Stay Away

My God-fearing grandpa was so intensely religious he could shed tears over the length and breadth of his sinful heart. He loved Jesus and hated Blacks, but he called them the n-word. It never dawned on him that his prejudices may have been sin, even though he claimed--out loud and in public--that he knew very well what sin was. He thought he lived biblically--after all, didn't the Bible make direct reference to the Negro race when God condemned Ham, Noah's son, to forever servitude?

My mother told me about Grandpa's love for the Phillies. I was five years old when the Boston Braves changed baseball forever by grabbing the franchise and moving west to Milwaukee, so I grew up with the Milwaukee Braves, listening every night of the season to an old radio with a dim yellow face tucked in a cabinet built into a space above my bed. No one I knew didn't love the Braves, except maybe for a few Cubs fans. Otherwise, no one.

Except Grandpa, the blacksmith turned grease monkey, who followed the Philadelphia Phillies, Mom said, because they were the last team to integrate. The Braves had Billy Bruton, Wes Covington, and a wiry kid named Henry Aaron. Grandpa took his allegiance and left the state. On principal.

The fear-mongering the Fox News crowd is doing about "critical race theory" seems inexplicable to me. How can any teacher in any classroom talk in any way about race in America and not make white kids feel bad? Those old Jim Crow signs pointing out which drinking fountains were accessible for Black people?--lock 'em in a drawer. To Kill a Mockingbird?--most famous novel of the 20th century?--put it way up in the library stacks so no one can reach it. Explain Little Big Horn without saying a thing about broken treaties?--sure, play John Wayne movies and reference savagery liberally. The Civil War--"the war of Northern Aggression."

For heaven's sake, don't bring white kids to Kansas City. Don't let them anywhere near the Negro Baseball League Museum because white kids are going to see is something very few will be able to imagine. Two leagues, two worlds in a country divided violently by custom and law.

For sixty years America had two distinct major leagues--one white, one black. How many high school kids, how many sports fans, have any idea that, not all that many years ago, Henry Aaron played professional baseball for the Mobile Black Bears? Not so far away. Not so long ago.

For sixty years, the Negro Baseball Leagues operated in a segregated world, and did so successfully, so well, that when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers he created a shock wave that altered the face of the country into which he was born, but also undercut an enterprise that had been both thoroughly Black, owners to players to fans.

One year, 400,000 people attended Negro league ball games and regularly outdrew attendance in the lily-white Bigs. Black-owned businesses blossomed around ball parks. How high was the caliber of play in those segregated leagues? If you're white, don't ask. Once Jackie Robinson moved to Brooklyn, all-white teams changed forever.

Rube Foster

The man sometimes called "the Father of Negro League Baseball," Rube Foster, actually played the game himself, but realized eventually that an enterprise was waiting to be born from turnstiles teams like the Kansas City Monarchs, the Chicago American Giants, the Indianapolis ABCs, and Dayton Marcos were turning. It was 1920; it would take another forty years before Jackie Robinson.

What Foster did for Negro Baseball is give it the structure it so badly needed. With a few others in a meeting that took place just a few blocks away from the Negro League Baseball Museum (NLBM), Rube Foster put some legs under the enterprise, gave it a system and a name, and set it out for fans who were already excited about a brand of baseball they could not only support and love.

There are sad stories at the NLBM, the saddest, of course, is the racial divide that once upon a time kept America cut in pieces--white here, black there in the back of the bus. But another, one you almost certainly didn't know is that Jackie Robinson's ascension into American history as the man who, more than any other, broke the color barrier, his success as the Dodgers' shortstop meant the end of an incredibly successful enterprise that belonged completely to Black Americans.

Of course, if it's going to hurt you, don't go to the NLBM. By all means, stay away. Go to the Zoo or something, and for heaven's sake don't go next door to the NLBM either, where another fine museum teaches the history of jazz, another story that can't be told without the pain of exclusion, of prejudice, and racial hatred.

By all means, stay away from 14th and Vine. Stay clean and untouched by the tragic rooms of the American mansion. Stay away from the servants' quarters, the empty Native villages. We don't want anyone hurt, after all. We don't want anyone sad.

Great places, great museums, great stories--14th and Vine, Kansas City. Not so far away at all.