Sacrifice Play

How the Negro Leagues were killed

- By Andrea Williams

WHEN YOU WALK into the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and pass through the turnstiles ushering you into the main exhibit, the first thing you see—before the photos and artifacts, the gameworn jerseys and yellowed newspaper clippings—is a wall of chicken wire. You peer through this fence, so similar to the ones that separated Black fans from white ones at segregated stadiums, and you see a baseball diamond, scaled-down, with 10 life-size bronze statues of players.

This, the Field of Legends, is the museum’s focal point, the central design feature around which the entire exhibit was built. When you see the field, the replica dugout, the figures cast in the images of some of the best ever to pick up a ball and glove, your jaw goes slack at its majesty. You want to stand next to Satchel Paige and practice your own windup. You want to crouch behind home plate next to Josh Gibson. You want to take a couple of practice swings next to Martín Dihigo, the Cuban-born Negro Leaguer who is enshrined in baseball halls of fame in five different countries.

But you can’t. Not yet.

The museum’s exhibit follows a chronological path through the history of Black baseball in America, starting in the days when Black men were first shut out of organized white baseball and forced to form independent teams that barnstormed around the country, and ending with the end of the Negro Leagues themselves. You can’t take the field until you know— really know—this story.