On the first Monday after the abrupt shutdown from the pandemic in mid-March last year, Bob Kendrick sat in the lobby of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and pondered the implications of a phenomenon that felt surreal.
The museum suddenly had closed the day before and wouldn’t reopen for nearly three months. So even though it was a day on which it normally wouldn’t be open, Kendrick still felt a flood of emotions. All at once, he thought about how precious so much of what we take for granted might be; the sense of an impending shift in the world as we knew it; what he could do to help … and a certain hollowness.
“Now every day is kind of like Monday,” he said then, managing a laugh. “Most people don’t like Mondays.”
Most people don’t like shots, either.
But on the corresponding Monday a year later, Kendrick relished the opportunity to make that unsavory combination more appealing in the warm and friendly confines of the NLBM over which he presides in the 18th & Vine District. Coming “full circle” from a year ago, as Kendrick put it, Monday was the first day of what is to be a weekly vaccination clinic at the museum in partnership with Hy-Vee:
More than 600 people were vaccinated against COVID-19 there on the opening day of a Monday-only program that Kendrick expects to extend for at least six weeks.
A year after contending with “a veil of uncertainty and fear like everybody else, not knowing what the heck is going on … we are trying to be part of the solution to getting rid of this dastardly virus,” he said, later adding, “I guess that is a sign of progress and optimism and hope. But, again, those are the things that are embedded in the story of the Negro Leagues.”
That theme reverberated at the museum all through 2020: The long-planned 100th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Negro Leagues in Kansas City was disrupted by a virus Kendrick likes to a call a “big nasty right-hander who just threw one high and tight and knocked you down.” But it dusted itself off and adapted and made a dynamic year of it nonetheless as it also deftly switched gears to focus on Negro Leagues 101 this year.
But something else resonated in the last year about what’s embedded in the story of the Negro Leagues. Or, more specifically, the story of the museum itself:
From the time it was founded in 1990, Kendrick recalled, the mindset was that it had an inherent responsibility to more than just a museum; it was incumbent that it become a community leader and give back in the spirit of its founding.
When someone asks, “Why are you guys doing that?” Kendrick will say, “We’re supposed to do these kinds of things.”
That became further evident last summer in the reinvigorated social justice movement in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a time in which the identity of the museum as a civil rights institute was clarified and amplified.
“So we’re always doing things that on the surface have nothing to do with baseball or the Negro Leagues,” he said. “But then once you delve into this story, you know that it has everything to do with what the Negro Leagues represented off the field.”
In this case, an institution that in the past has sought to find ways to empower the Black community to take control of their finances or their health has taken this on for several reasons — including providing access to the under-served and to demystify the process for those wary of treatment.
In the case of Kendrick himself, that meant facing his own dread about getting what he called his first shot in decades a few weeks ago when he was notified that Morning Star Baptist Church had a slot open because of canceled registrations.
