Heartbreaking news: Reberto Clemente lost his entire family in a collapsed apartment

While Clemente amassed a mountain of impressive statistics during his career, he was often mocked by the print media in the United States for his heavy Spanish accent. As an Afro-Latino, Clemente was also subjected to the double discriminations of being a foreigner and being Black in a racially segregated society. Although the media tried to call him “Bob” or “Bobby” and many of his baseball cards use “Bob,” Clemente explicitly rejected those nicknames, stating in no uncertain terms that his name was Roberto. There was also confusion over the correct form of his surname. For 27 years the plaque at the nationalBaseball Hall of Fame read “Roberto Walker Clemente,” mistakenly placing his mother’s maiden name before his father’s surname. Only in 2000 was it changed to its proper Latin American form, Roberto Clemente Walker.