Sunday, June 29th, the Kansas City Royals and Los Angeles Dodgers at Kauffman Stadium. It was the Royals’ annual Salute to the Negro Leagues game, paying tribute to Negro Leagues baseball. Two of the Negro Leagues players Sam Allen and Pedro Sierra gave the first pitch of the game. Both teams wore custom caps: the Royals wore a 1945 KC Monarchs road hat, and the Dodgers wore the Brooklyn Dodgers hats, both in the spirit of Jackie Robinson.
The 2025 season marks the 80th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s in his first season in pro baseball with the Negro Leagues’. After his season with the KC Monarchs, Jackie Robinson would break the color barrier in baseball with his next season debuting with the minor-league Montreal Royals — the Triple-A affiliate of the then-Brooklyn Dodgers.
“So it’s Jackie vs. Jackie,” Bob Kendrick, the President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (NLBM) in Kansas City, Missouri said while speaking to the players and coaches before the game. Up until last year, the Royals and their opponent wore full Negro Leagues uniforms on that special day, and the jerseys were auctioned off after the game to raise money for the NLBM. Kendrick wasn’t sure why the decision was made to quit the tradition, but he said it wasn’t the Royals’ call. Other MLB teams have also stopped wearing the Negro Leagues uniforms for special days.
In March, the MLB removed the word “diversity” from its MLB Careers home page in reaction to President Trump’s executive order ending “equal opportunity” for people of color and women in recruiting. The sweeping moves to purge DEI also resulted in the U.S. Department of Defense removing a webpage featuring Jackie Robinson, who served in the Army during World War II and segregation. They did restore it later.
“When you think about the star power that you have with the Dodgers, you can only imagine what those uniforms would have fetched. Shohei [Ohtani], Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, you know, those uniforms would raise a pretty penny with the proceeds coming back to the museum,” Kendrick said. “But it also would have meant a lot to have Shohei Ohtani doing something in tribute to the Negro Leagues, particularly when you learn that it was the Negro Leagues that introduced the American brand of professional baseball to the Japanese (in 1927).”
Another threat to the museum comes from legislation from the state capital, as Governor Kehoe of Missouri passed its budget bill that made sweeping cuts to funding. The museum was expecting to receive $1.5 million to help pay for operating costs as museum leaders seek to build a new museum and $250,000 to build a tower at the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center.
The game on Sunday ended with the Dodgers, the World Series Champions of 2024, defeating the Royals 5-1. At Kauffman Stadium, Royals fans were disappointed with the result of the game, but the entire stadium was clapping and cheering for the celebration of the Negro Leagues salute. We at PARCC celebrate the history of the Negro Leagues. We call the attacks on civil rights and diversity programs by the current administration as unlawful and must be stopped.
By Jerry Ginsburg
