Negro Leagues Baseball Museum

“At the time Major League baseball was a base-to-base thing. You hit the ball, you wait on the base until somebody hit again… but in our baseball, if you walked to first base, you stole second, they’d bunt you over to third and you stole home… actually scored runs without a hit. This was our baseball.” Buck O’Neill

         

The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum  holds a place in Kansas City on 18^th and Vine in the Historic District.  This museum tells the stories of baseball legends like Rube Foster, Satchel Paige, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Cool Papa Bell, and of course, Jackie Robinson. Kansas City takes pride in their history with the Negro League and played a pivotal role in the success of the Negro Leagues. The museum walks visitors through a timeline from the start of Negro baseball teams in the early 1800s to 1962 when the Negro League officially died.

The leagues began in Kansas City when Rube Foster, a former baseball player, held a meeting at a local YMCA to initiate the leagues. This started a chain reaction of soon to be rival teams, to sprout up throughout the United States. By 1917 Foster had dominated the black baseball scene. His goal was to force the white major leagues to accept the manner of integration. The Negro National League led to teams from the U.S., Latin America, and Canada, to play each other. These league games became key in economic development in many black communities.

Most everyone knows the story of Jackie Robinson and how on April 15^th, 1947 he was brought up to the major leagues with the Dodgers. Something that is not as known is that it was not until July 21^st, 1959, when the Red Sox added Pumpsie Green to their roster, that all the major league teams were integrated.

The walls of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum are lined with priceless baseball memorabilia. As a group we discussed how much the game has changed from the 1900's until now. Players now earn somewhere in the millions and travel all over the country to play in giant stadiums. Before this these players were out on the field every day for the love of the game, where they were and how much money they made did not push them away from playing. Many of them had to overcome more than they needed to in order to get their major league jersey but they earned it.

“I never felt that I wasn’t making the money the white players made or I wasn’t famous I just wanted to play baseball. I loved the game. I’d have played for $100 a year, for a dollar. I’d have played for nothing just to get out there in that grass, that dirt, and play baseball.” -Gene Benson of the Philadelphia Stars in 1937-1948.

Katie