Wilmer Fields - Negro Leagues Baseball Players Association

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:

    Had she been worth the blood, the cramped cries, the little stuttering bravado,
    The gradual dulling of those Negro eyes,
    The sudden, overwhelming little-boyness in that barn?
    Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)

    Good news about someone never gets past the door, but bad news will travel a thousand leagues away.
    Chinese proverb.

    One of the baseball-team owners approached me and said: “If you become baseball commissioner, you’re going to have to deal with 28 big egos,” and I said, “For me, that’s a 72% reduction.”
    George Mitchell (b. 1933)

    Will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them
    be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    In this great association we know no North, no South, no East, no West. This has been our pride for all these years. We have no political party. We never have inquired what anybody’s religion is. All we ever have asked is simply, “Do you believe in perfect equality for women?” This is the one article in our creed.
    Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)