I've played baseball since I was five. It's been a constant my whole life. When you're a kid you think you'll be a MLB player. When you get older you think you could play in college. I've gotten better at baseball, especially as a pitcher, but sometime in the last year I realized that I won't play beyond high school. Even when it has been tough, baseball has always been something I loved and enjoyed. I had never really thought about the role of baseball in our history, how integration occurred, and how we wound up with baseball as we know it today. But this past year it started meaning something different. In AP African American Studies, I wrote a thesis on the integration of Major League Baseball. The more I researched, the more I realized how much of that story I didn't know. The Negro Leagues, the players who never got a shot, the towns and ballparks that still carry that history. None of it shows up in the box scores.
That research is what pushed this expedition from an idea into something I actually had to do. Inspired by my oral history interview with Mr. Terence Moore, I wanted to go to Kansas City to see the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and meet one of my heavily cited sources, Mr. Bob Kendrick.
Age 5. The beginning of twelve years.
