Pictured above is the earliest known photo of football
legend William Henry Lewis when first playing varsity football at Amherst
College, c.1889.
Lewis was a man of many firsts. Considered one of the first of
three African American varsity college football players he is regarded as a
pioneer in not only athletics but also law and politics. He was the first
African American All-American in the history of college football (at Harvard
1892, 1893). Lewis became the first African American to be appointed as an
Assistant United States Attorney (in 1903), the first African American
United States Assistant Attorney General (in 1910) and one of
the first African Americans to be admitted to the American Bar Association
(1911).
He attended
Amherst College and was well-known as a ground-breaking student leader. W.E.B.
Du Bois attended the Amherst graduation ceremony to witness Lewis obtain his
diploma (along with a several other African American students).
Lewis played varsity football for three years at Amherst
beginning in his sophomore year (1889, 1890, 1891) and for two years for
Harvard while attending law school (1892, 1893), most often as a centre rush. He was the first African American to captain
a predominantly white football team, at Amherst, and was the first African
American football player and also possibly the first African American athlete
at Harvard.
After Law school, Lewis continued his association with
football, coaching (assistant coach at Harvard from 1895 – 1906) and writing
articles on the sport as well as penning one of the first books to ever discuss
football strategy, entitled “A Primer of College Football,” which was published
in 1896.
After a fairly exhaustive year and a half long search, we reviewed
all of the known/documented photos of Lewis that we were able to locate. It was
obvious that his looks were noticeably affected by age and weight, length of
hair (longer during football season), and the fact that he was what was
considered a “light-skinned black” man. Lewis exhibits marked ptosis (drooping
of the eyelid) of the left eye, a characteristic aiding in the confirmatory
identification of Lewis in many photographs. This is a fact we recognized from
our research and have not seen reference to previously in any written work. There
are a number of identified period photographs where it is not obvious to most that
Lewis is African American - see photo above titled “1892 Center Trio”,
picturing “W.C. Mackie, ’94 and M.S., W.H. Lewis, L.S., B.G. Waters ’94 and
L.S.” - used here with permission of the Beale family – copied from “The History of Harvard Football, 1874 – 1948”.
Also pictured below is a close-up of the lower right corner of an oversized
albumin photo c. 1894 by E. Chickering of Boston including Lewis, when playing for the Hyde Park football club (see June 27, 2016 posting).
In addition to Lewis, two other early African American varsity
college football players that began playing in 1889 were William Tecumseh
Sherman Jackson, also playing for Amherst (1889, 1891), and Thomas James Fisher,
who played football at Beloit College in 1889, 1890 and 1892.
In the Amherst College Olio ’91 yearbook, the 1889 College
Eleven is listed which included W.H. Lewis, Rusher and W.T.S. Jackson, HB. This
was in their sophomore year. In the Olio ’92, the College Eleven for the 1890
season is listed and Lewis is listed again as a rusher (he was known as the
centre rush, or in today’s terms, the center, a position he continued to play
at Harvard). Jackson was listed as a director (one of four), but not as a team
member, and was not present in the team photo. The ’93 Olio lists the College
Eleven for 1891, and includes Lewis (centre rush) and Jackson, RH.
To put the significance of Lewis, Jackson, and Fisher
playing varsity college football in 1889 into perspective, our research and
utilizing research done by Gregory Bond specifically, as part of his Doctoral
dissertation in 2008 “Jim Crow At Play: Race, Manliness, and the Color line In
American Sports, 1876-1916”(certainly the definitive and most important work on
African Americans in athletics during this period) suggests that it was not
until the 1898 season that there were more than ten African Americans playing
college football in the United States on predominantly white teams, only three
African Americans played football in 1889, six in 1890, and either seven or
eight for the years 1891 through 1897. This is also one reason for the extreme scarcity
of pre-1900 college football photos with African American players.
The 1889 photo*
at the beginning of this article may well be the earliest known photo to date
of any collegiate varsity African American athlete that played football, in a
football uniform or setting.
*This
photo may in fact be as early as 1888 as this is the year Lewis enrolled at
Amherst and played on the freshman team. It is generally believed and cited in
most sources that he began playing football in his sophomore year (and this was
the case for him playing on the varsity team). The source of the information referring to Lewis
playing on the freshman team in 1888 was Morris Beale’s book on Harvard
football (referenced in the above posting), in a reprinted article by Wilbur
Wood. It likely is the case as Lewis himself was an acknowledged contributor to
Beale’s book.
