This week, San Francisco is united in honoring the memory of the late, great Willie Mays. But a historian sat down with KPIX to shed light on the baseball legend's arrival to the city - and how he overcame it.'The magnitude of what he accomplished,' said historian John William Templeton with an error of shock. 'I just came from the stadium.' Templeton had just come from the growing memorial to Willie Mays, a man who now claims his own corner in San Francisco.
When Mays arrived in San Francisco, he was landing in a largely segregated city, just ahead of its largest civil rights demonstrations, like in 1964 when thousands of protesters filled auto showrooms on Van Ness, ultimately pushing city business away from nondiscriminatory hiring practices. 'Well, that was five years after he came here,' Templeton said of the Mays era in San Francisco.