The Negro Leagues Made Baseball a Global Sport and Kickstarted the Civil Rights Movement

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2020

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Many people think the Negro Leagues as a sad, somber part of America's legacy of racial division. In many ways it is, says Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro League Baseball Museum. But on the 100th anniversary of its founding, he stresses that it is moreover a triumphant story about what came out of segregation, and the result was a much richer, stronger country.

It was the Negro Leagues that introduced baseball to Japan and Latin America when black players played in exhibition matches at those places (they went on a goodwill tour to Japan in 1927, years before Babe Ruth and others came, winning the hearts of locals). And, he says, it was the Negro League that kickstarted the Civil Rights Movement by its players breaking the baseball color barrier of the Major Leagues with Jackie Robinson in 1947. This was years before the Birmingham Bus Boycott (1956) or the Freedom Riders (1961).

Today I'm speaking with Kendrick about the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues, which were formed on February 13, 1920, in Kansas City, Missouri. For the next several decades, black players competed on Negro League teams every bit as competent as their white counterparts (Hank Aaron got his start in the Negro Leagues; Joe DiMaggio called Satchel Paige “the best and fastest pitcher I have ever faced.”)

We discuss legends of the sport, such as Buck O'Neil, a first baseman for the Kansas City Monarchs, who became the first black scout for Major League Baseball and was a major player in establishing the museum itself (he was also a fixture on Ken Burns' documentary on baseball).

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey there! Here's some important news from Network Rail, if you're planning to catch a train
0:04.8	over the May Bank holiday weekends. From the 28th of April to the 1st of May, and from the 27th
0:11.1	to the 29th of May, Network Rail will be working to upgrade and improve the railway for us all.
0:17.2	And while most of the network will stay open, some train services will be affected.
0:22.1	So, be in the know before you go. Please check before you travel at
0:26.8	nationalrail.co.uk forward slash May.
0:32.8	Childhood should be fun. Don't let bed wetting spoil that.
0:37.6	Dry nights give maximum protection, so kids can go to bed worry free. Have a dry night's sleep.
0:46.0	And wake up awesome!
0:49.5	Ah!
0:54.4	Awesome days start with dry nights. Search dry nights for a free sample.
1:11.9	History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts. It's the collection of all the stories
1:16.8	throughout human history that explained how and why we got here. Welcome to the History
1:21.5	Unplugged Podcast where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even counterfactual stories
1:27.6	that made our world what it is. I'm your host, Scott Rank.
1:40.7	Well, first I started with the fact that we make the boldest search in that Jackie Robinson's
1:44.4	breaking of the color barrier. It wasn't just a part of the civil rights movement. It was in
1:48.8	the beginning of the civil rights movement. This is 1947. This is well before those more noted
1:53.8	civil rights occurrences. This is before Brown versus the Board of Education. This is before Rosa
1:58.8	Parks refusal to move to the back of the bus. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a sophomore at
2:04.6	Morehouse College when Robinson Sciences contracted the plan to dive his organization.
2:09.3	President Truman would not integrate the armed forces until a year after Jackie. So for all
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Unplugged, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Unplugged and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.