Fleet Walker's Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball's First Black Major Leaguer

by David W. Zang

Moses Fleetwood Walker was the first black American to play baseball in a major league. He achieved college baseball stardom at Oberlin College in the 1880s. Teammates as well as opponents harassed him; Cap Anson, the Chicago White Stockings star, is blamed for driving Walker and the few other blacks in the major leagues out of the game, but he could not have done so alone.

 

A gifted athlete, inventor, civil rights activist, author, and entrepreneur, Walker lived precariously along America’s racial fault lines. He died in 1924, thwarted in ambition and talent and frustrated by both the American dream and the national pastime.

Genres: Baseball

169 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1995

Reviews

[M. Apple · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not just a book about MLB’s first “black” player — he was “mulatto,” an offensive term then and now — but an examination of the very issue of “race” in the US. Moses Fleetwood Walker’s painful, conflicted existence is laid bare, and to read it is like re-opening the scabbed over, original wound of American society that has never really properly been treated.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story of Moses Fleetwood Walker, the first African American to play Major League baseball, is an important one to tell but also a very difficult one. Unbelievably poor record-keeping fills his family tree with few leaves and countless question marks. Sports statistics weren't nearly as thorough as they are today, and any existing contemporary analysis of his qualities as a baseball player were run through the lens of his race. It's not easy to tell who Fleet Walker was, but David Zang's work fills in more gaps than I thought would ever be possible.

Zang's research here is impressive, and while he provides quite a bit of supplementary information about contemporary race relations throughout the book, it's all relevant and in no way overbearing. It's easy to forget just how prevalent race theorists (including Walker himself) were, and they remained so far deeper into the 20th century than one would like to think. How can we really blame Walker for believing racial integration to be impossible when just two years prior to the release of his anti-integration pamphlet Our Home Colony, an adult African male was exhibited in the Bronx Zoo in a cage with monkeys? I'd lose faith in white people pretty quickly, too.

Fleet Walker's Divided Heart is a great title for a biography of a man who never ceased to struggle with his identity. He was neither fully black nor fully white, and by the end of his life he resented both his whiteness and blackness to the point of perpetual restlessness and self-hatred. This is not a comfortable read, nor should it be. It's easy to tell the story of Jackie Robinson. That story has a much happier ending. Baseball (eventually) accepted Jackie with open arms, but gave nothing to Fleet and made no apologies for it. You don't see his smile the way you see Jackie Robinson's. You see his pain, his bitterness, his hatred of the color of his skin and of the black and white communities that would never accept him. Moses Fleetwood Walker was a complicated man who wasn't allowed to succeed in a game that was rigged against him, in a country that was rigged against him, in a world that was rigged against him.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important book that won SABR's Seymour Medal in 1996 and holds up well after 20 years. Moses Fleetwood Walker was a pioneer as a dark-skinned man in the major leagues decades before Jackie Robinson and he dealt with similar tribulations and unbearable racism in his day, as well. Walker's story is courageous but ultimately sad, as he was run out of baseball by social forces far more powerful than him and later landed in jail. The end of his life was difficult, often because of his own actions, but what an incredible burden he must have had to bear. Most readers might also be surprised to learn just how close we came to having integration in major-league baseball for the entire 20th century. The story of the integrated leagues of the 1880s that Walker and others played in remains one of the most intriguing what-ifs in American history. How might the world be different if not for the Jim Crow era, which was by no means inevitable during Walker's lifetime? America's slow descent into racial segregation in the decades following the Civil War is explained in this book, through the prism of a complicated but talented baseball player who should be much more well known today than he is.

[Shelley Alongi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tries to present him in a sympathetic light even though we might think that his life was plagued by difficulty and uncertainty.A valiant attempt to explain a life we don’t know much about and to give it meaning based in the context of how it was covered by newspapers at the time. The greatest emphasis is on the racial injustice that played his excellent standing in the baseball world and followed him relentlessly until his death. Explains how the eventsIn his life are interpreted by the media and people around him.

[David Garza · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book on Walker was definitely needed. I'm not aware of any others. The topic of race relations and segregation in baseball is important to the sport's history, and Walker was a key figure. This book also gave interesting insight to early days of nickelodeons and movie theaters. Sometimes the writing feels a little forced and gets in the way, but not too distracting.