This is America: Remembering the Negro Leagues is about more than baseball

Chris Bumbaca | Paste BN

Happy Thursday everyone! That means it's time for a new edition of This Is America, which means I return after three months away.

I'm Sports reporter Chris Bumbaca. Last time we all caught up I told you about what covering my first Olympics in Tokyo over the summer was like. It's hard to believe that the Winter Games in Beijing are in three months.

We're going to keep things in the sports realm this week (play to your strengths, they say). I had the privilege of profiling the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum's president Bob Kendrick, who has played a vital role in keeping alive the history and stories of Black baseball players that came before Jackie Robinson.

I hope you read it as part of Paste BN's Never Been Told series, which explores the unseen, unheard, lost and forgotten stories of America's people of color. And what better way to explore that than through the lens of baseball? It's a sport born of the Civil War that seeped into this country's culture throughout the 20th Century.

The experience for Black people and baseball cannot be told without understanding and knowing the history of the Negro Leagues.

But first: Race and justice news we're watching

Important stories of the past week, from USA TODAY and other news sources.

The baseball history I never learned

I've been writing about Roberto Clemente for a long time. There was an elementary school poster board project about the Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Famer who died 49 years ago bringing humanitarian aid to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua. There was an essay in high school my father sent me (happy to report my writing has improved slightly) after a story I wrote about Major League Baseball's efforts to retire No. 21, Clemente's number – revered among players from Puerto Rico – in September.

While in Kansas City this summer, I learned that Clemente had been heavily influenced by Negro Leagues players who traveled to his native island in the 1940s. In America, these Black ballplayers were outcasts. In the Caribbean and Latin America, they were heroes, and Negro Leaguers toured there during the winters.

At age 11, Clemente met one of his idols in San Juan, Newark Eagles right fielder Monte Irvin. Clemente would go on to become one of the best right fielders in the history of the game.

The Negro Leagues' influence on Clemente, an Afro-Latino, was one of many things I learned while reporting on Kendrick, the museum and the history of the Negro Leagues.

With thriving baseball, a thriving community

Kendrick told me about more than just childhood heroes and baseball history, though.

"Wherever you had successful Black baseball, you typically had thriving Black economies," Kendrick told me. "18th and Vine was no exception."

We were sitting at that cross-street in Kansas City, Missouri, inside the lobby area of the Negro League Baseball Museum, across the street from a food joint that makes a mean fried catfish.

A 13-block radius around the present-day site, Kendrick explained, provided everything one needed and more in this eastern section of Kansas City. It was a city within a city. The Kansas City Monarchs, the iconic Negro League franchise, played at Municipal Stadium in the neighborhood (22nd and Brooklyn, to be exact).

The Negro Leagues themselves were formally organized in February 1920 by Rube Foster around the corner from the current museum at the Paseo YMCA — the only place Black people could swim at the time.

"What segregation did," Kendrick said, "it forced ownership."

Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947. Desegregation policies flowed into society through the ensuing decades. And the Negro Leagues disbanded — it's players simply went to the majors. Regardless of the caliber of play in the Negro Leagues, the world was always going to say the most talented ballplayers suited up in the major leagues.

"There was this natural excitement about now seeing how these Black stars were going to fare," Kendrick said. "But then the Black fanbase also left the Negro Leagues and went to the major leagues, which ultimately killed the Negro Leagues...

"I’m not sure that Black folks realized what we were losing when we lost the Negro Leagues."

In writing history, equality gained but something lost

Without the Monarchs to anchor the community, the community regressed. The dynamic didn't play out only in Kansas City, Kendrick said. It repeated in Indianapolis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Birmingham, Pittsburgh and more. The lesson, Kendrick said, is that progress comes at a price.

But it's also that progress, in the methods of Kendrick's mission to spread the stories behind the museum, that led to MLB declaring the Negro Leagues a "major" league last December. That means the statistics and records available — kept without the precision afforded to the majors — are part of the game's official history. The banner atop the Baseball Reference homepage reads "The Negro Leagues are Major Leagues. We have dramatically expanded our coverage of the Negro Leagues and historical Black major league players."

Type "Turkey Stearnes" into the search bar and discover that the centerfielder who played for three iconic Negro Leagues franchises — the Detroit Stars, the Chicago American Giants and the Monarchs — batted .349 during his 18-year career from 1923-1940. (Stearnes was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000 by the Veteran's Committee.)

That's great, Kendrick said. But the existence of Negro Leagues is an example of America's racist history.

“I don’t want a young baseball fan, 15, 20 years from now seeing the names of Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell … right there alongside the names of legendary major leaguers and think it was always that way," Kendrick told me. "It is important that they understand they didn’t play in the Negro Leagues because they wanted to play in the Negro Leagues."

Negro Leagues teams, especially in the Jim Crow South, would often play in one town and then have to travel to a different locale for lodging and a hot meal. They are equals in the history books now, but we must remember it wasn't always so.

"I don’t want this history to become watered down," Kendrick said. "It’s important this museum remains embraced so that the story, the greater context of the story, is never lost."

The comparison to MLB goes beyond statistics and records. As baseball is "America's Pastime," the Negro Leagues deserves the same recognition in a positive way.

As Kendrick put it, the Negro Leagues are a success story:

"And my success stories have very rarely been touted," he said.

Except the thousands of success stories within the context of the Negro Leagues are preserved here, right on the corner of 18th and Vine.

Join us in conversation

Join us at 4 p.m. ET today for a Twitter Spaces conversation about the fascinating story of the Negro Leagues and the man keeping the history alive. Our journalists, including your This is America writer today, Chris Bumbaca, will be joined by Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and LaTroy Hawkins, a former MLB pitcher.

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1DXxyDklXEdJM

—

This is America is a weekly take on current events from a rotating panel of Paste BN Network journalists with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. If you're seeing this newsletter online or someone forwarded it to you, you can subscribe here. If you have feedback for us, we'd love for you to drop it here.

Facebook Twitter Email