Videos

American Experience: Roberto Clemente

60 minutes, produced 2008 by WGBH.

Puerto Rican athlete, Roberto Clemente, was a professional baseball player. At times he was an outspoken and controversial player. He helped to shatter stereotypes about Latinos and he paved the way for the next generation of Latin American and Caribbean ballplayers.

Beginning his baseball career in Puerto Rico, Clemente made an unprecedented leap into Major League Baseball, playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates for 17 years. He was the first Latino selected to baseball's Hall of Fame. Clemente was a complex, sophisticated athlete ahead of his time.

The film producer Bernardo Ruiz sets Clemente's life against the background of the racially segregated America of the 1950s and '60s, and shows that Clemente was just as determined in making a difference outside the sport as he was in stretching a single into a double. Roberto Clemente was not the first Latino to play in the majors, but he was the first Latino star to have a clear and lasting impact on the game of baseball. Clemente was smart and politically engaged, marching in the street protests of the 1960s, and meeting with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when the civil rights leader visited Puerto Rico. Clemente was a bona-fide humanitarian and activist. "If you have the chance to make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't," he famously said, "you are wasting your time on earth."

He was involved in charity work both in Puerto Rico and other Latin American countries, often delivering baseball equipment and food to them. He died in an aviation accident in 1972 while en route to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame after his death, becoming the first Latin American selected.

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