 18 Street entrance to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and the American Jazz Museum which shares the building. |
 Interior entrance to the museum. |
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18 Street entrance to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and the American Jazz Museum which shares the building. |
Interior entrance to the museum. |
Inside, fans find a history of black baseball going back to the 1860s, along with extensive documentation of the rise of the Negro Leagues right after the first World War, and a description of how “the ultimate goal” – the acceptance of blacks into Major League Baseball in 1947 – spelled the end of the Negro Leagues in the late 1940s. Some teams continued on as touring entertainment acts, but even they were gone by 1960.
Exhibits include interactive databases on several of the game’s top stars, such as Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, and Kansas City’s own Buck O’Neil and Satchel Paige. Other memorabilia, including uniforms, programs, scorecards, correspondence, and so forth, are clearly displayed, and there are also several multimedia presentations.
Per museum policy, I was not able to take photographs of the exhibit areas on my 2005 visit.