The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City's historic 18th & Vine Jazz District preserves the history of professional African-American baseball from the early 1900s to the 1950s and its impact on America's social advancement. This privately funded nonprofit museum was incorporated in 1990 two blocks from the Paseo YMCA, where Andrew "Rube" Foster established the Negro National League in 1920. Inspired by Horace M. Peterson III, founder of The Black Archives of Mid-America, and led passionately by Negro Leagues legend John "Buck" O'Neil, local historians, business leaders, and former professional baseball players joined to create a museum devoted to this chapter of American history. It opened to the public in a one-room office space in 1991, expanded by 1994 into a 2,000 square foot space in the Lincoln Building that helped spur redevelopment of the 18th & Vine Jazz District, and in November 1997 joined the American Jazz Museum in the new Museums at 18th & Vine complex. The museum now includes a 10,000 square foot exhibit with multimedia displays, film exhibits, hundreds of photographs, 12 bronze sculptures of Negro League legends, and a growing collection of artifacts, and in July 2006 it received designation from the U.S. Congress as America's National Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.
