It was founded by Kerry Yo Nakagawa, the author of Through a Diamond: 100 Years of Japanese American Baseball.
The NBRP's mission is to bring awareness and education about Japanese American Concentration Camps during World War II, through the prism of their multimedia projects and baseball.
These ballplayers also kept the All-American Pastime alive during their incarceration during World War II as they played 'behind barbed wire' and again were denied of professional MLB careers.
The project began on May 4, 1996, at the Fresno Museum as the first exhibit to display the photos, memorabilia, artifacts, and text history of the Nikkei in baseball.
NBRP has co-produced two curriculums through the Stanford Program of International and Cross Cultural Education and produced the dramatic narrative film American Pastime released by Warner Bros. in 2007.