“Nobody Told Us”

This article examines continuity and change in racial meaning and inequality through the case of the author’s visits to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. As part of a broader autoethnographic study of baseball in social life, this article compares past and present racial events and memorials through the lens of personal travel and the standpoint of a white Southern biography and scholarly trajectory over time. Specifically, the author outlines how racial meanings and memorials shift and remain the same in different places and over time in relation to personal and broader cultural narratives. To this end, the continuity and change of racial relations in the United States and personal biography of the author become comparative autoethnographic contexts for exploring, experiencing, and reflecting upon the contents and contours of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum as well as broader memorials of racial history available to tourists, scholars, and other travelers in the United States of the 2020s.