Negro Leagues Baseball Players Association
He retired in the mid-1980s, worked briefly as a security guard and then became part of the new Negro League Baseball Players Association. As president since the mid-1990s, Fields organized autograph shows and held benefit auctions to raise money for many of his former colleagues from the diamond. He also wrote a memoir, My Life in the Negro Leagues (1992).
Wilmer Fields died of a heart ailment at his home in Manassas, Virginia. He was 81.
Read more about this topic: Wilmer Fields
Famous quotes containing the words negro, leagues, baseball, players and/or association:
“It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summond am to a tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide worlds end:
Methinks it is no journey.”
—Unknown. Tom o Bedlams Song (l. 5760)
“Ive gradually risen from lower-class background to lower-class foreground.”
—Marvin Cohen, U.S. author and humorist. Baseball the Beautiful, Links Books (1970)
“I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed August 1789, published September 1791)