Except for a fortunate few who got to see Willie Mays play in person, most Americans of my generation fell under his almost mesmerizing spell while watching him on TV.

Mays’ unmatched skills—and the unaffected, nearly childlike exuberance he brought to the game of baseball—quickly won a multitude of white fans, even in the South where I grew up amid angry calls for “massive resistance” to school desegregation. It’s fair to ask whether Mays could have managed this so readily had his early career not coincided so closely with the emergence of television as a national medium. Mays, his biographer James Hirsch explained, “always saw himself as an entertainer first,” and television “gave him the ideal stage” for the amazing things he did—on the field and later off of it, as a sought-after guest on popular programs from Today and The Tonight Show to The Donna Reed Show and Bewitched. A surge in TV ownership, from 9% of American households in 1950 to 65% in 1955, gave millions of Americans their first chance to see the miracle of Willie Mays with their own eyes. What they saw on their screens helped to blur the color line at a crucial point in our history.

Until the mid-1950s, most Americans could find live baseball only on their radios. The 1947 World Series pitting the New York Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers and featuring MLB’s first Black player, Jackie Robinson, was the first to be televised—but only in Washington, D.C., and three select urban markets in New York and Pennsylvania. Only one in 10 American homes had a TV in May 1951, when Willie Mays made his New York Giants debut. By that point, 16 black players had already appeared in a major league uniform and more than a third of teams were integrated. The color barrier had been breached, but the great majority of fans still couldn’t see the results for themselves.

This was true especially in rural areas. Scarcely 5% of households in the rural Georgia of my youth had television sets in 1950. Everyone knew that Jackie Robinson was Black—but radio broadcasters rarely identified any players by race.

One of my great uncles was known both for his love of baseball and his hostility to Black people. Family legend has it that listening to Giants games on the radio left him quite a fan of outfielder Monte Irvin, one of two Black players who joined the team in 1948. When a mischievous family member asked him if he realized Irvin was Black, the old man flew into an apoplectic rage at the broadcasters, for concealing this critical information from him.

This was but one of many tragicomic absurdities wrought by the Jim Crow mindset in the South of my boyhood. Still, the episode foreshadowed the importance of television in allowing white Southerners to see the reality of racial integration in their most beloved sport.

Seeing integration didn’t mean all whites in the South or elsewhere were ready to accept it, but Willie Mays was about to make that easier for many of them. Giants fans sensed his enormous potential in 1951, but he missed the next two seasons due to military service. By the time he returned in 1954 to bat .333 and hit 41 home runs, fans across the country could take in his dazzling feats at the plate, in the field, and on the basepaths courtesy of ABC’s “Game of the Week.” Many of the record 23 million viewers who watched NBC’s broadcast of the 1954 World Series between the Giants and the Cleveland Indians were seeing Willie Mays play for the first time. He did not disappoint.

In Game 1, after a long rundown and over-the-shoulder-grab of a blistering Vic Wertz liner, Mays pivoted on a dime and made a laser-beam throw to the infield to hold a Cleveland runner at third. All of this made for a stunning visual that was vintage Mays, down to losing his cap and coming to rest sprawled on the outfield grass. What would soon be known simply as “The Catch” became one of the most replayed film clips in sports history.

Mays thought he had made better catches, including a couple of barehanded grabs during his rookie season. But with millions watching, “The Catch” made the 23-year-old Mays an instant—and enduring—legend. It also marked him as the ideal athlete for the television age: The things Mays did had to be seen to be fully appreciated. Radio play-by-play simply could not do justice to his on-field artistry. Al Helfer, the veteran calling the 1954 series for the Mutual Radio Network, could only describe Mays’ play on the Wertz drive as “a beautiful, beautiful catch.”

I did not see “The Catch.” It would be another year before my parents could afford even the cheapest Emerson TV. I was only 8, but I had already listened to enough Giants games on the radio and devoured enough box scores to qualify as a prepubescent Willie Mays groupie. Stuck out in the country with no siblings to distract me, I rarely missed the CBS “Game of the Week,” anchored by the impressible Dizzy Dean and his broadcast partner Buddy Blattner. Chances were good that I’d be tuned in regardless of the matchup, but I was certain to be glued to the screen whenever the Giants were playing.

In the rural South of that era a little white boy who openly sang the praises of any Black man was enough of a rarity to attract some teasing from friends. But my mother loved Willie too, and other adults seemed to assume that my ardor would cool as I grew older and wiser to the racial proscriptions of the “Southern way of life.” That would not happen: My shame at boarding a school bus while the Black kids who lived nearby trudged a mile or so up the road to their weathered two-room schoolhouse assured that much.

Though few of Mays’ fellow Black players seemed to begrudge his fame and stature, some challenged him to make better use of the bully pulpit they afforded him. As the first Black major leaguer in 1947, Jackie Robinson had run the gauntlet of racial abuse, both physical and psychological. He redirected some of his smoldering resentment at Black players who did not join him in openly attacking racial discrimination. Mays’ enormous popularity made his reluctance to mount the soapbox even less forgivable to Robinson, who stopped just short of calling him an ”Uncle Tom,” but reminded Mays of how much he had benefited from the “battles fought by others” before him, and accused him of turning his back on the suffering inflicted on Blacks during his boyhood in Birmingham.

Neither charge was accurate, nor fair. Willie Mays needed no reminder of what Blacks were up against in Birmingham.  He got a very personal taste of that in October 1951 when Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s notoriously racist police commissioner, waited until the very last second to pull the permit for a long-planned “Willie Mays Day” parade honoring the National League’s Rookie of the Year. He was the biggest star in baseball 12 years later when a Birmingham TV station refused to air a documentary on him.

Robinson surely had it worse, but Mays was no stranger to the segregated restaurants, hotels, and buses that still awaited Black players in some major league cities well into the 1950s. Even after the Giants moved to San Francisco, Mays had to stubbornly stand his ground until the owner who initially refused to sell him the house he wanted in a white neighborhood finally relented.

Still, rather than attack discrimination publicly, he pursued Black advancement in his own understated and indirect way, steering younger Black and Latino players—from Willie McCovey to Bobby and Barry Bonds—clear of pitfalls that might derail their careers.

Biographer Hirsch suggests that seeing Mays become an overnight sensation prompted other franchises to add Black players to their rosters. Three years after he joined the Giants, the number of teams with Black players had doubled, from six to 12. The boyish, down-to earth superhero often seen playing stickball with Black kids in the streets of Harlem might not have been grooming future activists, but he sent a message that humility and openness were neither signs of weakness nor detriments to getting ahead. Former president Barack Obama thought Mays’ easy rapport with white fans had “change[d]  racial attitudes in a way political speeches never could” and credited Mays’ exemplary career for allowing “someone like me to even consider running for president.”

Bull Connor was not there to thwart last month’s planned three-day salute to the old Negro leagues at Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field, which was to conclude with a game between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals on June 20. Yet the real highlight of the affair promised to be an expected appearance by Mays, whose professional baseball career began at Rickwood in 1948 with the Birmingham Black Barons.

A heartbroken Mays revealed on June 17 that his health would not allow him to be there. When he died the next day, the salute to the Negro leagues blossomed into a full-blown celebration of his life and career.

But the most fitting tribute came from the 2.4 million television viewers, a huge audience for a Thursday night game, who tuned in to bid Willie Mays farewell through the medium that first brought his magic into the lives of so many Americans, including my own.