A Century

A hundred years ago today, representatives from eight clubs met at the YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri, to organize what would become known as the Negro National League. The first regulated group of baseball teams for African American players excluded from major league baseball, it would last until the beginning of the Great Depression.

Other leagues would follow, some of them formed around the teams that survived the NNL's demise. A Negro American League began in 1937 and ran until desegregation and economic realities forced its disbanding in 1962. A successor Negro National League formed in 1933 and played until 1948, when surviving teams joined the NAL.

The history of the teams, leagues, champions, statistics, stars and such is complicated. Had the most powerful owners banded together in the years prior to Jackie Robinson's signing by the Brooklyn Dodgers, could they have forced better terms from the major league teams and created an arrangement in which some of the storied franchises like the Kansas City Monarchs, Homestead Grays, Newark Eagles and Indianapolis Clowns continued to exist? Could a more visionary major league owner demonstrated the folly of excluding gifted players and a devoted fandom by recruiting legends such as Buck Leonard, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell or Satchel Paige?

Perhaps. History proceeded as it did, though, and we can't know what the "what-ifs?" might have meant for Negro League baseball teams and their stars, we can only know what was real. Which will be enough, because the teams were real, the players were real, and the example of human beings refusing to accept the idea that they were "second class" in any way was real as well.

Should your travels, O Tolerant Reader, ever take you through Kansas City, Missouri, and should you have the time, you could do worse than visit the Negro League Museum and perhaps see for yourselves what those players knew and tried to say: Sure, it's about baseball. But it's always about more than baseball.