ON SEPTEMBER 15, every year since 2002, Major League Baseball celebrates the life of Roberto Clemente.

Hailing from Puerto Rico and making his way into the major leagues as a right fielder with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Clemente was friends with Martin Luther King Jr and was himself a civil rights activist within the sport of baseball and outside it.

He supported local initiatives run by the Marxist–Leninist Black Panther Party in Pennsylvania such as the Free Breakfast for School Children Programme, the People’s Free Food Programme, and community health clinics.

Not all of this is mentioned on September 15, which is known in the league as Roberto Clemente Day and also marks the start of Hispanic Heritage Month in the US, but it is important that at least some of it is.

Clemente died in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve 1972 while flying to Nicaragua to personally deliver aid to the country after an earthquake near the country’s capital Managua killed up to 11,000 people.

His death said a lot about his life. It was a journey he felt he had to make. A couple of months earlier Clemente had coached the Puerto Rico team at the 1972 Baseball World Cup in Nicaragua.

His desire to personally deliver the aid to survivors and help with the relief effort came amid reports that international aid was being withheld by the US-aligned Somoza dictatorship in the Central American country that Clemente had previously spoken out against.

There were also suspicions that the provision of aid was not the primary motive of the US’s involvement in Nicaragua at this time.

In his book, A People’s History of Sports, sportswriter Dave Zirin wrote: “Thanks to Nixon’s elaborate obsession with audio technology, we know that his immediate concern after the earthquake was not the horrific loss of life in Nicaragua but rather that the country would ‘go communist’ in the ensuing chaos.

“Instead of providing relief, he sent in paratroopers to help the Nicaraguan National Guard keep order. Somoza had issued shoot-to-kill orders against anyone foraging for food, but not before shutting down all the service agencies that were feeding people.”

---

Clemente began his major league career with the Pirates in 1955, 10 years after Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers and seven years after Robinson made his first appearance in MLB and in doing so breaking the baseball colour line as the league’s first black player.

Though Robinson had blazed a trail for black players to play in the league, they still faced discrimination in baseball and in wider society as they travelled around the country with their teams.

Clemente’s character and his own experience as a player arriving in the US leagues from Puerto Rico saw him become a natural advocate for the rights of black and foreign players within the league and for minorities in the US as a whole.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica states that: “As an Afro-Latino, Clemente was also subjected to the double discrimination of being a foreigner and being black in a racially segregated society.”

Wells Twombly wrote in the San Francisco Examiner in 1973 that: “It was [Clemente's] opinion that newspapermen had a stringent pecking order. 

“They regarded baseball players in the following way: On top were the American whites, followed rapidly by the American blacks. Next were the Latin whites. Way down at the bottom were the Latin blacks. They were nobody’s children.”

Clemente was also discriminated against in some media for his Spanish accent, but this only spurred him on to make sure Spanish speakers were represented. After the Pirates’ 1971 World Series victory he began a TV interview by speaking to his family in Spanish.

The Society for American Baseball Research notes that this was the first time anybody had spoken Spanish on a nationally televised English-speaking broadcast in the United States.

“After Clemente died, he was martyred in Pittsburgh and everyone said they loved him, but that was not the case when he was alive,” Clemente biographer David Maraniss told the New York Times in 2011.

“He had to overcome a lot in terms of race and language in Pittsburgh, and did not really win the city over completely until he died.”

Those looking to dig deeper into Clemente’s life and work will usually encounter the media promoted during Roberto Clemente Day, but digging deeper into his work as a civil rights campaigner can be more difficult.

This is partly because Clemente himself didn’t shout about it. Though he was vocal on the issues themselves, there were no staged media promotions or photo ops of his individual community work. He preached with passion and conviction but practised with minimal fuss or fanfare.

This obfuscation of his activism is also partly due to forms of censorship in the US. Many who have looked to tell the story of the more revolutionary aspect of Clemente’s life have found their work pushed aside.

Most notably, a picturebook biography of Clemente was among the books removed from school libraries in Florida following laws signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2023.

The book in question was Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates, by Jonah Winter and Raul Colon, and aimed to raise issues of social and racial justice using Clemente’s life story.

The move sought to cover up a national history of systemic racism by hiding any books that highlighted it. In doing so it omitted important historical stories such as Clemente’s and erased their involvement in fighting for civil rights.

All of this brings to mind a passage from Lenin’s The State And Revolution.

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander,” Lenin wrote.

“After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”

A Clemente obituary in the newspaper of the Black Panther Party noted that: “It is ironic that the profession in which he achieved ‘legendary’ [status] knew him the least.

“Roberto Clemente did not, as the Commissioner of Baseball maintained, ‘Have about him a touch of royalty.’ Roberto Clemente was simply a man, a man who strove to achieve his dream of peace and justice for oppressed people throughout the world.”

Clemente was an active campaigner for equality and civil rights, from his Pittsburgh Pirates team and the MLB as a whole, to nationally in the US and internationally among his native Puerto Ricans or in Nicaragua.

One of his closest friends in baseball, Luis Mayoral, once recalled Clemente as saying: “No person is better than me, but I am not better than any person.”

It is important that Roberto Clemente Day exists and a credit to MLB that it does, but it's also important that the context around his life and work is provided alongside it.