KANSAS CITY —
Bob Kendrick beamed with pride as he looked at the broken painting.
In black and gray strokes of charcoal and pastel, four men are depicted. They sit around a dinner table. Their hands are clasped together. Their heads are bowed as they say grace.
It’s a setting that played out several times in real life: Martin Luther King Jr. joining Dodgers legends Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson for a meal, thanking them for their contributions to the civil rights movement as some of the first — and in Robinson’s case, the very first — baseball players to break MLB’s color barrier.