Opinion: Outplaying Segregation, Negro National League Hits 100-Year Milestone

Baseball's Negro Leagues were formally founded a hundred years ago this week. They should never have had to exist — but they sure had some glorious players and times.
Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and many more stars who couldn't play in the major leagues because of the cruelty of segregation engineered a sports enterprise of their own with superb teams that included the Kansas City Monarchs, Chicago American Giants and the Homestead Grays.
Pro baseball began in the late 19th century, and established its own color lines as segregation laws took hold in the South after Reconstruction. Many American churches and schools in the north were unofficially but rigidly segregated, too.