Meet the man who paved the way 6 decades before Jackie

When Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, he became a trailblazer and an inspiring figure in the civil rights movement after becoming the first Black player in modern Major League Baseball.

But, the key word? Modern.

Years before Robinson, Moses Fleetwood Walker made his professional debut on May 1, 1884, for the American League Association — one of two major leagues at the time — as a catcher. He played for the Toledo Blue Stocking for one season, but is mostly forgotten about in baseball history.

He played in 42 games and finished with a .263 batting average, 40 hits and 23 RBIs. In July of that year, his brother, Weldy, joined him and played in a few games as an outfielder. But, by the end of the season, the Walker brothers’ career was over. His last appearance was on September 4, 1884 after recovering from a broken rib earlier in the season (catchers didn’t wear protective pads at this time). Moses would play in the minors for five more years, but never returned to the highest level and retired in 1890.

When the American League and National League merged in 1903 to become Major League Baseball, baseball was only white until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier 63 years later.

“Walker and Robinson had some common experiences,” David Zang wrote in his book, Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball’s First Black Major Leaguer. “But while Robinson played at a time when the historical tide was carrying society toward integration, Walker stood as a nearly solitary figure attempting to play ball as an ebb tide swept away popular support for racial equality.”

According to his gravestone, Walker was born on Oct 7 1857, in Mount Pleasant, Ohio which was a pit stop for the Underground Railroads to get runaway slaves to Canada.

A lot of his early life is unknown, but before he played baseball, he was studying law at the University of Michigan. He played baseball for Oberlin College and Michigan, but left both schools early without a degree to become a professional baseball player.

While Walker had a different background than most professional baseball players at the time, he still faced some issues on the field with white players refusing to play against him. Before a game in Richmond, Virginia, Toledo’s manager, Charlie Morton, received a letter declaring that a 75-men lynch mob would attack Walker if he tried to take the field in the former Conferedate capital.

After his life in baseball, he and his brother pursued many business opportunities. From an entertainment center in Ohio that showed movies, plays and operas to patenting inventions that helped with loading film reels, he started to adapt without the sport he relied on for so long.

At the start of the 20th century, Walker had the heavy weight of bigotry on his shoulders and started The Equator, a newspaper that focused on racial matters, in 1902. Six years later, he published a long piece called Our Home Colony: A treatise on the Past, Present and Future of the Negro Race in America.

Walker died of pneumonia on May 11, 1924 in Cleveland, Ohio, at the age of 66. He was buried in an unmarked grave at Union Cemetery in Steubenville. When his brother died in 1937, he was buried alongside him. In 1990, private fundraising bought gravestones for the Walker Brothers with Moses’ reading “The First Black Major League Baseball Player in the USA.”