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Taking the Kids: An important history lesson through baseball in Kansas City

By Eileen Ogintz, Tribune Content Agency on

They were among the best baseball players in the United States, traveling cross-country to play the game they loved before cheering fans. But they were often forced to sleep on their bus and eat peanut butter crackers.

"They could fill up the ballpark but couldn't get a meal or a place to stay from the same fans that had just cheered them," said Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo.

He added that kids who visit "think that's just dumb." The museum, celebrating its 25th anniversary just after the World Series, aims to teach an important history lesson through baseball about segregation and civil rights. A life lesson, too.

"The story of these players is a celebration of the power of the human spirit, of passion and perseverance," said Kendrick recently, as he enthusiastically gave a group of family travel writers and bloggers from around the country a tour during the TMS Family Travel conference I co-chair.

Kansas City has famously come together to salute the KC Royals baseball team this year, as they vie for the 2015 World Series title. There are banners flying everywhere, people decked out in Royals shirts and caps, the fountains tinted Royal blue. But people forget the important baseball history story that began here in 1920 with the founding of the Negro Leagues, thanks to Andrew “Rube” Foster, owner of the Chicago American Giants, who convinced seven other Midwest team owners to form the Negro National Leagues.

Soon leagues formed in several states, bringing the innovative play of these teams to major cities in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. (Parents and teachers should check out the teacher’s guide created in partnership with Kansas State University, which will help kids to better appreciate what they are seeing here.)

 

You also may not know that before Jackie Robinson was recruited to play on the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945, thereby breaking the color barrier, he was a shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the best teams in baseball. He wasn't necessarily the best African-American player of his era, Kendrick said, but the college-educated Robinson, a World War II veteran, was thought to be the best player equipped to handle the abuse that followed his being named to the team, as well as the indignities of having to stay and eat at separate hotels from his teammates. "Failure wasn't an option," Kendrick said.

As you enter this museum -- the complex also houses the American Jazz Museum -- visitors can view a baseball game in progress (the players are life-sized statues of African-American baseball greats) through chicken wire, as African-American fans would have experienced a Major League ballpark. The chicken wire served as a barrier separating them, relegated to an isolated section of the park, from white fans. At Negro League games, Kendrick said, whites and blacks sat together.

The museum not only tells the story of those who played in the Negro Leagues, allowing visitors to walk on the field amid the statues of African-American baseball pioneers who ultimately were inducted in the Hall of Fame, but also of vibrant black communities in segregated towns and the civil rights movement. The museum, which begins the story shortly after the Civil War, helps remind us that baseball has often mirrored or led the shift in attitude and law concerning race in America.

Kids can follow the timeline of what was happening in baseball and what was happening in the country. Baseball, in some cases, led the way. Jackie Robinson's historic entry into Major League baseball, for example, took place before the U.S. military was desegregated or the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision integrated schools.

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