|  1859
On October 16, 1859, Harvard University announced the appointment of A.
Molineaux Hewlett, an African-American, as its first director of physical
education culture.
1892
Harvard's football team featured the first black All-American in the form
of William Henry Lewis, who had been an undergraduate at Amherst
College. Lewis had initially attended Virginia Normal (now Virginia State),
but moved north in 1889. He was voted as Amherst's captain in 1890. Lewis
went on to Harvard Law School and continued his football career. He played
in the Crimson's 6-0 loss to Yale in 1892, but so impressed Walter Camp
that he was named to Camp's All-America squad. The Crimson center rusher
was a repeat All-America honoree in 1893. Lewis became assistant district
attorney in Boston following graduation.
1897 A
member of Harvard's class of 1897, Napoleon Bonaparte Marshall
participated on the Crimson track team for four years. His specialty was
the quarter-mile. Born to well-to-do parents in Washington, D.C., Marshall
attended the prestigious Phillips Andover Preparatory School before enrolling
at Harvard. He finished third at the intercollegiate track championships
in New York in 1897, running the 440-yard event. His best time for the
440-yard dash was 51.2, which he set as a sophomore. Following graduation,
Marshall became an attorney with a long distinguished career in the nation's
capital.
1897 Eugene
Gregory was the third African-American to play baseball on a white
college team, as a member of Harvard's freshman squad. The pitcher/infielder
went on to become an educator in New Jersey.
1902 William
Clarence Matthews played shortstop for Harvard's varsity baseball
team as a freshman. The Crimson altered its 1903 schedule after several
southern schools vowed they would not compete against Harvard if Matthews
played. During his three years with the team, Matthews stole 42 bases
and batted above .300 in each season, while the Crimson went 54-16-1.
William was regarded as one of the greatest players of his time and if
he had been white, Williams would have definitely been a major league
prospect. He did continue to play with the New York Black Sox in its Burlington,
Vt. Summer Baseball League.
1907 Alain
Locke became the first African-American Rhodes Scholar, studying at
Oxford University in England from 1907 to 1910. He was not a varsity athlete
at Harvard.
1912 Theodore
Cable, an Indianapolis, Ind., native and graduate of the Phillips
Andover Academy, did not plan on participating in athletics when he entered
his freshman year. However, when he heard the track and field coach Pat
Quinn's call for freshmen in the weight events, he decided to get involved.
Cable became a member of the Crimson squad and performed in the 220-yeard
dash, the hammer-throw and the broad jump. At the 1912 Harvard-Yale meet,
he became the first African-American to win the hammer-throw event. Cable
went on to become a two-time intercollegiate hammer-throw champion in
1912 and 1913. He also won the broad jump title at 22-10 1/4.
1912 Alexander
Lewis Jackson, of Englewood, N.J., joined Cable as a sprinter on the
Crimson track team.
1921 A
standout track athlete at his high school in Florida, Edward (Ned)
Gourdin attracted national attention as a long jumper. He broke the
World mark in 1921 with a jump of 25-foot-3. That same year, Gourdin won
the pentathlon of the National Amateur Athletic Union. He won first place
in three events: the broad jump, the javelin throw and the 200-meter dash.
Following a successful collegiate career, Gourdin competed in the 1924
Olympic Games in France. He captured a silver medal in the running broad
jump.
1924
Theodora Roosevelt Boyd played for the Radcliffe womens
basketball team, the predecessor of the Harvard Crimson women’s
team. Athletic records from that time are unavailable, but Boyd played
in the Conference of the Seven Sisters, which included Radcliffe, Smith,
Wellesely, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Vassar, and Barnard. Following her
1927 graduation, Boyd earned a master’s in 1930 and a doctorate
in 1943. She went on to become a professor of French at Howard University
and later chaired the Department.
1941 Lacrosse
player Lucien Victor Alexis, Jr., of New Orleans, La., is barred
from playing a game at the U.S. Naval Academy because of his ethnicity.
Sent home 24 hours prior to his teammates, Alexis' banishment set off
a howl of protest back on campus.
1947 Tackle
Chester (Chet) Pierce became the first African-American player
to play against a white college in the South when Harvard's football team
faced the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He received a standing
ovation from the UVa crowd when he was removed for a substitute in the
fourth quarter. Pierce said the incident "thrilled me beyond description."
1958 Lawrence
Ekpebu became the first black soccer player named first-team All-Ivy
League and the first black athlete in League history to be voted first-team
by the Ivy coaches after the official formation of the League in 1955.
1958 Edward
(Ned) Gourdin, a 1921 graduate who won silver and gold medals in the
long jump at the Olympics in 1924 and 1932, becomes the first African-American
to become a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Gourdin, a native
of Jacksonville, Fla., had graduated from Cambridge Latin Prep before
enrolling at Harvard. Although he had originally intended to play baseball
at Harvard, after winning the long jump and the 100-year and 200-yard
dashes in a dual meet against Princeton, his fate as a trackstar was sealed.
In 1921, he became the first person to surpass 25 feet in the long jump.
1963 Chris
Ohiri was selected first-team All-Ivy League for the third year in
a row. "The statistics of Chris Ohiri's athletic life are irrefutably
astounding. In three varsity seasons, despite a constant struggle with
injuries, he broke every school and league goal-scoring record and led
the Crimson to three consecutive Ivy League titles. He still holds school
records for goals in a game (5), points in a game (10), career goals (47),
and career points (94). The fact that Ivy League rules allowed athletes
only three varsity seasons renders his feats more remarkable. Furthermore,
he lettered three times in track and still holds the school record for
the triple jump." ("The Angel Lion", Boston Magazine, Nov.2001)
1963 Aggrey
Awori became the first black Crimson athlete to earn a significant
league-wide honor, becoming the Athlete of the Meet at the Heptagonal
Indoor Championship. He would match that honor two years later.
1968 Standout
fencer Ron Winfield became the first African-American fencer to
be named first-team All-Ivy League.
1973 Tom
Sanders became the League's first African-American head men's basketball
coach when he named the head coach at Harvard in 1973. The Crimson posted
a 43-57 record under Sanders and consistently finished in the upper half
of the League.
1974 The
Ivy basketball season began with three black head coaches with Tom
Sanders at Harvard, Ben Bluitt at Cornell and Marcus Jackson at Dartmouth.
Of the more than 200 major college programs at the time, fewer than 10
had African-American head coaches.
 1983
The Harvard soccer field is renamed Chris Ohiri
Field in honor of the soccer star.
1987 Former
Harvard standout athletes James Brown and Dan Jiggetts became
the first African-American broadcast team for a network television game
they covered the NFL for CBS Sports.
1990 Not
only did Meredith Rainey score in six events at the Outdoor Heps
Championship, she capped the season by becoming the first black female
in Ivy history to earn an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship.
1997 Tom
Blake became the first African-American to be named the Ivy League
men's tennis Player of the Year. Two years later, his brother, James,
earned the same honor.
1998 Allison
Feaster became the first-ever Ivy League women's basketball player
to be named an All-American. She also became the first Ivy League African-American
female to play professional basketball in the United States when she suited
up for the L.A. Sparks (Feaster now starts for the Charlotte Sting). Feaster
led the Crimson to three-straight League championships and NCAA tournament
appearances. She was named Ivy League Rookie of the Year in 1994-95 and
then went on to collect an unprecedented three Ivy League Player of the
Year honors. When she graduated, Feaster held several League records,
including points scored in a season (389) and a career (1,173) and scoring
average for a season (27.8 ppg, 1997-98) and a career (21.0 ppg 1994-98).
1999 The
Ivy League celebrated its 25th year of women's championships during the
1998-99 academic year. In honor of the many women who have excelled in
their sport, the League announced its Silver Anniversary Honor Roll. Twelve
African-American women were named to the list. Basketball great Allison
Feaster '98 and track and field star Meredith Rainey '90 were
honored.
2000 It
would be hard to imagine the Taylor twins having a better year
than this. Brenda, competing for Harvard, and Lindsay, competing
for Brown, combined to win eight individual events at the 2000 Indoor
and Outdoor League Championships and both were named Academic All-Ivy!
Brenda would win a national title in the 400m hurdles the following year
and qualify for the World Championships while Lindsay would claim her
fourth straight Indoor Pentathlon title.
2001 Junior
wide receiver Carl Morris led the Harvard Crimson to its first
perfect season on the gridiron in 88 years. Morris, who entered his senior
season with nearly every Harvard receiving record, was named the League's
recipient of the Asa S. Bushnell Cup as the Most Valuable Player in the
Ivies. As a senior in 2002, he was a candidate for the Walter Payton Award,
the highest honor in Division I-AA football, and became the first two-time
recipient of the Bushnell Cup in a quarter-century.
2002
Junior sprinter Chris Lambert was the Men's Outstanding Performer
at the Outdoor Heps Championships in Annapolis after blazing through the
competition. Lambert won both the 100m and 200m dashes and both times
would have set Heps records, except that each was deemed wind-aided. Wind-aided
marks are not eligible for record purposes. His 10.19 clocking in the
100m dash was nearly a half-second faster than his nearest competitor.
2002 The
1999 Ivy Player of the Year, James Blake of Harvard, won his first
ever ATP tour title at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington, D.C.,
over the summer. Blake is also a member of the United States Davis Cup
team.
2003
Sprint standout Chris Lambert
found a new title -- that of World Champion. Lambert, running for the
British squad at the World University Games in Daegu, South Korea, took
the Gold medal in the 100-meter dash, posting a time of 10.44. At the
NCAA Championships in June, Lambert had the best 200-meter times in both
the preliminaries (20.71) and semifinals (20.73) before finishing fourth
in the final in a time of 20.64.
2003
Sports Illustrated named its 101 Most Influential
Minorities in Sports and four of the selections had Harvard backgrounds
-- Jonathan Mariner of MLB, Terdema Ussery
of the Dallas Mavericks, Ray Anderson of the Atlanta
Falcons, and Peter Bynoe of Piper Marbury Rudnick & Wolfe.
2003 Harvard
running back Clifton Dawson, of Scarborough, Ont., becomes the first freshman
to earn first-team All-Ivy status as a running back. He do so after becoming
the first Ivy freshman to ever rush for more than 1,000 yards in a season.
He ended the year with 1,187 yards and ranked 10th nationally at 131.89
yards per game.
2004 Former
Harvard Sports Information Director James E. Greenidge passed away at
the age of 54. Greenidge was the Ivy League's first African-American SID.
An invaluable member of the Boston sports community, Greenidge also served
as media relations director for the New England Patriots as well a reporter
for the Boston Globe.
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