In his autobiography, I Had a Hammer, baseball’s all-time homerun king tells of a time in his life when he was treated as anything but royalty.

As a shy teenager from Mobile, Ala., Henry Aaron was among the first African-American baseball players to integrate the South Atlantic League in 1953. He had signed with the then-Boston Braves after playing for the Indianapolis Clowns of the old Negro League.

Aaron’s first assignment was with the Braves’ minor league club in Jacksonville, Fla. As he and two black teammates, Horace Garner and Felix Mantilla, toured the Southern towns of the “Sally League,” they constantly faced abusive taunting and racially charged threat.

After the ballgames, Aaron and his two friends would graciously leave the hostility of personal racism only to encounter the structures of institutional racism.

The bus would take the team to a nearby restaurant where Aaron, Garner and Mantilla were not welcome. Mantilla had grown up in Puerto Rico and, unlike Aaron and Garner, was unaccustomed to such treatment.

While their white teammates enjoyed dinner together each night, Aaron and his two friends would eat hamburgers that had been brought out to the bus.

“We used to joke that the cows turned and ran when they saw us coming,” recalls Aaron, using humor to deflect the pain. “We ate so many hamburgers.”

The injustices continued after dinner. The bus driver would deliver the white players to the team hotel.

“Horace, Felix and I would sit in the bus as the rest of our teammates filed out,” Aaron adds.

 Then the bus driver would take Aaron, Garner and Mantilla to stay with families in a black neighborhood. There they were admired for their athletic success and widely embraced.

Hammering Hank Aaron’s story of tragic and sinful disrespect for persons made in the image of God is certainly not isolated. It could be told by thousands of lesser known but equally harmed persons.

The good news is, life has gotten better for Aaron and other African Americans over the past 50 years ago. He now enjoys dinner in the finest restaurants and owns a BMW automobile dealership a few miles south of the spot in Atlanta where he made baseball history in 1974.

The danger in 2003, however, is to think that race relations and racial equality are better than they really are. We need to keep our attention on both forms of the disease of racism that is far from eradication.

The first is an individual attitude of racial superiority that can easily lead to abusive actions. One doesn’t have to listen in on many conversations to know that racism still rests in many hearts. The second is the creation and support of social and institutional structures that treat persons differently depending on their race.

When racist attitudes and power meet, an explosive alliance is created. The results can be as devastating as the Jim Crow Laws that faced Aaron and other African Americans or even the destruction of millions of Jews by the Nazi regime.

While visiting family in the northwest corner of Georgia over the Christmas holidays, I took our two daughters, ages 4 and 9, to what was once the center of government for the Cherokee Nation. They were fascinated by Native American culture and surprised by the sophistication of these gifted, literate people who once lived at New Echota.

What they could not comprehend, however, was how church-going white Americans could systematically — with approval of the U.S. President — remove these people from their land and march them westward with little chance of survival in the 1830s.

After viewing a brief historical film at the museum, our 4-year-old remarked to my surprise: “That wasn’t right for them to take people away from their families.”

I am fully convinced that racism is not innate, but is taught. The challenge and responsibility of Christian individuals and the church is to teach the alternative — that is, the perspective of God who judges us not by our outside appearance but by the condition of our hearts.