Like modern astronomers finally spotting some overlooked planet, historians have discovered Moses Fleetwood Walker.
Of course, Walker will always be associated with baseball because the game earned him a niche in history—in 1884 he became the first black man to break the big-league color barrier. The achievement “at least kept Walker from slipping through the cracks of time,” biographer David W. Zang wrote in Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball’s First Black Major Leaguer.
But Walker is still on the fringe of public perception, as he has been since his baseball career ended in 1889. He remains one of those murky characters who occasionally rise, larger than life, from the depths of history, only to resubmerge and leave us wondering whether they really existed. Yes, Walker did exist, and he is faintly remembered only for his achievements on the diamond. His writings for early black publications, his quest for blacks to emigrate to Africa, and his entrepreneurship during the nickelodeon days were eclipsed by a few turbulent years of his youth.
After his death in 1924, fame continued to elude him. Only seven decades later would Walker begin to receive some recognition, which came in the form of the biography, the Internet reissue of a small book on race that Walker wrote in 1908, a letter of commendation from the commissioner of Major League Baseball, newspaper and online stories, a movement to honor his birthday, a historical marker in Toledo, a marker for his grave, and even his own retro baseball card.
He earned the card for having become the first African American player to sign a contract and play regularly in the big leagues, in baseball’s new American Association, on May 1, 1884. Soon, at Eclipse Field on the Ohio River in Louisville, he stroked a single for the visiting Toledo Blue Stockings against the Louisville Eclipse—the first minority hit.
Moses Fleetwood Walker in Toledo uniform, 1884. (Authors’ collection)
Nowadays, baseball historians are beginning to reexamine his career as well as the significance of the American Association, for which Walker played. “He played in forty-two games that year, hitting .263, which was respectable enough, but his defense was ragged,” author Cait Murphy wrote in her baseball history Crazy ’08. She called black ballplayers the invisible men, because they were ignored and shunned. Edward Achorn, author of The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, wrote, “Walker had his heart set on becoming a professional baseball player at a time when the doors that had been briefly pried open by Reconstruction were slamming shut again on blacks all over America.”
For the record, another player could have been the first black man to enter the big leagues—William Edward White, who played for the Providence Grays on June 21, 1879. But he lasted only one game, and he had no contract. “This is an important distinction,” said Craig Brown, a Salem, Ohio, resident and a lecturer in political science and American government at Stark State Community College and the Kent State University. In 2013, Brown learned of Walker’s story, became intrigued, and began a public-awareness campaign for the player in his home state. “Like a lot of people, I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of him,” Brown said. “He’s a tragic figure who needs to be remembered.”
Because Walker played in baseball’s first century, he received little appreciation. Then baseball historians discovered him, writing stories about him on the Internet. Today, all the attention goes to Jackie Robinson, the first African American in the Major Leagues of the modern era. While Robinson was integrating professional baseball in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, however, memories of the deceased Walker—and the Blue Stockings—were sliding further from the public’s mind.
Walker is worth remembering simply because he was interesting. Not only was he the last black man to play for a big-league team in his era, his unwanted presence on the Blue Stockings’ roster prompted the fast reestablishment of the color barrier, which would last until Robinson’s arrival sixty-three years later. “He’s the reason African Americans weren’t allowed to play in [white] baseball leagues,” said Brown. But Walker made the most of his time in the game, which at the time was the national sport. During his six years in professional baseball, he became half of the first all-black battery in organized ball, when as catcher he teamed with pitcher George Stovey, who that year won thirty-four games for Newark’s minor league team. If not for antiblack feelings among so many white players, the battery could have played big-league ball in the days before the Negro leagues were popular.
But Walker was much more than a neglected and gutsy baseball player. He was an inventor, an entertainer, a saloonkeeper, a nightclub and hotel owner, a weekly newspaper publisher, a theater owner-operator, and a postal worker. More dramatically, he was imprisoned for tampering with the mail while employed by the post office and tried and acquitted for the murder of a white man who assaulted and attempted to rob him on the street. But in the quicksilver world of history, Fleet Walker will forever be remembered for baseball. He got there through Oberlin College, where he played on the school’s baseball team and attracted attention for his talents.
In his era, the game was much different than in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Fans were insanely passionate, but they had much less perception of the “big leagues”—and the minors; the distinction between the two was a bit foggy. Teams played in three leagues—the American Association, the Union Association, and the National League. Only today do we think of the Major Leagues—the ultimate big-time. Back then, fans understood that some teams were wealthy enough to recruit and pay the better players; they had the best teams, but their leagues didn’t necessarily promote themselves as the biggest and best. Also, fewer home runs were hit then, and the distance between mound and home plate was only fifty feet (in 1893 it was lengthened to sixty feet, six inches). In the era of the single and double, players weren’t obsessed with power—at the plate or collectively. Gloves were a “luxury,” and they looked more like padded winter gloves made of lambskin than today’s baseball gloves. Walker occasionally used one, but he preferred to play barehanded.
Most ballplayers were hard-edged characters. Many were identified by colorful nicknames, such as Lipman “Lip” Pike, a slugger who played with the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1877 and a part of 1878. On professional teams, most players were white, but generally people of all colors played organized baseball—in minor leagues, industrial leagues, local fraternal leagues, or in pick-up games. Often Fleet was the only black player, or one of only a few, on his teams. Despite little help from trainers and physicians to cope with the physical rigors of the game, a surprising number of men played for many years. Lip Pike, for example, played for nearly a quarter of a century, for various teams. Fleet’s career ended prematurely due to racism, his insistence on carrying a revolver, and the minor leagues’ decision that they could do without black players. Most black players received little support from their own teammates. This is another way Walker’s case differed from Jackie Robinson’s: at least once Robinson had become established with the Dodgers, his teammates didn’t sabotage his game. Walker had to cope with antagonistic players on his own team as well as opposing teams. Retired player Ned Williamson explained the situation in the October 24, 1891, issue of the popular Sporting Life:
Ballplayers do not burn with a desire to have colored men on the team. It is in fact the deep-seated objection to Afro-Americans that gave rise to the feet-first slide… . They learned that trick in the East. The Buffaloes had a Negro for second base [Frank Grant]. He was a few shades blacker than a raven, but was one of the best players in the Eastern League… . The players of the opposing team made it a point to spike this brunet Buffalo. They would tarry at second when they might easily make third just to toy with the sensitive shins of the second baseman. The poor man played only two games out of five, the rest of the time he was on crutches… . The colored man seldom lasted.
One could assume that such mean-spirited play wore down Walker’s spirit until he soured on America, and maybe it did; he didn’t discuss it specifically with reporters. Baseball was hard, tough, and rough. So were its players; many of them had reservations about playing with blacks or even having blacks associated with the game. As Craig Brown explained: “Slavery had ended only about twenty years earlier. The mindset of white folks of that era was that African Americans were not only intellectually inferior but physically as well. Today we know this is ridiculous, but back then there were many strange theories about race. Walker was the first guy who showed that African Americans could compete. He was a novelty: ‘Come see the great black catcher.’”
Though Walker played professionally from only 1883 to 1889, he saw a lot of action during that time. Much of it was in Ohio, where he learned the game from his father, whom black Civil War veterans had tutored in the game’s rules. Despite a nomadic summer life as a ballplayer, he chose to live in Ohio.
Ohio was home.
Fleet Walker was born on October 7, 1857, in Mount Pleasant, a small town in east-central Ohio, not far from the Ohio River. His father, Moses W. Walker, was a barrel maker then, and his mother, Caroline O’Harra Walker, a midwife. Both parents were biracial.
Three years later, they moved to Steubenville so Fleet’s father could practice medicine. At that time, one didn’t need a medical degree to practice medicine—only an apprenticeship. The elder Moses Walker was the only black doctor in the town, which welcomed African American residents. They could attend public events and mingle freely in public. Walker and his younger brother, Weldy Wilberforce Walker, attended the integrated Steubenville High School.
The Walkers were a middle-class black family. By 1870, the family consisted of the parents and five children, who lived in an integrated neighborhood. Mr. Walker became a pastor in the Methodist Episcopal Church. In his free time, he played baseball with his sons.
In 1877, Fleet, a catcher as interested in baseball as anything else, arrived at Oberlin College in Ohio. He weighed 160 pounds and batted and threw right. He was personable and smart. He wanted to be a lawyer. Weldy, who soon joined him at Oberlin, aspired to a career in homeopathic medicine, like his father. Perhaps Oberlin’s nondescriminatory admissions policy led the Walkers to believe the college was their doorway to a racially equal world. Nationally known for its early admission of black—and later female—students, Oberlin College became a major part of the Walker sons’ lives. Fleet joined the school baseball team, for which he hit leadoff. Weldy later joined him on the team as an outfielder.
When he wasn’t playing ball, Walker studied Greek, Latin, German, French, world history, English, rhetoric, astronomy, botany, geology, zoology, and other subjects. He later described his college experience as “excellent.” For the Walkers, Oberlin must have been a citadel of justice. Only a couple of decades earlier, in 1859, a federal grand jury had indicted thirty-seven local people for violating the Fugitive Slave Law. The trouble had begun in September 1858 when an escaped slave named John Price was found living in Oberlin. A federal marshal arrested him and jailed him in the neighboring town of Wellington. The Oberlin locals descended on the jail, liberated Price, and sent him away. Later, the Federals sued Oberlin village and Wellington for violating the Fugitive Slave Law, which had not yet been challenged. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the Federals could take the slave. But Oberlin received the praise of an abolitionist northern public for supporting Price, and that may have attracted the Walker brothers.
Their adjustment was undoubtedly difficult. College life was not the real world; as the Sporting Life put it as late as April 11, 1891: “Probably in no other business in America is the color line so finely drawn as in baseball. An African who attempts to put on a uniform and go in among a lot of white players is taking his life in his hands.”
Meanwhile, that summer Walker accepted a roster spot on the Whites, the baseball team sponsored by Cleveland’s White Sewing Machine Company. He met discrimination everywhere. During a trip to Louisville, he was refused service when he attempted to eat breakfast at the Saint Cloud Hotel. Then he went over to the baseball field, where some players for Louisville’s Eclipse protested his presence in the Cleveland lineup. The game started with him sitting on the bench. When the Whites’ catcher claimed his hands hurt, a team official asked Walker to warm up. The crowd of two thousand to three thousand spectators applauded.
A Louisville Courier-Journal story published the following day related that the crowd understood how the Cleveland team was at a disadvantage without its starting catcher.
The very large crowd of people present … at once set up a cry in good nature for “the nigger.” Vice President Carroll, of the Eclipse, walked down in the field and called on Walker to come and play.
The quadroon [Walker] was disinclined to do so, after the general ill treatment he had received; but as the game seemed to be in danger of coming to an end, he consented, and started in the catcher’s stand. As he passed before the grand stand, he was greeted with cheers, and from the crowd rose cries of “Walker, Walker!” He still hesitated, but finally threw off his coat and vest and stepped out to catch a ball or two and feel the bases.
He made several brilliant throws and fine catches while the game waited. Then Johnnie Reccius and Fritz Pfeffer, of the Eclipse nine, walked off the field and went to the club house, while others objected to playing that afternoon.
The crowd continued to cheer Walker and insisted that he play. “The objection of the Eclipse players, however, was too much and Walker was compelled to retire. When it was seen that he was not to play, the crowd cheered heartily and very properly hissed the Eclipse club, and jeered their misplays for several innings, while the visitors … obviously under disadvantages, were cheered to the echo.”
In desperation, the Whites’ third baseman finally had to catch. The team lost the game, 6–3.
After two years of valuable experience on the college baseball team, Moses Walker left Oberlin, without graduating, to attend the University of Michigan, where he studied law and played on the baseball team. In the summer of 1882 he returned to Ohio to marry Arabella Taylor, a biracial woman from Xenia. He didn’t stay in Michigan for long, however, for he received an invitation to play for the New Castle, Pennsylvania, Neshannocks, nicknamed the Nocks. The local newspapers welcomed Walker and called him the best hitting amateur catcher in the nation. Of course, he was not using a glove most of the time—apparently he could grip the ball better when he caught it barehanded. As a result, his fingers were often swollen and bloody. But he played on and he played while hurt.
Then William Voltz, a former Cleveland sportswriter who had seen the Walkers play for Oberlin, was named manager of the Toledo Blue Stockings in the Northwestern League, a minor league. He asked Walker to be the team’s catcher. Walker agreed. But during the 1883 season, a foul ball broke his thumb, which put him out of action. Nonetheless, Walker quickly became known as a hard-hitting catcher who could play good defense.
The pay was better than any salary he could earn elsewhere. The Sporting Life reported, “Columbus has a deaf mute and Cleveland a one-armed pitcher, Toledo a colored catcher and Providence a deaf center fielder; and yet these men can earn about $2,000 per annum apiece.” That was a good salary by working-class standards. Walker earned his money that 1883 season, hitting .251 in 152 at bats, swinging four home runs, knocking in twenty-three runs, stealing forty-four bases, and scoring forty-five runs in sixty games. In this era, baseballs were not made to fly out of ballparks, and home runs were often panned by the veterans, who specialized in hitting singles and doubles. While he played in the Northwestern League’s medium-sized cities such as Peoria and Springfield, Illinois; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Grand Rapids, Michigan, Walker longed for the bigger cities and their more prominent teams.
The big-time arrived at an exhibition game in August 1883, in the form of the Chicago White Stockings and its manager, Adrian C. “Cap” Anson. Anson would become Walker’s—and any dark-skinned player’s—nemesis. The White Stockings, a National League team, came to Toledo to play the Blue Stockings. The Blue Stockings and its management, led by a Charlie Morton, believed the team was ready to compete in the big leagues. Their players were good enough, and the crowds were large.
But the day Anson arrived, Walker’s hands were injured, so he couldn’t catch and must have had a hard time gripping a bat. Anson didn’t care; he wasn’t accustomed to seeing African American players on the field. A few played in the minor leagues and for local city teams, but not in the big leagues. Anson demanded that Walker not play at all because he was black; he even threatened to call off the game if Walker was in the lineup. Just to irritate Anson, Morton ordered Walker to play right field. When told Chicago would forfeit the game and the gate receipts, Anson backed down. He said, “We’ll play this here game, but won’t play never no more with the nigger in.”
Walker played the entire game in right field, making no errors. The White Stockings defeated the Blue Stockings, 7–6.
In 1884, buoyed by the Blue Stockings’ strong performance against a big-league team and its continued success against its opponents in the Northwestern League, Toledo management entered the American Association. Then only two years old, the association was one of three major leagues of the time; the others were the National League and the weaker Union Association. The Blue Stockings’ American Association opponents were the New York Metropolitans, Columbus Buckeyes, Louisville Eclipse, St. Louis Browns, Cincinnati Red Stockings, Baltimore Orioles, Philadelphia Athletics, Brooklyn Atlantics, Richmond Virginians, Pittsburgh Alleghenies, Indianapolis Hoosiers, and Washington Nationals. The American Association was nicknamed the “beer and whiskey league” because a number of its club owners were brewery and distillery magnates who sold beer to fans and played games on Sunday. That year, the Blue Stockings retained a few of their 1883 players, including Fleet Walker, and signed many new and more talented ones.
In the majors, the salaries were higher, the players better, and the crowds larger. The game itself was still rough, tough, and filled with boozers and brawlers. Players took the game seriously and openly disliked their opponents. Routinely, they were arrested for violating laws prohibiting baseball on Sunday. Catchers usually volunteered to be arrested in place of the managers. Moses Walker was no exception.
At home in Toledo, the fans cheered Walker. On the road, he received mixed messages—home crowds cheered and jeered when he came to the plate. Some groups of black fans traveled to games to give him confidence. But in Richmond, the manager received a letter demanding that Walker be benched during his time in town—or else. He couldn’t play anyway. He was injured again.
Overall, however, the fans appreciated his prowess as a catcher. One baseball poet celebrated Walker:
There was a catcher named Walker,
Who behind the plate is a corker.
He throws to a base with ease and grace,
And steals ’round the bags like a stalker.
That year, 1884, the Blue Stockings went to play in Chicago, but this time Anson didn’t have to protest Fleet Walker’s presence. His hands were injured again, so the backup, Jimmy McGuire, caught. Several months prior to the game, Chicago’s team management had written to the Blue Stockings and asked that any black players be benched while playing the White Stockings. The Chicago management took no responsibility, blaming the team’s players.
Anson, the former star first baseman, who is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame, didn’t singlehandedly chase black players out of big-league baseball, but he was influential, and he had help from owners, fans, and society. Many other white players disliked their black counterparts and sought to disrupt their play. Tony Mulane, a native of Cork, Ireland, didn’t want to play with a black man, let alone pitch to one. Mulane was a star pitcher for the Blue Stockings, but a roughneck. He said Walker was the best catcher he had ever played with, but he could not bring himself to cooperate with his teammate. For example, when Walker would call for a curveball, Mulane would throw a fastball. All that season, he threw any kind of pitch he wanted to Walker, to surprise him. This had to contribute to Walker’s injuries—as well as his number of passed balls.
As a batter that season, Walker also became a human target for anyone’s baseballs. Struck in the abdomen, he suffered a broken rib. (He wore no chest protector, although they were in limited use by then.) Injuries hobbled other teammates as well, and the Blue Stockings needed good players so badly that they signed Weldy Walker to play outfield. Nevertheless, the team finished in eighth place, winning forty-six and losing fifty-eight. (In the 1884 season, the Metropolitans finished first and Columbus second.) Fleet Walker batted well enough, hitting .263, the second highest average on the team that season. Because of his many injuries that season and the club’s financial reversal, the Blue Stockings released Walker in September, having cut Weldy in August.
The catcher was out of baseball, the game he loved.
Three months later, Fleet was hired as a postal clerk in Toledo, and Weldy returned to Steubenville to open a restaurant. The Blue Stockings, which would last only one more season, didn’t want either player back because the team was nearly broke. But Fleet Walker could not walk away from baseball so easily. He found work with minor-league teams, including the Cleveland Forest Cities of the Western League in 1885, the Waterbury Brassmen of the Eastern League in 1886, and the Newark Little Giants of the International League in 1887. That year, Walker stole thirty-six bases for the Little Giants and hit .264. He also suffered additional harassment from Cap Anson, whose White Stockings arrived for an exhibition game. Probably to appease Anson, Newark benched Walker and George Stovey, the team’s most important pitcher. Anson’s boys won the game.
By 1888, Walker was playing with the Syracuse Stars, champions of the International Association that year. Walker hit only .170, but he stole thirty-four bases in seventy-seven games and was the team’s main catcher. The Sporting Life reported on October 3: “The Syracuse Stars … returned home from Rochester Saturday night last and were given a royal reception. The team … were escorted to carriages amid fireworks, booming cannon and shouts of thousands of citizens. A line of marchers was then taken up through the principal streets… . Over 25,000 were out to see the show… . Catcher Moses Walker, of the Star team, returned thanks to the directors and citizens on behalf of himself and fellow players and everyone was happy.”
The next year, the American Association returned to its policy of unofficially prohibiting blacks from playing on its teams. The National League had banned them starting in 1876. When the Union League went out of business, its out-of-work players provided more available white talent for teams in both leagues—blacks simply weren’t needed.
By 1887, an estimated twenty black players played for minor-league teams. People came out to see them out of curiosity. “The beginning of the end for Blacks in organized ball was in 1887 when Dug Crothers was suspended for refusing to sit for a photograph because a Black was in it,” Ulish Carter wrote in a 1974 story in the Pittsburgh Courier. “After several of the white players in the league complained, the International League, which was on a minor league level, held a meeting in mid-season and it was decided that no more Black contracts would be signed.” The International had about eight black players that year; perhaps it was sensitive to criticism from the Sporting Life, which wondered if the League would change its name to the Colored League. “How far will this mania for engaging colored players go?” the publication asked.
By the start of the 1888 season, only three black players were in all of white baseball—minor and major leagues. By the early 1890s, Carter said, most black players had given up on playing with the white teams, so they entered the Negro Leagues. As a result, the Negro Leagues began to expand across the country, with teams popping up in Cleveland and Cincinnati.
In 1891, Walker’s life changed. He had been drinking alcohol more often (a habit he picked up from other ballplayers), and his family knew it. He continued to live in Syracuse, where he had last played. Despite his drinking, he entered a more cerebral period, receiving a patent for an exploding artillery shell and other devices, while he grew more introspective about race issues. Then he was arrested for the April 9 stabbing death of a local white man. The incident occurred when Walker was searching the taverns of the Seventh Ward looking for his former Syracuse Stars manager, “Icewater” Joe Simmons. After drinking several beers, Walker began walking home. One man in a group threw a rock and hit him on the back of the head. Then the group surrounded him, making racial slurs. A convicted burglar named Patrick “Curly” Murray tried to rob him. In the struggle, Walker fatally stabbed him; he was charged with second-degree murder. District Attorney T. E. Hancock noted Walker’s “peculiar disposition” and added that if he “magnifies every trivial incident into a cause for crime, then he ought not to touch [alcohol].” Nevertheless, an all-white jury acquitted him and newspapers took his side. The judge told him to stop drinking, and then shook hands with Mrs. Walker. Walker thanked each juror personally.
The bad times weren’t over yet. In 1895, Arabella “Bella” Walker died of cancer, leaving him with two sons and a daughter. He wanted a distraction, so he began considering changes in his life, including his occupation and where he lived.
Three years later, he married Ednah Taylor, whom he had also met at Oberlin years earlier. By 1902, the Walkers were living in Cadiz, Ohio, and singing and giving exhibitions of Edison’s kinetoscope, which played early films. He and Ednah toured Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, giving lectures and entertaining in churches, singing and acting. Walker also published a weekly black newspaper called the Equator. Walker, whose byline was “M.F.” instead of “Moses Fleetwood,” owned the paper with Weldy. Two years later, Walker and his wife assumed proprietorship of the Cadiz Opera House, where they also lived. The couple presented movies, plays, operas, and lectures and rented the place for independent presentations of vaudevillians and minstrel actors. By 1905, Walker had joined the nickelodeon craze, turning Walker’s Opera House into a theater. He brought the movies to Cadiz, for citizens of all races. Meanwhile, he worked on more inventions, including several that would help make the showing of films more convenient for the projectionist.
In 1908, Weldy Walker published his brother’s brief book, Our Home Colony: A Treatise on the Past, Present, and Future of the Negro Race in America. The forty-seven-page publication—a well-written and thoughtful treatise on racial issues—claimed that blacks and whites could never live in harmony in the United States. Some people took offense. Writer Barry Regan believes the book “caused American society in the early twentieth century to diminish his [Walker’s] achievements to the point where history no longer remembers him.”
What did Walker say that made him so controversial? He stated that black Americans could find “superior advantages, and better opportunities, on the shores of old Africa.” But what caught more attention was his idea that “the Negro should be taught he is an alien and always will be regarded as such in this country, and that equal social, industrial, and political rights can never be given them.”
Walker maintained that it wasn’t necessary to remove African Americans immediately, but the time was coming when it would be beneficial to the nation to do so. Possibly foreseeing the strife of the 1960s, he wrote, “The Negro race will be a menace and the source of discontent as long as it remains in large numbers in the United States. The time is growing very near when the whites … must either settle this [racial divide] problem by deportation, or else be willing to accept a reign of terror such as the world has never seen in a civilized country.” No one knows how long it took Walker to conclude this, but it could have been based on his time in baseball.
“The only practical and permanent solution of the present and future race troubles in the United States is entire separation by Emigration of the Negro from America,” he wrote. “Even forced Emigration … would be better for all than the continued present relations of the races; but there would be no necessity for force if the proper measures are taken and Negroes are offered reasonable help to return to their native land.”
Walker’s playing days gradually faded to distant memories for most people. On August 30, 1913, the Sporting News remembered him with these words: “‘Fleet’ never wore a catcher’s mitt… . Walker was a marvelous player, as every old-timer knows… . Every club Walker played with won the flag with the exception of his second season in Toledo.”
Moses Fleetwood Walker died of pneumonia on May 11, 1924, not long after his wife had died and just as a new baseball season was starting. He was sixty-seven. “He died alone in Cleveland, clerking in a pool hall,” Craig Brown said. “He’s someone who is easy to forget, but he should not be forgotten.”
Perhaps he wanted to remain unknown. Though he could have afforded a simple stone, he chose to be buried in an unmarked grave in Steubenville’s Union Cemetery.
In 1990, Oberlin College’s Heisman Club, an athletic support group, heard about the situation and donated time and money to research Walker’s career and purchase a headstone for him. He was elected to Oberlin’s Hall of Fame. The group scheduled a graveside ceremony, and then–baseball commissioner Fay Vincent sent a letter listing Walker’s baseball accomplishments. School athletic director James Foels loaded the 350-pound marker into his pickup truck and took it to Walker’s grave for the ceremony. The marker reads that Walker was the “first black Major League baseball player in USA.” At the gravesite, his grandniece, Sara Freeman, said, “The family always knew that Moses was a ballplayer, of course, but we never really realized how important he was.”
In February 2014, the state representative Steve Slesnick, a Canton Democrat, introduced House Bill 436, to designate October 7, Walker’s birthday, as Moses Fleetwood Walker Day every year in Ohio. Slesnick submitted the proposal to legislators at the request of some students at the Kent State University and Stark State College who had learned about Walker from their professor, Craig Brown. As Brown told the Toledo Blade, “Justice is slow, but justice still happens anyhow.” The students vow not to give up until Moses Fleetwood Walker Day is celebrated through Ohio.
As for Moses Walker, the score of life was finally evened in August 2014, when he achieved every modern baseball fan’s dream. The Toledo Mud Hens, a minor-league team, sponsored Moses Walker Bobblehead Night.
It was an excellent likeness of him, too.
