Rumors and Facts: William Clarence Matthews’s 1905 Challenge to Major League Baseball’s Color Barrier

Rumors sometimes have a basis in fact, and sometimes rumors are pure fiction, made up, irresponsible, serving commercial, political, or personal ends. In 1905, one of baseball’s most compelling rumors involved the imminent entry into the major leagues of William Clarence Matthews, “Harvard’s famous colored shortstop.”¹ This rumor, reported in the Boston Traveler in July 1905, was repeated in Sol White’s History of Colored Baseball (1907) and passed on to contemporary audiences by Robert Peterson in his seminal Only the Ball was White (1970).

There are inevitable questions about the rumor’s veracity. Is it possible that forty years before Jackie Robinson signed a contract with Brooklyn, someone in organized baseball was seriously considering adding a black man to a major league roster?

This essay addresses that question by examining the major players—the Boston Nationals’ player-manager Fred Tenney in particular—as well as the primary documents associated with the rumor of Matthews’s breakthrough, demonstrating the reasons Matthews might plausibly be considered for this role, while also raising the possibility that the Traveler conjured a patently false story in Boston’s overheated journalistic environment during the first decade of the twentieth century.

Regardless of his race, Matthews was certainly worthy of the major leagues. He was a terrific player, in the topmost rank of collegiate baseball players in the country at a time when skilled collegians were walking off their campuses onto major league nines.² As a freshman at Harvard, he scored the winning run in the decisive game of the Yale series at the Polo Grounds before ten thousand fans. He never looked back, leading Harvard in hitting the next three years, batting .400 in his senior year and stealing 25 bases. The Harvard nine, preeminent among collegiate programs, won 76 games and lost 18 in Matthews’s four years on the team. At the time of the rumor, he was playing professionally for Burlington in the Northern League of Vermont, a fast independent or “outlaw” league, which in its six-year existence claimed over one hundred major league players.

After his season in Burlington, Matthews went back to Boston and got on with his life, the rumor proving to be just that and no more. He enrolled in Boston University Law School and passed the bar in 1907, the same year he married Pamela Belle Lloyd of Hayneworth, Alabama. To make ends meet, he coached at a number of Boston-area high schools. Following the lead of his mentor, William Henry Lewis, Matthews worked for the government as special assistant to the U.S. district attorney in Boston, succeeding Lewis.³ After World War I, Matthews served as the chief legal counsel for Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) from 1920 to 1923. When Matthews died in 1928 at just fifty-one years of age, he was serving as an assistant attorney general in the Coolidge administration, based in San Francisco. His death was reported in all the major East Coast newspapers. The black press noted his death in banner headlines; the Pittsburgh Courier announced “Matty is dead” under the headline “William Clarence Matthews Dies Suddenly at Capitol/Political Leader’s Death a Shock.”⁴

The Rumored Breakthrough: Tenney’s Gambit

Right in the middle of the summer of 1905, two weeks after he had arrived in Burlington, Matthews became national news for more than being the lone black in pro ball who played in an outlaw league in northern New England and confronted the enmity of some opposing players. The headline in the Boston Traveler sports page on July 15 revealed that “Matthews May Play Ball with Tenney’s Team.” Underneath the headline was this provocative lead:

Will Matthews, the negro ballplayer, whose antics at Harvard, and later while on the Burlington team of the Vermont League, wear a Tenney Tribe uniform?

That is the question of the hour.

Matthews’s signing with the major league Boston Nationals had been “hinted at” for days, according to the Traveler, but “now it is rumored that it...