Before Jackie Robinson, There Was Moses Fleetwood Walker

Playing in the 1880s, Walker is recognized as the first Black major leaguer. A few years later, Black players were banned from the game.

Walker photo credit: National Baseball Hall of Fame

On Saturday, April 15, every major league baseball player on every team will wear the number 42 in honor of Jackie Robinson on the date he made history by breaking baseball's color barrier in 1947. 

 I had always assumed that the Black players had been barred from professional baseball going back to its earliest incarnations in the mid 19th century. I thought Robinson was the first African-American to play professional baseball. I was wrong.

National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, N.Y. Photo credit: Ron Cogswell

I've been a baseball fan for as long as I can remember, but I had never been to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York until three years ago. 

At Cooperstown, there's a large room that contains the commemorative plaques of every player inducted into the Hall of Fame, 270 at last count, plus those of a smaller number of managers and executives.

I was there during the peak of the Covid pandemic, so there was a severe restriction on the number of visitors allowed inside. The room was mostly empty. The few people who were there spoke quietly as if in a church.

Cap Anson

Among the plaques in this hallowed space is one for Adrian Constantine "Cap" Anson. In his sculpted image, his cap is pulled down low to his brow and his eyes gaze as if in reverie into the distance. He is wearing what looks like a bow tie. The inscription says, in part, "Greatest Hitter and Greatest National League Player-Manager of 19th Century."

Cap Anson was baseball's original superstar. A four-time batting champion, he hit .334 over his career and collected either slightly more or less than 3,000 hits — no one knows for sure. He played first base and was a tough, brusque character and loved baseball. He was a brilliant strategist and innovator. He was also as rabid a racist as ever played the game.

Oberlin baseball team, 1881. Moses Walker is seated, first on the left. His brother, Weldy, is standing, third from left photo credit: Oberlin College Archives

In the fall of 1878, a young Black man by the name of Moses Fleetwood Walker enrolled in Oberlin College, one of the few white colleges that admitted African-American or female students. 

Walker, an outstanding student and athlete, played five games for the Oberlin varsity baseball team. A few years later, he transferred to the University of Michigan and played there but also for a semi-pro team in Cleveland.

In 1881, the Cleveland club traveled to Louisville, Kentucky to play a game. The home team protested Walker, a Black man, playing in the game, so Cleveland held him out. But when his substitute was injured in the first inning, they brought him. The Louisville players refused to continue the game unless Walker was taken out. He left the game and play resumed.     

After Michigan, Walker joined the professional Toledo Blue Stockings of the Northwest League, a minor league, in 1883. That’s when the first trouble began. 

Before Walker even appeared in a game, the league debated a proposal by the Peoria, Illinois baseball club to ban Black players from the league. The idea was dropped and Walker joined the Toledo team as a catcher. He was a decent hitter but a terrific catcher, at a time when the position was fielded without mask, chest padding or even a glove. Walker caught bare-handed. 

On August 10, 1883, a Toledo all-star team was scheduled to play an exhibition against the professional Chicago White Stockings (which would later become the Cubs).

Cap Anson, the player-manager for the Chicago team, took one look at Walker and was enraged. He informed the Blue Stockings manager that there was no way his team play the game against a team with a Black player. 

Toledo's manager Cooley replied that, in that case, Anson's club would forfeit the game and, with it, their portion of the income from ticket sales.

Anson was furious but relented, reportedly saying, "We'll play this here game, but won't play never no more with the [N-word] in it."  

 

If nothing else, Anson was true to his wretched word. He never again played against a team with a Black player.

Cap Anson

The next year, 1884, Toledo joined the American Association, a major league organization. As legend has it, that made Walker the first Black Major League Baseball player. Only later was it discovered that that a Black man of mixed parentage named White, who passed as white, had played one game for the professional Providence Grays several years before Walker's debut. 

In July 1884, the Toledo Blue Stockings were scheduled to play Anson's Chicago team once again. 

Three months earlier, the Chicago team had notified Toledo in a letter that "the players do most decisively object and to preserve harmony in the club it is necessary that I have your assurance that (Walker) will not play... I have no desire to replay the occurrence of last season and must have your guarantee to that effort."  

Walker did not play in the game against Anson's squad.

Later that same season, his younger brother Weldy briefly joined his team. 

At the end of the 1884 season, Moses Walker, bedeviled by injuries, was let go. He never played again in the major leagues. 

Cap Anson and Moses Walker would cross paths one more time. In 1887, the Chicago White Stockings were scheduled to play an exhibition against a team from Newark, New Jersey that had Walker and another Black player on its roster. 

Anson refused to play and the Newark team backed down. They sat the two Black players. There were several other such episodes in what would become a pattern. Anson’s team was set to play an integrated (non-major league) team. Anson would object. The opposing team would bench its Black player or players.

What was then the early incarnation of Major League Baseball must have wearied of this. In 1887, the nine-team National League [which had come into existence in 1876] and a leading minor league, the International League, found a solution. They quietly agreed to ban Black players.

"There was no written document," Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues National Baseball Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Mo., told me. "It was a quote-unquote gentlemen's agreement."

To this day, there is debate over the extent to which Anson’s racial animus contributed to that infamous compact. 

"Cap Anson erected the color barrier in baseball," wrote Kevin Blackistone, a sports columnist and a visiting professor at Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

But baseball historian Bill James said, "Jim Crow would have come to baseball even if Anson had never been born."

Maybe. But he was born and while he lived, he exercised his considerable influence to demand that Black players be kept out of America’s past time.

“Anson's racism may have been common by the day's standards, but his influence and stature gave his actions additional impact and supported the segregationist attitudes that impeded the game for another six decades,” according to an on-line bio of Anson on the Hall of Fame website.

Walker would be the last Black major league player until Jackie Robinson, as Kendrick put it, "re-broke the color barrier.”

Unlike Walker, Anson would enjoy a long career in baseball as a player and later manager. After he left baseball, he went broke. When he died in 1922, the National League paid for his funeral. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1939.

Walker's later life took many twists and turns after he finally stopped playing baseball in 1889. At various times, he ran a hotel, an opera house, was a postal service worker, a writer and even an inventor with four patents to his name. In 1892, he was attacked by a mob of whites and fought back, killing one man. He was tried for murder and acquitted. He died in 1924.

The first time I ever heard of Walker was two weeks ago when I visited the outstanding Negro Leagues National Baseball Hall of Fame Museum in Kansas City, Mo.

There, near the beginning of the path that leads visitors on a chronological journey through the history of African-Americans in baseball, I stopped at the exhibit about Walker and Anson and learned the story about this Black man who just wanted to play baseball and the white man who was determined to stop him and anyone like him.

It is an American story.

Moses Fleetwood Walker, photo credit: National Baseball Hall of Fame

In 2021, a country singer who goes by the name of Cousin Wolf recorded an album entitled Nine Innings which features a song for each of nine historic baseball players. The first tune on the album is Moses Fleetwood Walker. In the song, there’s this sad refrain:

Now it's too late,

You're just a footnote on the page.

On April 15, as we pay tribute to Jackie Robinson for his courage, dignity and athletic achievements in the face of unimaginable abuse, let’s also pause and remember Moses Fleetwood Walker, who did it first.