Before Jackie Robinson dared to cross baseball’s color line in the spring of 1947, there was Moses Fleetwood Walker. He played pro baseball, six decades before Robinson entered the big leagues. Walker was born October 7th in 1856 in Mount Pleasant, Ohio. When Walker was three years old, the family moved 20 miles northeast to Steubenville near the Ohio-West Virginia border a working-class town in Eastern Ohio that had served as a sanctuary for runaway slaves since 1815. Walker, was born during a turbulent time when slavery was still a fixture in American society. Walker and his younger brother Weldy attended Steubenville High School in the early 1870s, just as the community passed legislation for racial integration. As an adult, Walker enrolled at Oberlin College in 1878, where he majored in philosophy and the arts. Walker was also the first African-American to play baseball at Oberlin College and the University of Michigan.
At Oberlin, Walker proved himself to be an excellent student, especially in mechanics and rhetoric, but by his sophomore year, he was rarely attending classes. Walker gained stardom and was mentioned in the school newspaper, The Oberlin Review, for his ball-handling and ability to hit long home runs. Walker, joined by Weldy who enrolled in the class of 1885, played on the baseball club's first inter-collegiate team. They capped the season with a blowout of the University of Michigan that ended with a transfer offer from the Wolverines, which he accepted. With Walker, the team performed well, finishing with a 10–3 record in 1882. He mostly hit second in the lineup and is credited with a .308 batting average. Weldy also played with him at Michigan.
Just before his move to Ann Arbor, though, Walker took a sweet semi-pro gig in August 1881 with the White Sewing Machine Company of Cleveland. The game was in Louisville, Kentucky, against an outfit called Eclipse. The Louisville Courier-Journal reported “players objected to Walker on account of his color”, and so his side pulled him from the lineup. As coincidence would have it, his replacement broke his hand in the first inning and refused to come out for the second, forcing Walker’s return. As the newspapers tell it, Walker retook the diamond with the crowd behind him and dazzled them with his warm-up throws and catches while the decision was made to play on. When two Eclipse players still objected to Walker’s participation and repaired to the clubhouse in protest, he was forced to retire. And without him the Clevelanders booked a 6-3 loss. After playing baseball at both Oberlin College and Michigan, Walker went professional.
It was not until his minor-league signing with the Toledo Blue Stockings of the Northwestern League in 1883 that his race became a sticking point. That same year a representative from the rival Peoria Reds introduced a motion in the league’s executive committee banning “colored” players. The motion was defeated. On August 10, 1883, in an exhibition against the Chicago White Stockings, Chicago's manager Cap Anson, one of the most dominant White Major League Baseball players of the era refused to play if Walker was in the lineup. Anson was one of the prime architects of baseball’s Jim Crow policies. In response Toledo Blue Stockings manager Charlie Morton called his bluff and challenged Anson's ultimatum by not only warning him of the risk of forfeiting gate receipts, but also by starting Walker at right field. Anson threw a fit, but ultimately he relented, because he wouldn’t get his gate money if he canceled the game. “We’ll play this game here,” Anson said per the Toledo Blade, “but won’t play never no more with the nigger in.” The White Stockings won in extra innings, 7–6.
Although Walker hit in decent numbers, recording a .251 batting average, he became revered for his play behind the plate and his durability during an era where catchers wore little to no protective equipment and injuries were frequent. Nonetheless, he played in 60 of Toledo's 84 games during their pennant championship season. In 1884, the Blue Stockings joined the Major League sanctioned American Association, making Mr. Walker the first African American to play in the Major Leagues. Moses Fleetwood Walker's first appearance as a major league ballplayer was an away game against the Louisville Eclipse on May 1, 1884. Although Walker was a skilled player, but his debut was a shaky one. Walker went hitless in three at-bats and committed four errors in a 5–1 loss.
Moses Fleetwood Walker encountered few friendly faces among opponents, fans, or even his teammates. He was derided by spectators angered by his presence on the field with White players. During the season, Walker, who was a catcher, faced opposition not just from other teams, but from fellow Blue Stockings players as well. One such player that sticks out is Walker’s relationship with Toledo pitcher Tony Mullane. While most of his White Toledo teammates supported him, Mullane wanted nothing to do with Walker. “He was the best catcher I ever worked with,” said Toledo star pitcher Tony Mullane in a 1919 interview. “But I disliked a Negro and whenever I had to pitch to him I used anything I wanted without looking at his signals. One day he signaled me for a curve and I shot a fast ball at him.” Ultimately, Walker told Mullane that he would catch without giving signals, but wouldn’t allow himself to be crossed up by Mullane.
In 42 games with the Blue Stockings that year, he batted .263, with 40 hits and 23 runs scored, but Toledo finished eighth in the pennant race. The rest of the team was also hampered by numerous injuries: circumstances led to Walker's brother, Weldy, joining the Blue Stockings for six games in the outfield. When younger brother Weldy joined the team and played in six games, the Walkers gained the distinction of being the first two African-Americans to play in the Major Leagues. Throughout the 1884 season, Walker continued to deal with issues simply because of his race. Toledo's team, under financial pressure at season's end, worked to relieve themselves of their expensive contracts. Walker made his last MLB appearance on September 4, 1884, after suffering a broken rib earlier in the season. Not yet fully recovered from a rib injury sustained in July, he was released by the Blue Stockings on September 22, 1884.
During the offseason, Walker took a position as a mail clerk, but returned to baseball in 1885, playing in the Western League for 18 games. For the second half of 1885, he joined the baseball club in Waterbury for 10 games. Despite a lackluster season for Waterbury, Walker was offered a position with the defending champion Newark Little Giants, an International League team. Together, with pitcher George Stovey, Walker formed half of the first African-American battery in organized baseball. Billed as the "Spanish battery" by fans, Stovey recorded 35 wins in the season, while Walker posted career highs in games played, fielding percentage, and batting average. Walker followed Newark's manager Charlie Hackett to the Syracuse Stars, the only team in the league to secure permission to keep two Black players on the roster in 1888. Although he slumped at the plate during his two years playing for the Stars, he was popular among Syracuse fans.
But racist objections to integrating baseball lay at the root of his release from the team. When he left the game during that season, an unwritten agreement among owners and players resulted in an absence of Black players in the Major Leagues. When his baseball career ended he became the last Black man to play in the International League until Jackie Robinson joined Montreal in 1946. In 1887, when Walker was playing with a Newark, New Jersey minor league team, Anson, again balked at playing in an exhibition with Black players. An unofficial ban fueled by Cap Anson, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1939, team owners enacted an unwritten agreement barring Black players from major league baseball for the next six decades. A policy that not only ended Walker’s career but also perpetuated segregation in the sport for decades. By the early 1890s, no African-Americans were playing professional baseball.
Forced out of baseball, Walker took a job in Syracuse handling registered letters on the New York Central Railroad. On April 9, 1891, Walker was involved in an altercation outside a saloon with a group of White men. Walker stabbed to death an ex-convict outside a Syracuse saloon. After a brief chase, Walker surrendered to police, he was charged with second-degree murder (lowered from first-degree murder). He argued that he had acted in self-defense after being struck in the head by a rock by one of his White attackers. After a sensational trial, on June 3, 1891, an all-White jury acquitted him of second-degree murder. A verdict that sparked ecstatic pandemonium in the courtroom. Following the trial, Walker moved with his family to Steubenville, Ohio, where he found work as a mail clerk. It was at this position that he was arrested yet again, this time for mail robbery. Walker was found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail.
By the turn of the 20th century, Walker was running theater venues in Ohio, where he received patents for his work in early motion picture technology. One patent helped film projectionists determine more efficiently when a reel was ending. As the country became increasingly ensnared in racial violence, Walker became more engaged and militant on the issues facing African Americans. With his younger brother Weldy, he briefly edited "The Equator", a newspaper that focused on race matters and offered a service to help Black Americans emigrate to Liberia. In 1908, Walker published a 47-page book, "Our Home Colony, A Treatise on the Past, Present and Future of the Negro Race in America", where he urged African Americans to return to Africa.
Walker and Weldy never led an emigration of Blacks to Africa or any other country—nor did they ever incite racial violence. He spent much of his later life in Cadiz, Ohio, as the manager of the town's opera house. In 1924, Walker died at the age of 67 from pneumonia. Growing up as a free man, he overcame insurmountable odds and broke into professional baseball 19 years after the end of the Civil War. A researcher found that another player, William Edward White, played one game about five years before Walker. However, baseball historians still credit Walker as the first to openly play as a Black man in the major leagues. Like Robinson, however, Walker endured trials with racism in the major leagues and was thus the first Black man to do so. Though his baseball career was brief, Walker continued to make significant contributions as an entrepreneur, inventor, and author, showcasing his talent and dedication to justice. Walker’s work remains a powerful reminder of the creative and intellectual resilience of African Americans in the face of systemic injustice.