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 doesnt do good to open doors for someone who doesnt have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“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)
“People stress the violence. Thats the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it theres a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. Theres a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, theres a satisfaction to the game that cant be duplicated. Theres a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“... a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself cannot stand upon it.”
—Susan B. Anthony (18201906)