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:

    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 (1803–1882)

    Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    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)

    It is not merely the likeness which is precious ... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing ... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think—and it is not at all monstrous in me to say ... that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist’s work ever produced.
    Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)