LONE TREE, Colo. (CBS4) – Colorado’s baseball culture started long before the Rockies. You can go back to the Nineteen Twenties to a team called the Denver White Elephants. Bob Kendrick has committed to talking about one of the forgotten chapters in American sports history: Negro League Baseball. Kendrick is the President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. “The Negro Leagues were created in a generation of American segregation whilst African-American and Hispanic baseball gamers denied a possibility due to coloration. So they created their league,” Kendrick stated.
He started as a volunteer at the museum before he met Buck O’Neil, who played in the Negro Leagues and led an effort to open the baseball museum. The encounter changed his life. “I tell human beings all the time that when you are bitten by the ‘Buck-computer virus,’ it’s throughout. You desired to be on Buck’s team, Kendrick stated. “I took into consideration myself to be a baseball fan, but right here is a whole chapter of baseball and Americana that I no longer know nothing approximately. The extra I turned into delivering this tale, the more I learned about this story, the more I wanted to learn about this tale, and so I have almost become engrossed in it.”
Kendrick now goes across the country in one of the six journeying exhibits to tell others approximately the life and legacy of the Negro Leagues, which lasted from 1920-1960. The competition changed into fierce. Future Baseball Hall of Famers like Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron began in professional baseball. “This is only a sampling of the talent that had been there inside the Negro Leagues,” Kendrick stated. “It makes us, as baseball fanatics, marvel at what we left out? What could have passed off had the doorways opened faster?”
Colorado by no means had an affiliated Negro League group. However, it had the Denver White Elephants, the most lasting African-American semi-seasoned crew in Denver from 1915-1935. The White Elephants had been owned by Albert Henderson Wade Ross, or A.H.W. Ross for brief. He changed into a businessman and baby-kisser who owned the Rossonian Hotel in Denver’s Five Points.
The White Elephants could barnstorm around Colorado and play inside the Denver Post Tournament, which became the primary American event to integrate in 1935. “Although they weren’t respectable participants of the Negro Leagues, they have been a dominant black baseball team frequently competing against white baseball teams due to the fact they didn’t have that inflow of black baseball groups in and around them. So they were going all over the nation, taking all comers and whooping all comers,” Kendrick stated.
One of the players on the White Elephants’ roster turned into Theodore “Bubbles” Anderson. He played with the crew at the ripe age of 15. Two years later, he could end up the handiest Colorado native to play inside the Negro Leagues in 1922 when he joined the Kansas City Monarchs as a 2nd baseman, 3rd baseman, and pitcher. Anderson would play for the Monarchs (1922-23), Washington Potomacs and Birmingham Black Barons (1924), Indianapolis ABCs (1925), and Atlanta Black Crackers (1938). He became a World War II veteran and died on March 14, 1943, at 38, from a gastric ulcer. Anderson’s final resting place is at the Fairmount Cemetery in Denver.
Stories of the Denver White Elephants, Bubbles Anderson, and the Negro Leagues are the purpose why Bob Kendrick keeps to journey u. S, hoping the legacy of those tales remains bright inside the hearts and minds of the subsequent generation. “The satisfaction, the passion, the perseverance, the determination could now not handiest change our game; more importantly, it’d transform our United States,” Kendrick stated. “This is what ushered inside the Civil Rights Movement in our United States of America. This is a compelling story of variety and inclusion.”
