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Teenie Harris captures the backstory
of baseball in the city like only a
Pittsburgher can.
BY PHILIP ANSELMO
Charles “Teenie” Harris, Baseball players, front row from left: Douglas Jones, Charles Evans, Thomas Wallace, Sterling Smith, Joe Lewis, Larry
Hubbard; back row: Roy Campanella, Gair Allie, Jackie Robinson, Joe Black, Carlos Bernier, Sam Narron, and Ronald Gray holding shoes on
left, at Uptown Little League baseball opening day ceremonies, Kennard Field, May 29, 1953, Heinz Family Fund, © 2006 Charles “Teenie”
Harris Archive, Carnegie Museum of Art
n the surface, the photograph looks
much like any other Little League
team portrait: young ballplayers
kneeling in the foreground with mitts slung
across their laps, a group of adults lined up
behind them. But this particular black-andwhite image, taken on May 29, 1953, by
Charles “Teenie” Harris, captures anything
but the typical. It was opening day for the
O
intimate portraits of Negro League players,
sandlot teams, and otherwise undocumented
moments on and off the field.
Included are several candid shots of
famed Pittsburgh Pirates players of the past
along with icons of the game, such as Josh
Gibson, Roberto Clemente, and Willie Mays.
One such print shows Jackie Robinson smiling on a hotel couch alongside Major League
the Civil Rights movement that comes from
this collection of 25 prints.”
And no one was better positioned to tell
it than Harris.The Hill District native was a
shortstop and founding member of the
Pittsburgh Crawfords—a sandlot team until
1931, when local business owner and reputed numbers runner Gus Greenlee turned the
team into one of the dominant clubs in the
“The exhibition captures black baseball in Pittsburgh. But what’s most compelling is the stories behind
that history.” - SEAN GIBSON, GREAT-GRANDSON OF NEGRO LEAGUE POWER-HITTER AND HALL-OF-FAMER JOSH GIBSON
Uptown Little League in Pittsburgh, the city’s
first racially integrated league. Pictured in the
center of the frame are several professional
players, including Jackie Robinson and fellow
Brooklyn Dodger teammates Roy Campanella
and Joe Black.
“Teenie captured the whole panorama
of it—that it wasn’t just about the sports
action, but also an important community
event elevated by the presence of Jackie
Robinson, and recognizing it was also an
important political event,” says Louise
Lippincott, curator of fine arts at Carnegie
Museum of Art.
The image is one of 25 taken between
1938 and 1966 and grouped together to
form Teenie Harris Photographs: Baseball in
Pittsburgh, on view through September 22.
The new exhibition, which includes five
minutes of recently digitized 16mm film
shot by Harris at Forbes Field, features
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Baseball executive Wesley Branch Rickey in
1957, 10 years after Rickey signed the
slugger to the Dodgers roster, breaking the
baseball color barrier. (Pittsburgh fans will,
of course, remember Rickey as the trailblazing general manager who acquired such
Pirates greats as Clemente, Bill Mazeroski,
and Dick Groat.)
Exhibition organizers initially imagined the
show as a chronicle of black baseball in
Pittsburgh, but soon realized how closely that
history tracked the desegregation of the city,
the integration of professional sports, and
the impact both had on the city.
“We realized there was a much bigger
story about the history of the community and
the role sports played in that history,” says
Lippincott, who for more than a decade has
managed the vast Teenie Harris Archive.
“There’s quite a big story about the integration of professional sports and its relation to
Negro League. Harris’s lifelong love of the
game combined with his keen eye for the
photographic moment during a decades-long
career with the Pittsburgh Courier, the leading
national African American newspaper of the
time, translated into unbeatable access.
Carnegie Museum of Art tapped another
insider, Sean Gibson, great-grandson of Negro
League power-hitter and hall-of-famer Josh
Gibson, to guest curate the exhibition.
Gibson’s grandfather, Josh Gibson, Jr., also
played in the Negro League in Pittsburgh and
went on to create the Josh Gibson Foundation
to maintain his father’s legacy. Sean Gibson
took the helm of the foundation after college
and now serves as its executive director.
Over several weeks, Gibson and Kerin
Shellenbarger, archivist for the Teenie Harris
collection, each selected 50 images from the
original 667 baseball-related photographs by
Harris—out of the nearly 80,000 total
images in his archive. Gibson paid special attention to historic moments within the sport, while
Shellenbarger considered aesthetics. Then they
teamed up with Lippincott to decide which 25
would make the final cut. Gibson recalls the
uncanny moment of looking through images chosen by Shellenbarger and recognizing his greatgrandfather standing for a group portrait at the
Harris Hotel and Grill in the Hill District in 1944.
“The exhibition captures black baseball in
Pittsburgh,” says Gibson. “But what’s most compelling is the stories behind that history: Jackie
Robinson; Curtis Roberts, the first African
American player for Pittsburgh [signed seven years
after Robinson]; and Josh Gibson, and you get him
out of uniform just hanging out.”
Those personal connections motivated
Gibson’s own process. A candid shot of Boston
Red Sox slugger Ted Williams and Minnie Minoso
of the Cleveland Indians chatting in the dugout
during the 1959 All-Star Game stood out to
Gibson “because in 1966, when Williams got into
the Hall of Fame, he mentioned in his speech that
one day Negro League ballplayers such as
Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson would get into the
Hall of Fame—and five years later Paige got in,
and Gibson soon after,” he says.
Indeed it’s about special moments, like the
1961 image of Mark Harris, Teenie’s grandson,
clad in a diaper and clutching a baseball bat. Or
spectators dressed to the nines at a Homestead
Grays game at Forbes Field sometime between
1940 and 1945. There’s a surprise tucked into
the bottom right-hand corner of the latter image:
a glimpse of backup catcher Robert “Rab Roy”
Gaston and a young Josh Gibson, Jr., then a
batboy who went on to play briefly for the team.
Archive sleuthing is part detective work, and in
the case of the Teenie Harris Archive many of the
photographic negatives and much of the film
footage document moments in a largely unchronicled history. Even some of the more public
moments are not prefaced with captions or title
cards and time stamps.
“With the Teenie Harris Archive, we encourage
people to get involved with making history,” says
Lippincott. “We always accept that our knowledge
of a particular photograph or subject is incomplete and we encourage people who know something—a name, a location—to contact us and
provide information that’s missing.”
She wasn’t surprised that Gibson recognized
his own grandfather in one of the portraits and
she expected he wouldn’t be the only one. Harris
was a voracious documentarian of his time, his
neighborhood, his city, his race.
“He took photos of everyone: famous people,
non-famous, black, white, kids, adults, Little
League games, professional games, women in
softball, women in baseball, victory parades,”
says Gibson. “He didn’t just focus on African
Americans, he took pictures of everyone. That’s
what’s so fascinating to me about his work: It
didn’t matter who it was, when it was—he took
the photo.” n
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