(Almost) Lost To History

WHY MUSAY EXISTS

To tumble joyfully down a rabbit hole of discovery on the heels of finding a “whoa, this is cool” museum treasure is, for curious people like me…a high.

MUSAY was founded because I realized younger and more diverse populations would not have the joy of “whoa, this is cool” discoveries or rabbit hole journeys unless they were invited into museums in ways that worked for them...via mobile, with friends and with content that’s relevant to where they are in that moment. MUSAY 2.0 was designed by Gen Z for Gen Z, so…more on that in a couple of weeks!

For today - if you enjoy discovering new things that you can tell someone else about - then you’re going to have fun with today’s read.

Thank you again for your support of MUSAY!

LISTENING WHEN HISTORY WHISPERS

Today’s post by Darius Coleman reminded me of the story of Belle da Costa Greene - the founding librarian of my beloved Morgan Library in NYC; a story I didn’t know until last year after being a fan of the Morgan for almost 20 years.

Call it a delayed rabbit hole journey - but Belle da Costa Greene is one of the most celebrated and widely respected librarians in history, and I dove in to learn as much as I could. As a woman in the early 1900’s, Bella defied every expectation of what a woman “should” be and is responsible for identifying, sourcing and negotiating almost every deal for the illuminated manuscripts and books in J.P. Morgan’s library. She was also passing as white.

The J.P. Morgan Library wouldn’t exist without Belle da Costa Greene, and the library celebrated her with her own exhibit last year. I suspect there are more stories like hers that are currently still whispers waiting for someone to take the time to listen and then share them - more loudly - with the world. Darius’ story is one of these - enjoy!

A Note From Darius: This is the second installment of a two-part series on the importance of museums holding up the truth of history that can get lost in time.

(ALMOST) LOST TO HISTORY

In my last post, I talked a lot about Jackie Robinson, and for good reason. It’s always important to broaden your horizons as an avid writer and reader, and this work has been a way for me to do that. Originally, this article had nothing to do with the man I am about to name; it was just Jackie and nothing else. 

Then I started to research and found a name I had never seen before. He was a person who seemed integral to the history of baseball but was largely unaddressed in any form of media before or really after his appearance. There are only a few scholars who created enough information for me to write this article about. Thanks to experts like them — who not only feed us knowledge but are also integral to museums — we have that story. 

Jackie Robinson is not the first Black man to ever play in the MLB. That “honor” goes to Willam Edward White. 

William isn’t a person you can find a lot of history on. In fact, because of the time and place of his birth and the facts surrounding it, there are very few things that we know for sure about him. In fact, even the conversation about if William was Black to begin with was something that was lost to history for almost 100 years after he played his one and only game of professional baseball in 1879. Bruce Allardyce of the Society for American Baseball Research is one of the few who have written in-depth about White.

Back in the day, the rosters of MLB teams were very small — 11 players, compared to 40 now. There were many times that when a player got hurt, his team would pay another player for a day to trot onto the field and leave once the original player returned from injury. On June 21, 1879, according to Allardyce, the crowd for the Providence Grays and the Cleveland Blues had no idea that they were watching the first Black man ever to play in MLB. 

Because for 60 years, William Edward White was white. 

As I mentioned earlier, there isn’t much information on William. We know he was born in Georgia in October 1860. We know that his father, a white man named Andrew Jackson White, was not only an extremely wealthy banker but also part of the Civil War as captain of the 3rd Georgia Infantry Battalion. We also know that Captain White had a child, William, with his mulatto “servant.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the fact that William was born a slave. Because by rule around the South, generally being any part Black meant you were fully recognized as Black. While Captain White would send William and his two siblings to school and also leave them a large sum of money in his will, he would never be near them. 

This is the story of William’s life. There isn’t too much conversation about him. To most people of the time, William was just any regular white man. He never even played pro baseball again. 

But the numbers didn’t lie: That boy was elite.

According to the 1880 Spalding guide, a resource for baseball statistics, White had a .488 batting average at Brown University. That was the best average of any college player listed. And the next year, he was ranked the 18th-best college player. Yet for some reason, he only picked up a baseball one time as a pro. He opted for many other odd jobs, like being a draftsman, freighting agent, clerk, and bookkeeper.

For three decades in the US Census, according to Allardyce, William was listed as white. Because even though racism was rampant down in the South and even in the North, familial history was harder to confirm. If you looked white and then appeared in a city, there was no way for most people to tell you had Black heritage unless you told them. 

Only William knew he was the first Black man to play pro baseball. To everyone else, he was just a bright-eyed kid playing a baseball game for a fist full of dollars. 

I wonder if his mother ever got the chance to know that her son accomplished such a historic feat. If she ever even got to see her son again once his father had paid for him to be sent to school. I wonder if she ever knew that her son died of blood poisoning on March 29, 1937. Not just as a Black man, but as the first slave-born man to ever put on a glove for a MLB team. 

But I think I know the answer. And I bet you do too.

Maybe this is why William only allowed himself to be Black in reference to the census of Chicago in 1920. We will never know how William looked at himself. Did he see himself as a mixed man? Did he see himself as a Black man who happened to be white-passing? Or, to William, was he just a white man playing a white man’s sport? There has been talk of a possible conversation William and his father had, where his father might have told him to identify as white when he went up to high school and William just kept that. We will never know. 

This story represents something special to MUSAY. A person whose story was lost in history was brought back by groups of scholars and people who cared. And one day, I hope that his story will be broadcast even more, with the help of museums and people like you reading and interacting with them. Supporting your local museums and the researchers that work with them ensures that stories like William’s are told.

Thank you so much for reading.

About Darius Coleman

Darius doesn’t just see the world. He feels it — deeply. He takes it in so it can surprise him, challenge him, and ultimately inspire him to dream, to write, to create. Whether it’s prose or poetry, sports or culture, Darius’s voice is one you must hear. A 2025 Magna Cum Laude graduate of Tennessee State University’s School of Mass Communications, Darius is only getting started and MUSAY is overjoyed he’s starting here.

About MUSAY

MUSAY is an app that transforms phones from isolation devices into discovery tools to  connect people with cultural experiences they never knew they needed — creating community around shared moments of awe while helping cultural institutions thrive.

MUSAY believes people, especially Gen Z, deserve more than endless scrolling through other people's lives and has engaged them in its design process.  The result is an App that gets people off their sofa and off their screen by helping them find things to do that fit their vibe; with all the things to do being at museums.  

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