On Nov. 1, just a few days after the end of the 2008 World Series, the National Baseball Hall of Fame unveiled a statue honoring Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente as part of its first "Character and Courage Weekend." Today the statue stands in the lobby of the Hall of Fame's museum as a tribute to their "strength of character and depth of courage."

Coming at the end of a year- long celebration of the 250th anniversary of Pittsburgh's founding, the unveiling of the statue also serves as a striking reminder of the importance of Roberto Clemente to the city's character and history. Bill Mazeroski's home run in the 1960 World Series may be the most dramatic sports moment in Pittsburgh history, but no Pittsburgh sports figure or event rivals Clemente's emotional impact on the city.

While Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente have now become larger-than-life symbols of character and courage in baseball, their real-life stories, taken together, form a narrative, familiar to Pittsburgh's own history, of the hard-fought struggle for ethnic and minority groups to achieve the success and equality at the heart of the American dream.

Best remembered for his heroic struggle against the disease that now bears his name, Lou Gehrig was the only surviving child of working-class German immigrant parents. He made his debut with the New York Yankees at a time when players of German and Irish descent dominated the major leagues. For the children of immigrants, baseball, in the early 20th century, had become a way out of the urban ghetto.

A child of Lithuanian immigrant parents, my father was a teenager when Gehrig played at Forbes Field against the Pirates in the first two games of the 1927 World Series. Years later, when we started playing catch on the South Side's Merriman Way under the shadow of the decaying Brady Street Bridge, he talked with pride about pitching a shut-out against a neighborhood Polish team, and how he dreamed of playing one day for the Pirates. Unlike Gehrig, he never lived his dream of playing big league ball, but he made sure that he passed that dream along to his son.

When my father decided that I was finally old enough to see my first Pirates game, Jackie Robinson was in his second season with the Brooklyn Dodgers after crossing baseball's color line in 1947. Raised by his mother, who moved to California and took work as a domestic after his father, a Georgia sharecropper, deserted the family, Robinson lifted himself out of poverty on the athletic field. He was such an outstanding athlete at UCLA that one sports writer described him as "the Jim Thorpe of his race."

Battling against outrageous acts of racism, including threats on his life, Robinson led the Dodgers into the 1947 World Series and was named Rookie of the Year, but that made no difference to my working-class father. We avoided Dodger games in the early part of the 1948 season because of the "coloreds" who were coming out to Forbes Field to see Robinson play. The Pirates were a good draw because they were contending for the National League pennant that year, but when the Dodgers came to town Forbes Field was not only jammed but also fully integrated.

Despite my father's belief that Robinson was ruining baseball, he finally broke down that summer and took me out to Forbes Field for a Sunday doubleheader against the Dodgers. I was too young to understand the racial drama taking place at Forbes Field that afternoon, but I do remember watching the games from a roped-off section of the outfield because of the overflow crowd and feeling I could reach out and touch right-fielder Dixie Walker, who had been traded by the Dodgers to the Pirates because he didn't want to play on the same team with Robinson.

By 1955, Roberto Clemente's rookie season with the Pirates, Dixie Walker's playing career was over, a veteran Jackie Robinson was ready to lead the Brooklyn Dodgers to their first and only World Series championship and I was a teenager playing ball in Pittsburgh's mostly segregated public parks.

If Clemente's rookie season had been similar to Robinson's remarkable first season, things might have been less hostile for him in Pittsburgh. But Clemente, despite his great talent, struggled at the plate and fielded erratically, while the Pirates, after opening the season with eight straight losses, finished in last place for the fourth straight year. Of course, Robinson, who had played Negro League baseball, was 28 years old in his rookie season, while Clemente, in just his second year in professional baseball, was only 22.

Clemente began living up to his potential the following season, but he felt unappreciated and alienated in Pittsburgh because of the color of his skin and his Latin American heritage. After he was snubbed in the National League MVP balloting following the 1960 World Series, he played baseball as if it were a form of punishment for those who had injured his pride and spirit.

To validate his greatness to the city and the nation, he captured, at the age of 38, the national spotlight at the 1971 World Series. A little more than a year later, he became the stuff of legend when he died tragically in a humanitarian effort to help the victims of a devastating earthquake in Nicaragua.

Roberto Clemente certainly deserves a place beside Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson in the Hall of Fame statue honoring character and courage, but he also is in good company at PNC Park, where his statue stands with those of Honus Wagner and Willie Stargell. Wagner, the son of German immigrant parents, became a hero in the early 20th century for working-class families in Pittsburgh, while Stargell, an African American from Oklahoma, inspired a later generation of Pittsburghers to see themselves as part of a larger family.

There have been many events this year celebrating Pittsburgh's greatness, but the statues of Wagner, Clemente and Stargell tell their own story of the city's character and courage. They stand today as symbols of Pittsburgh's determination to overcome its deep-rooted racial divisions, to rise from the shadow of its Smoky City past and to forge a hopeful and united future out of the hard work and pride that has come to characterize the city's renaissance spirit.