning and two Indians on base, Larry Doby on second and Al Rosen on first. Durocher had brought in the left-handed Don Liddle to relieve Sal Maglie, and he was facing the lefty-batting Vic Wertz.

 

Wertz drove the first pitch just to the right of dead center field. Racing toward the high green boarding with his back to home plate, Mays caught the ball over his left shoulder some 450 feet away. He cupped it like a football player catching a pass, then whirled and fired to second base, his cap flying off. The throw, as spectacular as the catch, kept Rosen on first while Doby tagged and went to third.

 

The Indians never scored in the inning, and the little-known outfielder Dusty Rhodes hit a three-run pinch-hit homer in the 10th to give the Giants a 5-2 triumph. They went on to win the Series in four straight games.

 

“The Catch” was only one spectacular play by Mays. Another came at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh in his rookie season, off a deep drive hit by the Pirates’ Rocky Nelson.

 

Irvin, the Giants’ future Hall of Fame left fielder, told of the moment in “Mays, Mantle, and Snider: A Celebration” (1987), by Donald Honig.

 

“Willie whirled around and took off,” Irvin said. “At the last second he saw he couldn’t get his glove across his body in time to make the catch, so he caught it in his bare hand. Leo was flabbergasted. We all were. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.”

 

Mays hit 51 home runs in 1955, Durocher’s last season as the Giants’ manager. In 1956, playing under Bill Rigney, Mays led the league in stolen bases with 40, the first of his four consecutive stolen-base titles.

 

Despite Mays’s heroics, the Giants were a fading team by then, and after the 1957 season they moved to San Francisco as the Dodgers went to Los Angeles.

 

In his first year in San Francisco, Mays batted .347 with 29 home runs, having been asked by Rigney, his manager, to hit for average rather than go for homers. Moreover, the shallow center field at Seals Stadium kept Mays from turning the kind of spectacular plays he had fashioned at the cavernous Polo Grounds. Giants fans voted Orlando Cepeda, the slugging rookie first baseman, the team’s most valuable player.

 

A Black Family Moved In

 

Mays even had trouble purchasing a home in a fashionable San Francisco neighborhood, when neighbors complained that property values would decline if a Black family moved in. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page article on the issue, and Mayor George Christopher offered to let Mays and his wife live at his home temporarily if they continued to be rebuffed. With the city facing embarrassment, the owner of the home finally went ahead with the deal.

 

After two years at Seals Stadium, the Giants moved to the newly built, and ever windy, Candlestick Park. Mays found that he had to spread hot oil on his body to combat the wind chill. Those winds kept many a drive in the park.

 

“Playing in Candlestick cost me 10, 12 homers a year,” Mays once said. “I’ve always thought it cost me the opportunity to break Babe Ruth’s record.”

 

But Mays thrived in San Francisco. In 1959, he began eight straight seasons in which he drove in at least 100 runs. On April 30, 1961, he hit four home runs against the Braves at Milwaukee’s County Stadium; the following June 29, he hit three in a game at Philadelphia.

 

On July 24, Mays returned to play in New York for the first time since the Giants had moved to San Francisco, in an exhibition game at Yankee Stadium. A crowd of some 50,000 reserved its biggest cheers for Mays.

 

The Giants were regaining their New York swagger. In 1962, with Mays slugging 49 home runs, they won the pennant in a three-game playoff against the Dodgers, then lost to the Yankees in seven games in the World Series.

 

Mays hit 52 home runs in 1965, joining Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Ralph Kiner and Mantle as the only players at that time to have hit at least 50 in a single season more than once. On May 4, 1966, Mays surpassed the National League record for home runs, 511, set by the former Giant outfielder and manager Mel Ott.

 

As he approached age 40, Mays was still capable of outstanding play, but he had changed.

 

“Willie, as he grew older, became more withdrawn and suspicious, more cautious, more vulnerable and with plenty of reason,” Leonard Koppett wrote in “A Thinking Man’s Guide to Baseball” (1967). “Life, both personally and professionally, became more complicated for him, and he had his share of sorrow.” After marrying and adopting a child, Mays “went through a painful divorce,” Koppett wrote.

 

On May 11, 1972, with the Giants’ attendance in decline, Horace Stoneham, the team’s longtime owner, wanting to provide Mays with longtime financial security, sent him to the Mets in a trade for a minor league pitcher, Charlie Williams.

 

Mays was in the next to last year of a two-year contract paying him $165,000 a season (the equivalent of a little more than $1 million today). When the deal was made, Joan Payson, the Mets’ president, who had been a stockholder in the New York Giants and was a fan of Mays, guaranteed him a 10-year, $50,000 annual payment apart from his baseball salary. He was to be a good-will ambassador and part-time instructor after his playing days ended.

 

Mays was hitting .167 when he joined the Mets, but on May 14, in his first game with them, before a Sunday crowd of some 35,000 at Shea Stadium, he beat the Giants with a home run. Yet he was 41, and his skills had eroded. The next year he was hampered by swollen knees, an inflamed shoulder and bruised ribs, and on Sept. 20, 1973, he announced his retirement.

 

A Ground-Out, and It’s Over

 

Mays was honored at Shea five days later, but there was still a finale in the spotlight. The Mets won the pennant, and Mays played in the World Series against the Oakland A’s. His last appearance was in Game 3, when he grounded to shortstop as a pinch-hitter for the relief pitcher Tug McGraw.

 

But what was envisioned as a long-term association with the Mets soured. Mays had little interest in instructional or promotional work. “Not playing was eating me up,” he said. “I couldn’t watch the games.”

 

Mays’s ties to the Mets ended in October 1979, after he signed a 10-year deal at an annual salary of $100,000 to represent Bally, the Atlantic City hotel and casino company. Bowie Kuhn, the baseball commissioner, told Mays that he could not hold a job with a company that promoted gambling and also retain a salaried position in baseball. Mays decided to keep the Bally job and forgo the remainder of his $50,000 yearly payments from the Mets, which were to have continued through 1981. Kuhn suspended him from baseball.

 

Kuhn imposed a similar ban on Mantle in 1983 when he took a post with the Claridge casino and hotel in Atlantic City. But in March 1985, Peter Ueberroth, Kuhn’s successor, revoked both bans, and Mays continued to work for Bally while becoming a part-time hitting coach for the Giants. In the late 1980s, the Giants gave Mays a lifetime contract as a front-office consultant.

 

He remained the Say Hey Kid, his vanity license plates proclaiming “Say Hey.”

 

In 2004, the Giants star Barry Bonds tied Mays’s career home run mark of 660 on April 12 at San Francisco against the Milwaukee Brewers. Bonds was Mays’s godson and the son of his former teammate Bobby Bonds. Mays met Barry Bonds near the Giants’ dugout and presented him with a torch he had received when he jogged a leg in the 2002 Olympic torch run. It was embellished with diamonds forming the numbers 660 and 661.

 

When the Mets held an old-timers’ event at CitiField in August, 2022, they retired Mays’s No. 24 jersey number and presented a tribute video to him along with a message from Mays, who could not attend, having undergone a hip replacement a few months earlier. Joan Payson, who wanted Mays to finish his career in New York City, had promised that the Mets would retire his number. But when she died in 1975, the promise had been unfulfilled.

 

Mays, who lived in Atherton, Calif., before moving to Palo Alto, is survived by his son, Michael, from his first marriage, to Marghuerite Chapman, which ended in divorce. His second wife, Mae Louise (Allen) Mays, with whom he had no children, died in 2013.

 

When the San Francisco Giants won the 1962 National League pennant, Mays was in the lead car of their victory parade. He also rode in the Giants’ parades following their 2010, 2012 and 2014 World Series victories and accompanied the players to White House receptions hosted by President Obama after each of those victories. At his death, he was listed by the Giants as a special assistant to the president and chief executive.

 

The ‘Best’

 

Mays largely stayed away from controversy and seldom spoke about racial issues, although he went on the radio in 1966 to help quell a riot in San Francisco after a Black teenager had been shot by a white police officer. During the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Jackie Robinson criticized him for not drawing on his stature to confront the issues of the day. In the spring of 1968, Mays called a news conference to respond.

 

“People do things in different ways,” he was quoted as saying by James S. Hirsch in “Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend” (2010). “I can’t, for instance, go out and picket. I can’t stand on a soapbox and preach. I believe understanding is the important thing. In my talks to kids, I’ve tried to get that message across. It makes no difference whether you are Black or white because we are all God’s children fighting for the same cause.”

 

Mays evoked the image of a “natural,” a superb athlete who needed to do little to hone his skills. But that was not the case.

 

“I studied the pitchers,” Mays told the baseball writer Roger Kahn in “Memories of Summer.” (2004). “I knew what every single pitcher’s best pitch was. You wonder why? Because in a tight spot, with the game on the line, what’s the pitcher going to throw? His best pitch. Curve, slider, fastball, whatever. His best pitch. Because I’d studied and memorized that, I’d be ready.”

 

When he was selected for the Hall of Fame, Mays was asked to name the best ballplayer he had ever seen.

 

“I think I was the best ballplayer I’ve ever seen,” he replied. “I feel nobody in the world could do what I could do on a baseball field.”