Kwadwo Adae with the mural. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The player springs forward, the bat held gracefully behind his shoulder. Behind him, the catcher and umpire freeze in time, their faces fixed on the ball. Before him, the field explodes into color, a starburst of yellow and orange, electric. As he begins to run, his whole body trails stars. His white cleats barely touch the ground.
The player in question is Major Robert Allen Jr., a second baseman who played for the Negro League's Brooklyn Royal Giants, Lincoln Giants, and Baltimore Black Sox in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Born in 1896 in New Haven, his life is a piece of little-known Elm City history that artist Kwadwo Adae is hoping to amplify, one brushstroke at a time.
His latest mural stands in West Rock Park, between a baseball diamond and dirt trail that runs by the West River. It is funded by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, which commissioned the piece as a way to cover what Adae called “really lewd graffiti” that had taken over the wall. At nine by 18 feet, it is one of the artist’s more intimate murals—and one that feels exactly the right size for the park.
“I love digging into the histories that are here, especially the people of color that have been ignored,” Adae said last Friday. “You do just a little of it and you realize there are so many people who deserve their flowers.”
Adae’s path to the mural began last year, when he connected with Kim Futrell, community outreach coordinator in the Department of Cultural Affairs. At the time, Futrell asked him to cover some graffiti that had become a thick, wound-like tangle of obscene words in a park that sees a lot of foot traffic from kids and families.
Adae started to play with the idea of something baseball related when he saw the location. While he knew very little about the sport, “I know that people love it,” he said. “Stadiums are filled in the summer, all with people loving this game.”
The more he thought about it, the more a baseball narrative stuck. Growing up in New York, Adae went to a handful of Yankees’ games, and still loves cheering teams on (“There are really very few places in society where you can go and just scream,” he said with a smile). Years ago, his sons both played tee-ball in West Rock Park, running the bases as soft balls rolled in the overgrown grass and soared into the outfield.
So when he started looking for a subject, something clicked. For years, Adae has had a love for undertold New Haven history, with nods to Edward Alexander Bouchet, engineer William Lanson, and living New Haven matriarchs like Diane Brown and Florence Caldwell. He’s also no stranger to West Rock, where he’s completed three murals with the students at Elm City Montessori School in the past few years. He began to wonder what New Haven sports history had been swept under the rug.
“It’s America’s pastime, so of course it’s going to have some discriminatory undertones to it,” he said. After spotting Allen in a Negro League database online, he turned to the New Haven Museum, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscipt Library, and the Office of Vital Statistics at City Hall. When he came up blank, save Allen’s March 1896 birth date and a single grainy photo online, he doubled down on the project for its educational bent.
“It felt really good,” he said. “I feel like we need to have something in the public that mirrors what we’re learning online.”
The timing also felt fortuitous, if not also overdue: in May of this year, Major League Baseball (MLB) desegregated its scores for the first time in its history, meaning that Negro League statistics are now recognized as part of the official MLB record. For the first time in years, there’s also a push to teach more of the city’s Black and Latino history in schools, as part of an elective class that became a state requirement in 2022.
Before he started painting, Adae gave himself a crash course in baseball (it helped that his mom, Tess Adae, is an avid Yankees fan), learning about positions and rules of the game. He hadn’t known, for instance, that a baseball team will wear white uniforms for a home game, and darker uniforms for an away game. As he sketched, he chose purples, pinks, and vibrant oranges. He joked that he wanted to avoid Yankees-Red Sox rivalries that his viewers might project onto the work.
Tess Adae: “History takes you back to your core. It makes you sturdy."
“I wanted to stay away from that!” he said with a laugh, adding that the bright colors are a nod to his Ghanaian heritage. After adding the number nine for New Haven’s nine squares—he couldn’t find Allen’s number anywhere—he finished with a smattering of velvety black stars that now glitter in the sunlight.
From afar, it looks as though Allen has not only hit a home run, but opened the vivid, dazzling portal to another universe, one where he can soar through life unscathed.
Last Friday, Adae paused before the work, taking it in before pouring a pool of silver-gray paint onto his handheld palette. He gestured to the space around home plate, where Allen stood in a swirl of stars and thick ribbons of purple. “I’m trying to get the shadow under the umpire and the catcher that will push them up,” he said.
Eric Williams.
As he painted methodically, the occasional passer-by stopped to take in the work and track its progress (Adae, who is headed to Finland for a mural project next month, estimated that it will be done this week). Sipping an iced coffee on a bench by the West River, longtime New Havener Eric Williams said he is excited to see the mural go up, especially when he thinks of young people learning Allen’s history.
“It’s educational for kids!” he said. “We all have heroes, but their idols are usually painted a different color from them. When you mention the Negro League, it’s good to put the knowledge out there for people to understand.”
For him, the subject is doubly fitting, because he’s seen how sports can be a lifeline. Growing up in New Haven, Williams saw Pop Warner and Pop Smith as fixtures of his childhood, and kept him occupied on the playing field when he wasn’t in school. As he got older, he looked up to players like Frank Thomas, Hank Aaron, Barry Bonds and Darryl Strawberry, who closed out his athletic career with a Minor League team in West Haven.
Now, the mural is part of that. As a dad, he teaches his kids about Black history that they aren’t getting in school, and that “the most valuable thing you can be is yourself,” he said. He's excited to pass Allen’s story—and word of the mural—on.
Bella.
As she listened to the burbling West River, Bella (she declined to give her last name) also praised the mural. An immigrant from Russia, she now lives in the Park Ridge Apartments, and walks through West Rock Park each day, sometimes for hours. “I like it,” she said.
Chatting with Adae as he worked, Tess Adae echoed an excitement for the piece. When her son first told her about his latest mural project, she was thrilled, she remembered.
“Oh, I love, love, love it,” she said of the work, which brings together her love of baseball and her love of her son. “History takes you back to your core. It makes you sturdy. It tells you that there were so many people before you got here and that they did so much for you to be where you are."