Kwadwo Adae with the mural. Photos by Lucy Gellman.

The player leaps forward, holding the bat elegantly behind his shoulder. Behind him, the catcher and the umpire freeze, their faces fixed on the ball. In front of him, the field explodes in color, a brilliant display of yellow and orange. As he runs, his whole body leaves a trail of stars behind him. His white cleats barely touch the ground.

The player in question is Major Robert Allen Jr., a second baseman who played for the Brooklyn Royal Giants, Lincoln Giants and Baltimore Black Sox of the Negro Leagues in the first quarter of the 20th century. Born in New Haven in 1896, his life is a piece of little-known Elm City history that artist Kwadwo Adae hopes to bring to life brushstroke by brushstroke.

His latest mural is in West Rock Park, between a baseball diamond and a dirt road that runs along the West River. It was funded by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, which commissioned the work to cover what Adae called “really offensive graffiti” that had overgrown the wall. At 9 feet by 18 feet, it’s one of the artist’s more intimate murals – and it’s just the right size for the park.

“I love diving into the stories here, especially the stories of people of color who have been ignored,” Adae said last Friday. “If you do just a little bit of that, you realize there are so many people who deserve their flowers.”

Adae’s journey to the mural began last year when he contacted Kim Futrell, a public relations coordinator at the Ministry of Culture. At the time, Futrell asked him to cover up some graffiti that had become a dense, wound-like tangle of obscene words in a park where many children and families roam.

When Adae saw the location, he started toying with the idea of ​​doing something baseball-related. Although he knew very little about the sport, “I know people love it,” he said. “The stadiums are filled in summer all with people loving this game.”

The more he thought about it, the more a baseball story stuck. Adae grew up in New York and attended a few Yankees games. He still loves cheering on his teams (“There are really few places in society where you can go and just scream,” he said, smiling.) Years ago, his sons both played tee-ball at West Rock Park, running the bases as soft balls rolled through the overgrown grass and flew into the outfield.

So when he started looking for a topic, something clicked. For years, Adae has had a penchant for the little-told history of New Haven, with allusions to Edward Alexander Bouchet, Engineer William LansonAnd Living matriarchs from New Haven such as Diane Brown and Florence Caldwell. He is also no stranger in West Rock, where he three murals completed with the students at Elm City Montessori School over 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 discriminatory undertones,” he said. After discovering Allen in an online Negro League database, he contacted the New Haven Museum, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Office of Vital Statistics in City Hall. When he found nothing online except Allen’s March 1896 birth date and a single grainy photograph, he stepped up the project because of its educational nature.

“It was a really good feeling,” he said. “I feel like we need something in the public that reflects what we’re learning online.”

The timing also seemed right, if not overdue: In May of this year, Major League Baseball (MLB) started desegregated his scores for the first time in its history, which means that the Negro League statistics now recognized as part of the official MLB record. For the first time in years, there are also efforts to teach more about the city’s black and Latino history in schools, as part of an elective course that became a government requirement in 2022.

Before he began painting, Adae took a crash course in baseball (helped by the fact that his mother, Tess Adae, is an avid Yankees fan), learning the positions and rules of the game. He didn’t know, for example, that a baseball team wears white uniforms at a home game and darker uniforms at an away game. When sketching, he chose purple, pink and bright orange. He joked that he wanted to avoid rivalries between the Yankees and the Red Sox that his viewers might project onto the work.

Tess Adae: “The story takes you back to your inner self. It makes you strong.”

“I wanted to stay away from that!” he said with a laugh, adding that the bright colors were 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 it off with a few velvety black stars that now glitter in the sunlight.

From a distance, it looks like Allen not only hit a home run, but also opened the living, dazzling portal to another universe where he can float through life unscathed.

Last Friday, Adae paused in front of the work to take it in before pouring a pool of silver-gray paint onto his hand palette. He pointed to the plaza around home base, where Allen stood in a swirl of stars and thick purple ribbons. “I’m trying to get the shadow under the umpire and the catcher that high”, he said.

^ “Eric Williams”.

As he methodically painted, every now and then a passerby would stop to look at the work and follow his progress (Adae, who is traveling to Finland next month to paint a mural there, estimated it will be finished this week). Sipping an iced coffee on a bench along the West River, longtime New Haven resident Eric Williams says he’s excited to finish the mural, especially thinking about how young people will learn about Allen’s story.

“It’s educational for children!” he said. “We all have heroes, but their idols are usually painted differently than they are. When you mention the Negro League, it’s good to get the knowledge out to people so they can understand.”

For him, the theme is doubly fitting because he has seen how sports can be a lifeline. Growing up in New Haven, Williams had Pop Warner and Pop Smith as a fixture in his childhood, keeping him busy on the field when he wasn’t in school. As he grew older, he admired players like Frank Thomas, Hank Aaron, Barry Bonds and Darryl Strawberrywho ended his sports career with a minor league team in West Haven.

The mural is part of that. As a father, he teaches his children the black history they don’t learn in school and says that “the most valuable thing you can be is yourself,” he says. He looks forward to passing on Allen’s story – and the word about the mural.

Nice.

As she listened to the West River rippling, Bella (who declined to give her last name) also praised the mural. She is an immigrant from Russia who now lives in the Park Ridge Apartments and walks through West Rock Park every day, sometimes for hours. “I like it,” she said.

Chatting with Adae as he worked, Tess Adae was amazed by the piece. She remembers being thrilled when her son first told her about his latest mural project.

“Oh, I love, love, love it,” she said of the work that combines her love of baseball and her love for her son. “History takes you back to your core. It makes you strong. It tells you that there were so many people before you got here and they did so much to get you where you are.”