For America's 250th birthday, Heidi and Joel skip the fireworks and head for the ballpark, and they bring their guest, Bob Kendrick, along. He is the President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. The museum is just a few blocks away from where the team owners established a league of their own in 1920. Bob has spent three decades making sure that the players and the stories of the Negro League are not forgotten.
Bob walks Heidi and Joel through why some of the best baseball in the country got played on fields most fans never read about, how a club from Jamestown, North Dakota beat a lineup of big-league stars, and what happened to the Negro Leagues the day Jackie Robinson finally got his shot. Bob has answers and a lot of good stories to go with them.
In this episode:
- How Jim Crow forced Black players into their own leagues, and how they answered on the field
- Satchel Paige, Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson, and careers the majors delayed or erased
- Why Negro Leagues games often outdrew the majors, and the talent gap that never existed
- Larry Doby and the different fight the American League's first Black player faced
- How World War II shifted the country's willingness to integrate its pastime
Resources & Links
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
Connect with Bob Kendrick on:
Linkedin
Twitter
Two hundred fifty years in, America’s pastime still has a few chapters that are not told enough. Tune in.
The Hot Dish is brought to you by the One Country Project. To learn more, visit OneCountryProject.org, or find us on Substack (Onecountryproject.substack.com), and on YouTube, Bluesky, and Facebook (@onecountryproject).
- (00:00) - - Americana, baseball, and the show's focus
- (00:43) - - Kansas City, birthplace of the Negro Leagues
- (01:36) - - Bob Kendrick on the leagues' history
- (02:12) - - North Dakota's early integration
- (03:07) - - Bismarck and Jamestown's integrated teams
- (05:27) - - The Bismarck-Jamestown rivalry
- (07:03) - - Teaching the discrimination players faced
- (11:20) - - How long the leagues lasted after integration
- (12:30) - - Team geography and migration patterns
- (14:13) - - The East-West All-Star Game
- (17:10) - - Segregation's overt and covert forms
- (18:10) - - Satchel Paige's legend and skill
- (20:22) - - WWII, Willie Mays, and Henry Aaron
- (21:20) - - Jackie Robinson's courage and burden
- (24:13) - - Hank Aaron's rise to stardom
- (25:50) - - Baseball as a unifying force
- (32:00) - - The museum's future and mission
- (33:50) - - Positional barriers in early integration
- (38:01) - - Roy Campanella and other Hall of Famers who started in the leagues
- (43:27) - - Visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
