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On February 13-14, 1920, eight Black baseball-team owners met at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City to sign the constitution of the Negro National League — the first successful, sustained Black professional baseball league in the United States. The meeting, convened by Andrew “Rube” Foster, established Kansas City as the institutional home of Black professional baseball and seeded what is now the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum at 18th and Vine.
Summary
For two days in February 1920, Andrew “Rube” Foster — owner of the Chicago American Giants and the most powerful figure in Black baseball — gathered the owners of seven other clubs at the Paseo YMCA at 1824 The Paseo in Kansas City, Missouri. The result was the Negro National League (NNL), formally constituted with the motto “We Are the Ship; All Else the Sea.” The league fielded its first season later in 1920 and operated until 1931. Subsequent leagues — including the Negro American League (which would last into the 1960s and was also headquartered for much of its life in Kansas City) — descended from the NNL’s institutional template. The meeting is widely regarded as the birth of organized Black professional baseball in the United States.
Background
Black baseball before 1920
Black baseball teams had existed since the 1860s. By the early 1900s a vibrant Black professional baseball ecosystem existed — including the Page Fence Giants, the Cuban X-Giants, the Philadelphia Giants, and dozens of regional and barnstorming teams. But the structure was unstable:
- No organized league. Teams scheduled their own games, often against any willing opponent — Black, white, semi-pro, or amateur.
- No standing schedules. Income depended on barnstorming and unpredictable bookings.
- White booking agents controlled access to many large ballparks and extracted significant fees.
- No championship structure. “World’s Colored Champion” was a contested informal title with no unified body to award it.
The most successful Black baseball operator was Rube Foster in Chicago. Foster had been a star pitcher in the early 1900s and by 1910 had become a player-manager and owner of the Chicago American Giants. He believed organized league play was the only path to economic stability and to elevating Black baseball’s status nationally.
Why Kansas City
Kansas City was a logical convening site for several reasons:
- Geographic centrality. Most candidate league cities — Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit, Dayton — sat in a Midwest belt of which KC was the western anchor.
- The Paseo YMCA. Built in 1914 as one of the largest Black YMCAs in the United States, the Paseo YMCA provided a respectable, Black-owned, segregation-era venue capable of hosting a multi-day formal meeting with sleeping accommodations.1
- The Kansas City Monarchs (forthcoming). J.L. Wilkinson — the Kansas City club’s white owner, unusual in the otherwise all-Black ownership of the new league — was prepared to enter a strong, well-financed KC franchise. The Monarchs would become the league’s most-storied club.
- 18th and Vine. The surrounding 18th and Vine district was emerging as one of the most concentrated and vibrant Black business and entertainment corridors in the segregated United States, anchored by jazz clubs, restaurants, the YMCA, and Black-owned newspapers.
- Pendergast-era permissiveness. The wider political environment in Kansas City under the early Pendergast machine was permissive of Black-organized civic and economic activity in ways many other Midwestern cities of the era were not.
The meeting
Convening
Foster issued the meeting call in late 1919 to a roster of established Black-baseball owners. The meeting opened Friday, February 13, 1920 at the Paseo YMCA and continued through Saturday, February 14, 1920.
Attendees and the charter clubs
Eight clubs entered the new league:
| Club | City | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Chicago American Giants | Chicago | Rube Foster |
| Chicago Giants | Chicago | John “Big Brick” Schorling |
| Detroit Stars | Detroit | Tenny Blount |
| Indianapolis ABCs | Indianapolis | C.I. Taylor |
| Kansas City Monarchs | Kansas City, MO | J.L. Wilkinson |
| St. Louis Giants | St. Louis | Charles Mills |
| Cuban Stars (West) | (touring) | Tinti Molina / Alex Pompez |
| Dayton Marcos | Dayton | John Matthews |
Also present and influential in the discussions: sportswriter Cary B. Lewis of the Chicago Defender (one of the most-influential Black newspapers in the country) and other Black-press journalists who would help legitimize the league’s existence to a national Black readership.
The constitution
Over the two days, the owners signed a formal constitution that established:
- Standing schedules rather than ad-hoc bookings
- Reserve-clause-style player contracts restricting movement between teams within the league
- Revenue-sharing elements to support weaker clubs
- A presidency, which fell to Rube Foster (who would hold the office for most of the league’s first decade)
- Standardized umpiring
- A formal championship structure — the Colored World Series would not begin until 1924 (between the NNL and the rival Eastern Colored League) but the foundation for it was laid in 1920
The league’s motto, attributed to Foster, was “We Are the Ship; All Else the Sea.”2
Immediate aftermath
The 1920 NNL season began in May 1920. The Chicago American Giants won the first pennant under Foster’s player-manager-owner direction. Attendance figures across the league were stronger than skeptics had predicted; the Kansas City Monarchs in particular drew well at Association Park and later at the larger Muehlebach Field (after 1923).
A rival league — the Eastern Colored League — formed in 1923 along the Atlantic seaboard. The two leagues met in the first Colored World Series in 1924, won by the Kansas City Monarchs over the Hilldale Club of Darby, Pennsylvania.
Long-term significance
The Monarchs as flagship franchise
The Kansas City Monarchs became the most-successful and longest-lived Negro Leagues franchise. The Monarchs won twelve pennants across the NNL and successor Negro American League. The roster across the franchise’s history included:
- Satchel Paige (1935-1948)
- Jackie Robinson (1945 — his only Negro League season before signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers)
- Buck O’Neil (player 1938-1955; manager; later the founding face of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum)
- Bullet Rogan, Hilton Smith, Cool Papa Bell (partial), and many others
The Monarchs played their final professional season in 1965 and barnstormed through 1969 — making them one of the last operating Negro League franchises.
Integration and decline
The signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945 (announced October 1945; first MLB game April 15, 1947) marked the beginning of the end for the Negro Leagues as a separate institutional baseball system. As Major League Baseball gradually (and incompletely) integrated, the Negro Leagues lost both their top talent and their economic base. The NNL had folded earlier in 1948; the Negro American League (headquartered in Kansas City through much of its life) survived in increasingly diminished form into the 1960s.
The painful truth of Negro League history is that integration destroyed the institution that had nurtured Black professional baseball for nearly fifty years — even as it opened opportunities for individual Black players in MLB.
The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
In 1990, a group led by Buck O’Neil founded the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. The museum opened initially in a small space and moved to its current home at 18th and Vine in 1997, sharing a campus with the American Jazz Museum. The museum is the only one of its kind in the United States.
MLB statistical recognition (2020)
On December 16, 2020, Major League Baseball formally recognized the Negro Leagues (1920-1948) as Major League Baseball. The decision elevated Negro League statistics into the official MLB record book and triggered substantial revisions to all-time leaderboards — most notably moving Josh Gibson into multiple all-time top positions and elevating Negro League players’ historical standing across the board.
Buck O’Neil Hall of Fame induction (2022)
In July 2022, John “Buck” O’Neil — long denied induction despite extensive lobbying — was posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The induction was widely celebrated in Kansas City as overdue recognition.
Sites in KC associated with the founding
- The Paseo YMCA — 1824 The Paseo — the original meeting site. The building survives and has been preserved as the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, opened in 2024 after extensive renovation.
- Negro Leagues Baseball Museum — 1616 East 18th Street — the canonical museum of Negro League history
- 18th and Vine Historic District — the broader Black-business district where the league’s institutional life took root
- Municipal Stadium site — at 22nd and Brooklyn — where the Monarchs played from 1923; now a vacant lot with a historical marker
- Association Park site — the Monarchs’ earliest home park
Cultural memory
The founding meeting is annually commemorated through Negro Leagues Baseball Museum programming, particularly around the February 13 anniversary and during Negro Leagues Recognition Day (the third Friday of February). The 2020 centennial of the founding was marked by extensive nationwide programming, including MLB’s statistical-recognition decision later that year.
The phrase “We Are the Ship; All Else the Sea” has become a touchstone — used as the title of a 2008 picture-book history by Kadir Nelson and appearing prominently in museum signage and Negro Leagues commemorative materials.