Sunday, September 13, 2009

As I mentioned yesterday, we have been working closely with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, MO, to help them identify the buses that their teams used. Many of their team photos were taken in front of the bus they used (that tells you how important bus transportation was to them).

Another bus we were able to identify is this one of the Birmingham Black Barons, however, there was not enough of the bus showing in the photograph to identify the year. But by the windows, we were able to identify it as a Flxible. The photograph was taken in 1950.

Here's a little more of the history of the Negro Leagues Baseball clubs: In 1945, Major League Baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers recruited Jackie Robinson from the Kansas City Monarchs. Robinson became the first African-American in the modern era to play on a Major League roster. While this historic event was a key moment in baseball and civil rights history, it prompted the decline of the Negro Leagues. The best black players were then recruited for the Major Leagues, and black fans followed. The last Negro Leagues teams folded in the early 1960s, but their legacy lives on through the surviving players and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.