Founded in a one-room office in 1990, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum has come a long way in the intervening years. Today, it occupies a 10,000-square-foot space in Kansas City’s 18th & Vine Historic Jazz District and serves as the only museum of its kind in the country, working to preserve and celebrate the rich history of African-American baseball and its impact on the social advancement of America. Here, visitors can learn about famous players like Jackie Robinson, Buck O’Neil, and Satchel Paige through interactive exhibits, video presentations, and hundreds of photographs and historic artifacts, then visit the museum’s centerpiece—a mock baseball diamond called the Coors Fields of Legends, surrounded by 10 life-size bronze sculptures of Negro League greats.
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
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Buck O'Neil's Shrine
The 18th and Vine District is a testament to one of the most revered figures in Kansas City history, Buck O’Neil, who gained fame in Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball. Buck helped establish the nation’s only Negro Leagues baseball museum, which pays tribute to an oft-forgot history of the national pastime. The NLBM could rightly be called the Cooperstown of the Negro Leagues, full of artifacts that tell the story not just of great players like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and “Cool Papa” Bell, but the history of segregation. Follow in the footsteps of baseball superstars who tour the museum on road trips to Kansas City, then pay tribute to the history of Kansas City Jazz next door at the American Jazz Museum and the Blue Room jazz bar, near the famed “12th Street and Vine” of the song “Kansas City, Here I Come.”
