Second of two parts
Kansas City, Mo. – The Negro Leagues was born on 18th and Vine in 1920.
As Negro Leagues Baseball Museum President Bob Kendrick and I sat in the museum’s lobby, I asked him about this historic corner.
“It was the epicenter of Black life in Kansas City” in the early decades of the 20th century before integration, explained Kendrick. “To get an understanding of 18th and Vine, think of Harlem during the Renaissance. That was our Harlem. A jazz musician could get a gig in Kansas City when they couldn’t get a gig anywhere else in the country because here all the restaurants had live music. All the hotels had live music, and of course, you had nightclubs galore.
“The story of 18th and Vine is really important because Missouri was a slave state. Kansas right across the line was a free state, and during that era of American segregation, Black folks could only live within a six-block radius,” he pointed out. “I remind folks, within these 13 blocks, you had everything you needed. It was thriving.
“It was a cultural crossroads where jazz and baseball intersected, and at the heart of that were the great Kansas City Monarchs,” said Kendrick proudly.
There’s not a better storyteller, especially since Buck O’Neil joined the ancestors in 2006 at the age of 94 in Kansas City than Kendrick, who preaches the story of the Negro Leagues like an evangelist. He was the museum’s first marketing director in 1998, then marketing vice president in 2009, and after he rejoined the organization in 2011, he was named its president.
There’s no better person who is an authority on Negro Leagues baseball than Kendrick, a 2014 inductee into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.
I first met Kendrick when I was in the city for a Minnesota Lynx preseason game in 2005, and he took me on a tour of the NLBM. Before we embarked, we ran into O’Neil, who remembered me from when I interviewed him during a Black History event at St. Cloud State a few years earlier.
By all accounts American baseball is divided into two eras, “B.J.” (before Jackie Robinson) and “A.J.” (after Jackie’s signing and playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers, which finally broke baseball’s color line) that began in earnest in the late 1940s.
“The story of the Negro Leagues is fascinatingly complicated because there is no question that Jackie’s breaking of the color barrier that not only spawned integration in baseball, but it also spawned integration in a broader spectrum in our society,” stressed Kendrick. However, he pointed out, “With integration came the demise of many African-American communities because wherever you had successful Black baseball, you typically had thriving Black economies.
“So, when we lost the Negro Leagues, we lost the catalyst. We lost the spark that drove those businesses to their economic habits. Negro Leagues baseball was bringing them a built-in clientele that led these segregated, mandated Black-owned businesses to their heights,” Kendrick reiterated.
The museum, which moved to its current home in 1997 under O’Neil’s leadership as board chairman, didn’t have its larger-than-life Field of Giants bronze sculptures of Negro Leagues greats installed when I was there years ago.
As impressive as the 10,000-square-foot facility is, the NLBM, which shares space with the American Jazz Museum, is busting at the seams, said Kendrick. Congress in 2006 designated it “America’s National Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.”
“We started this thing in a one-room office in 1990, and we’ve seen it grow leaps and bounds, and we’ve completely tapped out of space there. We don’t have a lot of space from an administrative standpoint, and the demands on the museum are growing every day as the interest grows in this subject matter,” Kendrick said, pointing to the $35 million expansion project to build a new 30,000-square-foot facility. It will be built adjacent to the old Paseo Y, which is being restored to become the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center.
“It’s daunting,” surmised Kendrick on the huge fundraising effort. “We know we got our work cut out for us.”
Finally …
Awful Announcing last month analyzed every NBA team using various metrics “to identify the best and worst setups for the 2026-27 season” in regard to television access for fans to watch local games. It ranked the Minnesota Timberwolves 28th out of 30 teams – the Wolves are among five teams that exclusively put their games on DAZN this season and mostly not available on cable as before.
Charles Hallman welcomes reader responses at challman@spokesman-recorder.com.
Copyright © Charles Hallman