BILL LITTLEFIELD, WBUR
- Last week in New York City, the College Football Hall of Fame inducted its class of 2009.
William Henry Lewis was among the 18 men honored. To describe his induction as “belated” would be an understatement. Lewis played his football at Amherst College and Harvard University in the early 1890s, and at those two schools, according to Evan Albright, who has written extensively about Lewis, he began accumulating a long list of achievements and distinctions.
“He was the first black All-American football player, for heaven’s sake,” Albright said. “He was the first African-American to captain a predominantly white team, which he did at Harvard. He also captained the Amherst squad when he was there. He wrote one of the first books on football, a primer on college football. And he was the first paid coach that Harvard ever had for its football program.”
Under the eligibility rules of that time, Lewis could play for Harvard while he was attending the law school there, even though he’d played as an undergraduate at Amherst.
