The following combines parts of three columns originally posted on August 28, August 30, and September 11, 2000.

August 28
I was in Kansas City this weekend, and so I finally had a chance to visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. It is, in all honesty, a humble space not far from the site where Municipal Stadium -- home of the Kansas City Monarchs and the Kansas City Athletics -- once stood.

When you think of a "baseball museum," you probably think of The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. Now, my favorite thing in Cooperstown is the artifacts: the old gloves, the old baseballs, the old watches presented to old ballplayers for meritorious achievement ... you know what I mean.

Well, there's very little of this in the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, presumably because nobody saved anything.

As my companion put it, "It's kind of sad. They're trying to dredge up all this history, but there doesn't seem to be much of it left."

When we think of museums, we usually think of things. But there simply aren't many things left from the Negro Leagues. Or if there are, they've not found their way to Kansas City.

In a display devoted to Satchel Paige, do we find his uniform jersey from his days with the Kansas City Monarchs? Or his spikes from his days with the Homestead Grays? Nope, it's a jersey from the Memphis Redbirds, a minor-league team for whom Paige briefly served as general manager (i.e. figurehead).

A replica jersey.

Similarly, display cases are accentuated by vintage baseball gloves and balls. But they're not labeled, which leads me to believe that they have no historical significance, and are in the museum only as examples of what Negro Leaguers might have used. There's nothing dishonest about this, of course, but it's a far cry from Christy Mathewson's glove or Babe Ruth's pocket watch.

Instead of the artifacts, what you get is a fairly affecting series of displays that run along the walls, depicting the history of the Negro Leagues in chronological order. It's interesting stuff, if perhaps a bit less than I expected.

That said, I certainly got my six dollars worth. In fact, a single display card, included in the section on Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson, was worth six bucks:

Robinson will not make the major leagues. He is a thousand-to-one shot at best. The Negro players simply don't have the brains or the skill.

-- Jimmy Powers, The New York Times

I don't have anything profound to say about this, but I am fascinated by the fact that, as late as 1946, the greatest (that is, the most prestigious) newspaper in the greatest (that is, the largest) democracy in the world could employ someone so patently stupid as Powers must have been.

I can't recommend a special trip to Kansas City for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. But if you're in the area for another reason -- say, to see the Royal bullpen blow a late-innings lead -- then I do heartily recommend a visit, especially if your knowledge of black baseball is limited.

August 30
Monday in this space, I reprinted a powerful Jimmy Powers quote that I spotted during a recent visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. I think this is important, so I'm going to run that quote again, exactly as it appears in the museum:

Robinson will not make the major leagues. He is a thousand-to-one shot at best. The Negro players simply don't have the brains or the skill.

-- Jimmy Powers, The New York Times

And then I described Powers as "patently stupid" ... which was, I must unhappily admit, patently stupid of me. I fell for that placarded quote as dizzily as Cecelia fell for Tom Baxter in "The Purple Rose of Cairo."

First of all, Powers didn't even work for the New York Times, he worked for the New York Daily News (my thanks to a veteran colleague for pointing this out). And second, Powers actually supported the integration of the major leagues.

In my defense, I was far from my library when I wrote Monday's column. That said, I probably shouldn't accuse dead white males of stupidity and, by extension, racism, until I can check at least one other source.

And that's exactly what I did last night, turning first to Jules Tygiel's seminal work on integration, "Baseball's Great Experiment." I also consulted Arnold Rampersand's definitive "Jackie Robinson: A Biography."

Far from being a virulent separatist, Powers began agitating for baseball's integration back in 1931. And in 1939 he wrote, "I have seen personally at least ten colored ball players I know who are big leaguers. I am positive that if Josh Gibson were white, he would be a major league star."

Now, do those sound like the jottings of a man who didn't believe that black players had the "brains or the skill"?

From Rampersand's biography of Robinson:

The most unkind cuts from whites who opposed the ban [on black players in Organized Baseball] but saw Jack as the wrong choice. In the New York Daily News, columnist Jimmy Powers declared that with the flood of returning talent [from wartime military service] Robinson "will not make the grade in the big leagues next year or the next if percentages mean anything ... Robinson is a 1000-to-1 shot to make the grade."

You see what was happening? Powers did support integration, but he did not think that Jackie Robinson was the man for the job. Powers wasn't the only one who held this opinion -- Bob Feller said if Robinson "were a white man I doubt they would even consider him as big league material" -- but I also suspect that Powers' judgment was clouded by his quite public disdain for Branch Rickey.

So what about that sentence -- "The Negro players simply don't have the brains or the skill." -- the single most powerful sentence you'll read at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum? Would Tygiel and Rampersand, had they seen that line, have declined to include this "grabber" in their books?

Not likely. Rather, I suspect that Powers never wrote any such thing, and that someone made a huge mistake, a huge mistake that I can only hope was an honest one.

I did attempt to reach Raymond Doswell, curator of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, but he's not yet returned my call. In the meantime, I urge the museum to immediately remove the placard in question, because I believe that its continuing existence, on public display, represents an egregious insult to the good name of Jimmy Powers.

September 11
... I've got some good news. You might remember that a couple of weeks ago, I visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and repeated in this space a quote exhibited there. That quote, attributed to columnist Jimmy Powers, suggested that Powers was, at best, an enemy of the integration of Major League Baseball; at worst, a rabid racist.

But after conducting a bit of superficial research, I came to believe that the quote attributed to Powers was bogus. I wrote about it here, and I also contacted the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Well, this weekend I received an e-mail message from Raymond Doswell, the museum's curator. His message read, in part, "Upon further review, it appears that the placard on Jimmy Powers in the museum exhibit is grossly mis-labeled. We will correct this right away. I believe our exhibit designers may have mixed up some quotes and sources when producing this label. It is an unfortunate mistake on our part."

My compliments to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum for their willingness to address this situation quickly and even-handedly. I know it might not seem like a big thing, but a man's good name was at stake.