William Clarence Matthews
(1877-1928)
Challenged the Color Line in Baseball
William Clarence Matthews was a pioneer in athletics, politics and law who challenged the color line in baseball more than 40 years before Jackie Robinson.
Matthews was born in Selma, Alabama, January 7, 1877. He graduated second in his class at the Tuskegee Institute and was a standout athlete in baseball and football. With Booker T. Washington’s help, he was sent north for further education, first to Phillips Academy and then to Harvard. He enrolled at Harvard in the fall of 1901 and was able to walk on to the varsity baseball team as a freshman.
From 1901 to 1905, he played shortstop on perhaps the best college team in the country at a time when baseball enjoyed singular appeal in the United States. Matthews was a remarkable player. The Boston Post dubbed him "no doubt the greatest colored athlete of all time" and "the best infielder Harvard ever had." The racism of the era created controversy as Southern teams on Harvard’s road trips refused to play the Crimson if Matthews took the field. From 1902-04, Harvard held Matthews out of Southern games, but in 1905 the Crimson chose to cancel its Southern road trip and remain in the Northeast during the first weeks of April.
Matthews played his only season of professional baseball in 1905, playing for Burlington in Vermont's Northern League, making him the first and only African American player competing alongside whites in any professional baseball league at the time. The Boston Traveler reported in 1905 that Boston's National League team was interested in signing him, but Matthews was ultimately denied the opportunity to play Major League Baseball.
Matthews had options off the diamond, studying law at Boston University and passing the bar in 1908. He became one of the first Black Assistant District Attorneys in the country, worked as legal counsel to separatist Marcus Garvey, and served in Republican Party politics. He headed the Colored Division of the Republican National Committee, the first time that a major U.S. political party put an African American in charge of efforts to organize the African American vote. Northern African Americans voted overwhelmingly for Coolidge. Following the election, Matthews moved to Washington D.C. and served as a U.S. Assistant Attorney General before dying suddenly at the age of 51 from a perforated ulcer. At the time of his death the New York Times called him "one of the most prominent Negro members of the bar in America."
William Clarence Matthews' legacy lives on. Harold Kaese wrote in the Boston Globe in 1965 that he was "the Jackie Robinson of his age." Since 2006, the Ivy League baseball team to win the conference title receives the William Clarence Matthews Trophy. He earned induction into the College Baseball Hall of Fame in the Class of 2014.
Sources:
Lindholm, Karl (1998). "William Clarence Matthews: Brief Life of a Baseball Pioneer, 1877–1928". Harvard Magazine. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Clarence_Matthews