Current Exhibits

This exhibit is based on a permanent exhibit at the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. Besides exploring the history of baseball and examining how the treatment of black players reflected conditions in American society, the exhibit focuses on individual players, barnstorming, the Negro Leagues, the conditions players faced when they traveled, baseball rules and how they changed through the decades. Through a cultural timeline of American history visitors will be able to place the African American baseball story into the larger context of American history and see how it intersects with major events such as the Dred Scott Decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, Jim Crow laws, Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Great Migration to the North, Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and many more. The exhibit is made possible by the American Library Association and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.