Willie May: ‘We need to find and support the “missing millions”’
By 
Rebecca Trager2025-04-17T13:30:00
The analytical chemist on growing up Black in Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s and his journey through NIST, academia and the AAAS presidency
I grew up in the projects of Birmingham, Alabama, thinking that I wanted to be a baseball player like my homeboy namesake Willie Mays. In fact, my high school baseball coach was Willie’s best friend, and they had played on the Birmingham Black Barons together [a ‘Negro League’ baseball team that played from around 1920 until 1960].
When Willie would come to Birmingham in the early 1960s … he would come and watch our baseball practice, and he gave me one of his uniforms at that time. I weighed all of 130 pounds, so it was too big for me. But, I played baseball my freshman year in college and being the little hot dog that I was, I would show it off by practicing in it.