Spring training has begun, and the sports channels are turning their thoughts to baseball, but so is the Smithsonian Channel. On Monday, it begins a four-part docu-series called “Major League Legends” with a moving episode on Hank Aaron. Every fan knows his triumphant trot around the bases when he broke Babe Ruth’s major league home run record in 1974, but this program traces the difficult road he traveled to get to that moment.

“There’s the American dream, and then there’s the life that the Aaron family and black families like him actually had to live,” says the author Howard Bryant. It was, of course, a path full of the hurdles of racism, even after Aaron became a major leaguer in 1954 and a star. And it placed him in an odd sort of spotlight, acclaimed as a sports hero even as black America as a whole was struggling for equality.

Aaron himself contributes remembrances of the hardships and the triumphs. Subsequent episodes turn their attention to Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams.