Emma Hamilton Dancing

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Thomas Jarvis Taylor was born November 25, 1885, in New Haven, Connecticut. His family lived at 32 Foote Street. Taylor received his preparatory education at the Hopkins Grammar School and graduated in 1902.1 In 1903, he began attending the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, living at his family home in the Dixwell neighborhood.2 According to the Yale Daily News, Taylor tried to join the freshman baseball team at Yale but did not make the team for unknown reasons.3 Possibly due to being passed over for the Yale baseball team, Thomas Jarvis Taylor transferred to Wesleyan University in 1904 where he was on the school’s baseball team in 1905 and 1906. Throughout his baseball career at Wesleyan, he often was often unable to play for Wesleyan as rival teams, such as Princeton, refused to play against a Black person.4 He attempted to rejoin the team, but, according to a local news story, the captain of the team forced Taylor and another Black player, John Davis Smith, off the team on account of their race.5

Taylor graduated from Wesleyan University in 1908 with a bachelor of science degree and began attending Yale Graduate School the same year to study French.6 He left Yale Graduate School the following year to teach at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, where he was appointed assistant dean.7 He taught there until 1915 when he moved to Bordentown, New Jersey to teach at Bordentown Industrial Manual Training School from 1915 to 1918. He went to Howard University’s Teaching Institute during the summer of 1918 and began teaching at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri in the fall of 1918. At some point, Taylor moved to Chicago and attended Kent Law School, graduating in 1924.8 There are discrepancies about what he did after law school. His Yale obituary reported that he was working as a probation officer in the Juvenile Court of Chicago. However, the New Haven coroner records reported that he was a lawyer at the time of his death. Thomas Jarvis Taylor died on March 31, 1927, in New Haven during a visit to his parents, and was survived by his wife.9

  1. Catalogue of the Trustees, Rectors, Instructors and Alumni of the Hopkins Grammar School of New Haven, Connecticut. 1660-1902 (New Haven, CT: The Dorman Lithographic Company, Printers, 1902), 152, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t7xk8hm84&seq=152&q1=%22Thomas+Jarvis+Taylor%22. ↩

  2. Catalogue of Yale University. 1903-1904 (New Haven, CT: The Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Company, 1903), 553, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hnw3yg&seq=553&q1=%22Thomas+Jarvis+Taylor%22. ↩

  3. “1907 Baseball Candidates,” Yale Daily News, January 30, 1904, https://ydnhistorical.library.yale.edu/?a=d&d=YDN19040130-01.2.1&srpos=2&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22T.+J.+Taylor%22-------false. ↩

  4. Gregory Bond, “Jim Crow: Race, Manliness, and the Color Line in American Sports, 1876-1916” (dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2008), 498. ↩

  5. “Won By Georgetown,” The Washington Post, May 16, 1908, https://www.proquest.com/docview/144620370/fulltextPDF/A6632BBA1464899PQ/1?accountid=15172&sourcetype=Historical%20Newspapers. ↩

  6. Catalogue of Yale University. 1908-1909 (New Haven, CT: The Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Company, 1908), 635, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101065108316&seq=647&q1=%22Thomas+Jarvis+Taylor%22. ↩

  7. “New Havenite Tuskegee Dean,” New York Age, Nov. 18, 1909. ↩

  8. “Commencement Day,” The Chicago Kent Review 3, no. 1 (1924), https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=cklawreview. ↩

  9. "New Haven, Connecticut, United States records," images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSRD-FSFV-L?view=index : Jan 30, 2025), image 46 of 1567; “Alumni Notes," The Yale Alumni Weekly 26, no. 30 (1927), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433005985233&seq=835&q1=Thomas+Jarvis+Taylor. ↩

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