MLB | The Room Where the Negro National League Was Signed Into Existence (Paseo YMCA, Kansas City)

On Friday 13 February 1920, Andrew "Rube" Foster walked into a YMCA on the Paseo in Kansas City with a sheaf of papers and an argument. Behind him came eleven other men: the owners of seven independent Black baseball clubs, an attorney, and three sportswriters from the Chicago Defender, the Indianapolis Ledger and the Indianapolis Freeman. Foster had called the meeting and he ran it. There was one item on his agenda. By the time they left, they had a constitution, a set of bylaws, a scheme for allocating players, a president in Foster, and eight clubs. The Negro National League was the first Black baseball league to hold together as a business, and everything that followed in organised Black baseball descends from those two days in this building. Foster owned the Chicago American Giants. The other charter clubs included the Kansas City Monarchs and the Detroit Stars, both of which turn up elsewhere in this collection. He is usually called the father of Black baseball, and the reason is here rather than on any field: he understood that talent was never the problem, and that scheduling, gate splits and contract enforcement were. The building was not chosen at random. The Paseo branch was one of the first YMCAs in the country built for a Black community, funded by a local subscription drive in the 1910s that drew on Julius Rosenwald's matching programme, and by 1941 it was hosting thousands of meetings a year for well over a hundred community groups. In a segregated city it was one of the few large rooms available. It closed in the early 1970s as the neighbourhood emptied and stood abandoned for decades. The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, two blocks south, began raising money to save it in 2006, a campaign that hit its million-dollar target in the weeks after Buck O'Neil died that October. The restored building opened as the Buck O'Neil Education and Research Center in 2013, was badly vandalised in 2018, and has been worked on in phases since. Bob Kendrick, the museum's president, calls the Paseo YMCA the most significant Negro Leagues artefact in existence, on the grounds that a building can be an artefact if it is where the story started. The address is 1824 Paseo, Kansas City, Missouri, near the 18th and Vine district. Check opening arrangements with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum before travelling; access has varied through the phased restoration. Coordinates are from the geotag on the Wikimedia Commons photographs of the building, accurate to roughly the building footprint. Cover: the Paseo Branch YMCA on a Tichnor Brothers postcard, published between about 1930 and 1945. Boston Public Library, Tichnor Brothers collection #82200. Public domain. Second image: the building in 2015, photographed by Mwkruse, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.