Negro Leagues Baseball Museum

On February 13, 1920, team owners met at a Kansas City YMCA and founded the Negro National League, with Andrew "Rube" Foster as its leader. The building was the Paseo YMCA, two blocks from where the museum stands, and the Kansas City Monarchs were one of the eight teams in the first season. The league collapsed in 1931; the Monarchs went on. Buck O'Neil joined them in 1938 and made Kansas City his home for the rest of his life, and Jackie Robinson played for them too.

A group that included former Negro leaguers, O'Neil among them, founded the museum in 1990. It opened in a one-room office in 1991, and in November 1997 it moved into 10,000 square feet in the Museums at 18th & Vine, a building it shares with the American Jazz Museum. In 2006 Congress designated it America's National Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. O'Neil chaired its board until he died that October, at 94.

The tour is self-guided and takes at least an hour: text panels, hundreds of photographs, oral histories and artifacts laid along a timeline of baseball and African American history, the film They Were All Stars narrated by James Earl Jones, and the Field of Legends, a mock diamond with ten bronze statues. The museum plans to turn the Paseo YMCA into the Buck O'Neil Education and Research Center, which is not yet open. Construction of an 18th Street pedestrian mall has moved the parking; use the lot at 18th and Paseo or the free parking behind the building.