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Cambridge, Mass., 1904. Large silver print mounted on gray paperboard, 13.25” x 15.75”. Manuscript captions in white above and below photo. CONDITION: Image very good; loss to surface of mount.

A rare original photograph of Harvard University’s 1904 baseball team, featuring pathbreaking star shortstop William Clarence Matthews, who broke the color barrier in professional baseball and went on to work in Washington, D.C. as one of the first African American Assistant Attorneys General.

Seated second to the left in the front row, William Clarence Matthews (1877–1928) holds his baseball cap and gives the camera a sidelong look. He is surrounded by his fellow team members as well as their coach, trainer, manager, and assistant manager. The scores of their three games against Yale during the 1904 season are recorded in white manuscript captions on the mount below: “Harvard—5—Yale—3”; “Harvard—1—Yale—6”; and “Harvard—5—Yale—0.”

Matthews was born in Selma, Alabama, to tailor William Matthews and his wife Elizabeth. Following the death of his father in the 1890s, Matthews moved with his family to Montgomery, Alabama and attended the Tuskegee Institute between 1893 and 1897, founding the football team, captaining the baseball team, and graduating second in his class. With the support of Booker T. Washington, Matthews went on to attend Phillips Andover Academy and in 1901 entered Harvard University, where he became the first Black member of the varsity baseball team—one of the best in the country—and was quickly recognized as a standout player, “recording two hits, two runs, and a stolen base playing shortstop against the University of Maine in his debut…and scoring the winning run against rival Yale University…earning praise—rare praise devoid of racial language—from the New York Times for his performance” (Minatel). Matthews soon became a newspaper sensation, but despite his fame, talent, leadership ability, and personal integrity, he was never made captain of the team. Moreover, for his first three years at Harvard, he was left behind during the annual southern road trip, lest Southern opponents like Navy, Georgetown, Virginia, and Duke (then Trinity) forfeit rather than face a Black player. His inclusion in the tour in 1905 evidently prompted an alteration in the schedule, as The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine of 1905 reported that “the Southern trip, although two of the games had to be canceled on account of the protests against Harvard’s playing a negro on the team, was decidedly successful, the team winning all three games.” That season Matthews batted .400 and stole 25 bases, closing his college career with seventy-six victories out of ninety-four games.

Following his graduation in 1905, Matthews was considered to have the best chance of breaking the color barrier in the Major League, but in spite of his public statements that “A negro is just as good as a white man and has just as much right to play ball,” (Lindholm) the 1887 ban on African American players held firm, and he instead joined the Northern League in Vermont. In doing so, he became the only African American player on a U.S. professional team, and batted an average of .314 in the first half of his season. When Matthews left the league “amid rampant racism,” an attempt was made by “Fred Tenney, the manager of the lowly Boston Beaneaters…to violate the National League’s color barrier by signing Matthews,” but was stymied by the rest of the League (Minatel). Matthews entered law school at Boston University, coaching several high school teams to pay his way, and in 1908 he passed the bar and married Pamela Belle Lloyd of Hayneville, Alabama. In 1913 he was appointed special assistant to the U.S. district attorney in Boston; ten years later he served for three years as legal counsel to Black nationalist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940); and in 1924 he played a major role in organizing more than a million Black voters for Calvin Coolidge, after which he was appointed assistant U.S. Attorney General. He died suddenly of a perforated ulcer at the age of fifty-one, and was mourned as “one of the most prominent Negro members of the bar in America” and a “leader of the colored race” (Castrovince). The prominent Black weekly The New York Age captioned his photo simply: “‘Matty’ is Dead’” (Castrovince).

H. William Tupper (1846–1911) was a Massachusetts-born photographer who operated a studio in Harvard Square and worked for many years as the official photographer for Harvard University. He advertised “portrait work of all kinds, cabinets, panels, etc., in all styles, with interior and exterior views and large groups a specialty” (“H. William Tupper”). His portrait of Harvard’s 1905 graduating class—including Matthews—is held at MoMA.

No holdings of this original photograph recorded in OCLC, nor do Google searches yield any examples. Harvard presumably has one. A photomechanical reproduction appears in Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide of 1905.

A rare and very appealing photograph of “the Jackie Robinson of his age” and his Harvard teammates.

REFERENCES: Minatel, Joseph W. “Harvard Baseball’s Complex Racial History: William Clarence Matthews and the Southern Road Trips,” The Harvard Crimson, September 3, 2019, online; “Athletics. Baseball,” The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 52 (1905), p. 675; Lindholm, Karl. “Vita: William Clarence Matthews,” Harvard Magazine online and “William Clarence Matthews: ‘The Jackie Robinson of His Day,’” The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture (1997); “Harvard and Yale Scores” at The Harvard Crimson (1912) online; “H. William Tupper,” The Cambridge Chronicle, July 27, 1907.

Item #9499

Price: $2,750.00