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:

    The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
    —W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)

    By a knight of ghosts and shadows
    I summon’d am to a tourney
    Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end:
    Methinks it is no journey.
    —Unknown. Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song (l. 57–60)

    Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.
    Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)

    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)

    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)