Welcome to TonySPN, a semi-regular series in which Content Creator and Resident Sports Aficionado Tony takes you through obscurities and amusing oddities in the world of sports. Don’t worry, “No More Sports Questions!” folks, we’ll make this interesting.

One cool thing about working for Trivia Mafia is that you’re always surprised by what you don’t know. On February 8, we ran this question on a night I was hosting:

In the 1880s, brothers Moses Fleetwood Walker and Weldy Walker were the first Black athletes to play what sport professionally, leading white administrators to establish a ban that lasted nearly seven decades?

From its context, you might be able to draw the conclusion that the answer was baseball. Of the four major men’s sports in North America, it’s the oldest, and had its color barrier shattered in the 1940s, which lines up with the timeline in the question.

But as for Moses Fleetwood “Fleet” Walker and his brother Weldy? I had no idea about them or their story.

Perhaps you, like me, believed that Jackie Robinson was the first Black professional baseball player. It’s a widely accepted assumption. To be fair, Robinson’s cultural significance and historical impact is perhaps larger than any other person to play baseball. Maybe even American sports as a whole. It’s understandable why Fleet Walker’s legacy may have gotten lost in history.

But Walker certainly deserves to be remembered for his place in history, too. So to one person who only learned about Walker this month from another, here’s his story.

(If you want to know more, my main sources for this FKIA are WBPTV’s “Brief History” episode on Walker, Comedy/History podcast “The Dollop” episode “Forgotten Fleet Walker” [content warning: They do not censor primary sources in this episode, which means upsetting language will be read], Bleacher Report’s 2012 article on his life, his Baseball Reference page, and Wikipedia. Apologies to all of my teachers on that last one.)

It’s very shocking to read that Walker was born in 1856, five years before the outbreak of the Civil War, and almost a decade before the abolition of slavery. That’s the timeline we’re talking about. Fortunately, Walker lived in Mount Pleasant, Ohio, which was very progressive, especially for a time when chattel slavery was legal.

Mount Pleasant was a town with a high population of Quakers–a religious sect that was anti-slavery almost by definition–and the town was part of the Underground Railroad, and many escaped slaves settled there. In fact, there is some evidence that suggests the Walkers might have actively participated in Underground Railroad activity.

Living there (and nearby Steubenville, where the Walkers moved after Moses’ birth) afforded the Walkers opportunities that they simply would not have been able to find elsewhere in the United States. For example, his father, Moses Sr., was a Black physician in pre-Civil War America. Moses Sr. was perhaps the first Black physician in Ohio. A Black physician in the U.S. was practically unheard of up until nearly twenty years before Moses’ birth; James McCune Smith became the first Black doctor to open up a practice in 1839.

Like his father, Fleet got similarly rare opportunities. He attended Oberlin College, which was one of the first American universities to accept Black students (as well as the first to admit women) in the 1800s. Fleet’s intention was to practice law.

He arrived at Oberlin just as they were adopting a baseball team for the school. His grades were strong, until he fell in love with baseball. He not only played catcher, but was incredible at it. One of his pitchers was at the forefront of a new pitch, “the curveball.” Obviously, the curveball is a staple today, but at the time, it seemed to break the laws of physics.

Fleet could catch the curve, though, and he did it barehanded, which was customary of catchers before the advent of catching mitts. He could also hit, too. The Oberlin Review noted his ability to hit home runs, which was a rarity in those days. College ball was probably different from the major leagues, even in the 1880s, but the American League leaders in home runs were often in the single digits.

His hitting impressed an opposing University of Michigan team so much that they offered him entry to law school so that he could play there. Walker was breaking barriers everywhere he went, and flourished on the diamond, as Michigan went 10-3 with Walker catching, as well as hitting with a .308 batting average.

Walker went from Michigan to the professional circuit, signing on with the minor-league Toledo Blue Stockings. Unfortunately, this is when the backlash of being a Black baseball player started ramping up in a massive way.

Upon his signing, the Northwestern League (Toledo’s association), moved to ban Black players from playing altogether, before Walker could even play one game. It failed, but just about everywhere the Blue Stockings would go, Walker faced intense discrimination and abuse from opponents and fans alike.

In a game against the Chicago White Stockings (later Cubs), Player/Manager Cap Anson nearly refused to take the field against Walker, only relenting when threatened with the loss of gate receipts. Walker played, but due to a sore hand (remember–no mitts) played out of position in right field, where the combination of unfamiliarity and abuse led him to make errors. The local papers then mocked him for those errors the next day.

Despite these challenges, which included often sleeping on park benches because hotels refused to take him in, he played well at catcher and the Blue Stockings ascended to the American Association (today, the American League).

Once there, he continued to endure unimaginable racial abuse. Even his own teammates weren’t exempt from mistreating Walker. One of his pitchers, Tony Mullane, started the season purposefully ignoring Walker’s signals and threw the pitches he pleased. This was dangerous. Not only did Walker lack any protective gear that a modern catcher would have, but expecting a pitch at one speed and location, then having to catch a completely different pitch on the fly could potentially be fatal. The only on-field death in history was in 1920, when Ray Chapman was struck in the head by a baseball.

But Walker was so good as catcher that he caught Mullane’s fastball aimed at his head, despite expecting a curveball. He ended up catching Mullane without signals altogether, which hurt his stats by unfairly racking up “passed balls” that weren’t his fault, and at one point, physically with a broken rib.

Mullane would fully (and unrepentantly) admit his racism and disregard for Walker’s well-being in later interviews, while also calling Walker “the best catcher I ever worked with.”

Injuries limited Walker to just 42 games in the American Association, including missing the five games in which his brother Weldy played. Despite the intolerable abuse, injuries, and essentially forced homelessness while playing on the road, Fleet’s catching abilities were celebrated in their time, and he was an above-average hitter.

His .641 OPS is below average by modern standards, but in an era where pitching dominated and power hitting was non-existent, it was 6% above the league average. In addition to racism-related challenges, he did this while playing catcher, the most physically demanding position on the field. Doubly so, without any protective equipment.

Toledo released Walker in 1884, ending his brief stint in the major leagues. He would continue to play baseball until 1889. The previous year, Major and Minor League Baseball set up the color barrier that Robinson would break over 50 years later. Weldy wrote and published a beautiful letter against the decision called “Why Discriminate?” which is preserved today. Of course, segregationists won the day, and while Fleet was able to finish out his contract, his playing days were over.

Fleet continued to face challenges later in life. He suffered from alcoholism and had to beat an 1881 murder charge when two white men picked a fight with Fleet, forcing him to kill in self-defense. Miraculously, an all-white jury acquitted him. He was also convicted of “mail robbery” in 1895 and spent a year in jail.

But Fleet once again overcame the odds U.S. racism stacked against him. Walker was a successful businessman, a published Black nationalist author, and an accomplished inventor. In 1891, he helped a Syracuse professor to successfully create an artillery gun that could fire shells with gunpowder. The scientist had failed to make the concept work, but Walker designed a casing that fixed the issue. He also received three patents for holders that simplified the process for switching film reels, inspired by the early movie theater he owned.

Walker died in 1924 at the age of 67, and, tragically, his legacy has largely been lost to time. Fleet has been getting small, belated recognition in the recent past. Oberlin College inducted Walker into their Hall of Fame in 1990. In 2017, Ohio passed legislation to make his birthday, October 7, “Moses Fleetwood Walker Day.” Folk artist Cousin Wolf wrote a song called “Moses Fleetwood Walker” in 2021. Is it enough for what he did, is it the legacy he deserves? No, but it is at least something.

And now, friends, you and I both know about him.