The Old Negro League

Lester to speak about Negro Leagues, Nelson exhibit in Balcony Gallery

"We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball," a collection of paintings by award-winning artist and author Kadir Nelson, can be seen through July 31 in the Balcony Gallery at the Museum of Texas Tech, 3301 Fourth St.

Nelson could not visit Lubbock, according to David Dean, the museum's director of information services.

Instead, one of the founders of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., Larry Lester, will speak about the exhibit and the Negro Leagues at 2 p.m. today in the Helen DeVitt Jones Auditorium inside the Museum of Texas Tech.

There is no admission charge.

Lester's speech is titled: "We Are the Ship: A Personal Perspective about the Painted men of Black Baseball." He will talk both about Nelson's paintings and the men depicted in the paintings.

The exhibit is part of a two and one-half years national tour, and includes about 33 paintings and 13 sketches.

The tour is managed by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, an exhibit tour development company in Kansas City, Mo.

Nelson devoted seven years to researching and creating a series of stark, brilliant paintings that would be recreated in his illustrated book titled "We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball."

The book is dedicated to the preservation of the history of the Negro Baseball Leagues.

During the process of writing and creating this book, Nelson interviewed former Negro League players. He traveled to museums around the country, and looked at old photographs, first-hand testimonies and documentaries.

He collected baseball memorabilia, sports equipment and uniforms, and then posed and photographed himself in them, all with the intention of putting himself in the shoes of a former Negro Leaguer to recreate an authentic depiction of life in the Negro Baseball League.

The exhibition is:

■ The story of Negro League baseball.

■ The story of gifted athletes and determined owners.

■ The story of racial discrimination and international sportsmanship.

■ The story of fortunes won and lost.

■ The story of triumphs and defeats on and off the baseball diamond.

It is a perfect mirror for the social and political history of black America in the first half of the 20th century.

Most of all, the story of the Negro Leagues is about hundreds of unsung heroes who overcame segregation, hatred, terrible conditions and low pay to do the one thing they loved more than anything else in the world: play baseball.

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‘Take me out to the ballgame’

They were looking at pictures of Lil Wayne the rapper and I said, “That sure looks like a weave to me”. Right away, they answered, “ No! that’s his real hair.” A few minutes passed and I jumped in again with – “He’s got some nice teeth though”. “Actually – those are diamond grills in his mouth.” Finally I said, “Well he won’t last long in the business; next year you’ll be talking about another Lil Wayne, Little Kim, or Little Bow Wow”. To which my daughter answered, “Daddy, he’s already been in the business for 15 years; he’s a good rapper”. That’s when I said to myself – shut up man, you don’t belong inthis conversation. They were teenagers and they were having the time of their life. Still, I wanted to be a part of it. I’d driven over 700 miles to get them to their promise land – the land of subways, skyscrapers, and bridges; of Brooklyn,Queens, Harlem, and hip-hop. For one fun filled week, they took a serious bite out of the Big Apple. But the sweetest bite of all was visiting the studio of the hit BET show,‘106 & Park’ in Manhattan. Each of the girls got to meet their favorite hip-hop host but more importantly– each got on camera. You can just about imagine the mood they were in as we drove home. I wasn’t into hip-hop or anything, but I must admit, I was caught up in the excitement. Even though the show taped that Monday, it would not air until 6pm the following day; there was no way they were going to miss it. All that was standing between us and their national television debut were 14 hours and a 700 mile drive back to South Carolina. Without saying a word, we each knew what we had to do. They had to call up everyone they knew and tell them they were coming on T.V. (which they did) and I had to get them home as quickly as I could. So I decided to take an old shortcut – the Interboro Parkway. I hadn’t driven the route in ten years, but I knew it would save us much needed time. What I didn’t know was sometime over this period they’d changed the name of the route to the Jackie Robinson Parkway. Awesome! I was overjoyed with the news. Now I don’t know what possessed me to share this joy with the girls, but I did. Right in the middle of their Lil. Wayne Mutual Admiration Society, I shouted, “hey girls, we’re about to get on the Jackie Robinson Parkway! Suddenly, there was silence. Each of them slowly lifted their eyes to the massive green sign with the white letters – JACKIE ROBINSON PARKWAY. Finally, one of them spoke, “Who’s Jackie Robinson?”I was just about to answer her when my daughter blurted out, “Didn’t he play baseball or something daddy?” Here’s my chance to educate them about a real hero. I thought. But before I could collect my thoughts, I glanced into the rear view mirror. There they were, consumed again with that stupid magazine. Silly me, I should have recognized a rhetorical question when I heard it; I should have known these girls were not the least interested in Jackie Robinson. But who was Jackie Robinson anyway? To me, he was at least as important as Lil Wayne – but who said so? Why should they care about him? He became important to me only because my dad said so in 1968. We were attending a youth banquet in Brooklyn with the mayor of NewYork City and Jackie Robinson on the program. When it was over, both the mayor and Mr. Robinson stepped off the dais. That’s when my dad whispered in my ear, “there’s Jackie Robinson over there – go shake his hand”. I didn’t know who Mr. Robinson was but I knew he was someone special – not everyone could make my dad glow like that. Even so, I still couldn’t bring myself to telling my daughter and friends about him; about all the doors he opened for us. It wasn’t that I didn’t know his story, I just didn’t know how they would receive it. It’s hard trying to describe the tenor of the times sixty years ago to teenagers today – just as hard as describing a rainbow to a blind man.Sixty years ago, black children were not entitled to attend the same school as whites. Lynch mobs routinely lynched blacks while local law enforcement conveniently looked the other way. Blacks were excluded not only from certain schools but also from parks, beaches, playgrounds, department stores, night clubs, swimming pools, theaters, restrooms, hotels, barber shops, railroad cars, bus seats, libraries, hospitals, military units, and even voting booths. Back then, if a white man became acquainted with a black man, odds were good that the acquaintance stemmed from some service the black man was performing for him like shinning his shoes, mowing his lawn, or mixing his cocktails. This was the world that Jackie Robinson entered – a world where segregation was the legal and brutally enforced law of the land. As my star-struck passengers passionately turned the magazine pages, drooling over their hip-hop icons, how could I tell them of a time when we never saw ourselves in  glamor magazines,  beauty pageants, or  T.V. ; a time when cowboys wore white hats and white faces and the bad guys dressed in black; when the only roles for women on television were cooking dinner, caring for children, or comforting men after they came home from a hard days work of saving the world. How could I explain to a car filled with future mothers the pain of a Chicago mother who in 1955 sent her 14yr old son to spend the summer with his grandmother in Mississippi only to learn that he had gotten his face brutally bashed in by a bunch of racist white men who dragged him out of his bed at gun point in the middle of the night, took him into the woods, beat him, burned him, and left his dead body to rot in the local swamp all because earlier that day he innocently winked at a white woman. How can I capture the consciousness of this same mother when she was advised by the undertakers that her son’s face was so badly mutilated that his casket should remain closed yet she insisted they open it so all the world could see what they had done to her son –Emmett Till.

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