The REAL First Black MLB Player...

A lot of people think of Jackie Robinson when talking about the first black players in the top tiers of professional baseball, but in reality the first black man to play at that level was a catcher named Moses Fleetwood "Fleet" Walker back in 1884. He even had a younger brother who also played major league baseball. He enjoyed some success at the major league level with the Toledo baseball club and appeared to have a bright future in the game until a man named Cap Anson came to town.

Cap Anson was a big star and later a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was also an extremely outspoken racist and bigot. His refusal to step on the field while Walker was on it became a de facto rule throughout the major leagues. This is the incident that created the so-called "Color Barrier". Walker's experience dealing with racism was significant even within his own teams, he played with at least two fellow players who were open segregationists. One was outfielder Curt Welch, who played both the 1883 and 1884 seasons as Walker's teammate; the other was Toledo's workhorse pitcher in 1884, Tony Mullane. "He [Walker] was the best catcher I ever worked with, but I disliked a Negro and whenever I had to pitch to him I used to pitch anything I wanted without looking at his signals. One day he signaled me for a curve and I shot a fast ball at him. He caught it and came down to me....He said, 'I'll catch you without signals, but I won't catch you if you are going to cross me when I give you signals.' And all the rest of that season he caught me and caught anything I pitched without knowing what was coming."

The racial vitriol came from multiple sources, not just his own teammates and Cap Anson. Upon arriving in Richmond, the Toledo manager Charlie Morton received this letter: "Manager Toledo Base Ball Club:

Dear Sir: We the undersigned, do hereby warn you not to put up Walker, the Negro catcher, the evenings that you play in Richmond, as we could mention the names of 75 determined men who have sworn to mob Walker if he comes to the ground in a suit. We hope you will listen to our words of warning, so that there will be no trouble: but if you do not, there certainly will be. We only write this to prevent much blood shed, as you alone can prevent."

The story of Fleet Walker has become a classic trivia question, but is rarely seen as being as important as the stories of the men who broke the barriers. However, the importance of Walker's story means it cannot be ignored. Walker represents the end of the reconstruction era in the sport of baseball and the rise of the Jim Crow era. Baseball got its roots in American culture through the Jim Crow era, it was merely a curiosity in Walker's era. When baseball hit the American culture and became the nation's pastime, it was an ALL WHITE sport. Even when my father grew up in the era of integration, the league really was not welcoming black players with open arms. In 1947 there were five black players, two more joined in 1948, four in 1949, one in 1950...as you can see, it was not exactly a flood of new talent. Most players who grew up in the Negro Leagues effectively stayed there. It was about six or seven years after Jackie Robinson when most of the league began to embrace black players.

The story of the color barrier has many villains, but one of them is a man named Tom Yawkey. He was widely celebrated and elected to the Hall of Fame in 1980 despite never playing an MLB game and never winning a championship in over 40 years as owner of the Boston Red Sox. Yawkey literally ran his own team into the ground rather than promote black players into the Majors. Some said that it was because "Boston would never accept a black player", but since the Boston Braves had integrated without issue, that was simply a false statement. In reality, the Red Sox waited until 1959 to add a black player to their roster because Yawkey was committed to keeping the Red Sox white. "The intellectuals invoke muses, angels, and perhaps the devil to explain the ghosts that haunt Fenway. But the simple truth of much of the team's misfortune is more profane: at least until the 1960s, championships eluded the Red Sox because they were committed to bigoted managment. Red Sox officials watched while Jackie Robinson, Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, and other black stars took their teams to another level...they came up short not because they were doomed, but because they were blind to their own interests. During those years, the Red Sox suffered far less from fate than from their front office." I quote this journal not because I needed the words to be written, but because the journal was written decades ago and not in an era where heroes and prominent figures are receiving new light on their not-so-perfect pasts. The issue of Tom Yawkey being a racist was well known decades before the Red Sox began to finally distance themselves from his legacy. Again, his legacy was one where the Red Sox never won a championship and at one point had a stretch of 8 consecutive losing seasons. The team never got a new stadium in his tenure and the team's attendance numbers suffered for years because of the futility of fielding an all-white team in an integrating league. The Red Sox finally started winning and drawing fans in large numbers when they were finally utilizing the considerable talents of several black players to succeed.

 In the story of Fleet Walker and the 60 year ban on black players, not everyone in the league sat on the sidelines and did nothing as the league went all-white. Some men, like John McGraw, tried to integrate, but had to attempt to do so through trickery. McGraw was the manager of the Baltimore Orioles back in the early days of the color barrier and in 1901 he signed a man named Charles Grant. However, Grant was light-skinned and McGraw figured it would be easier to get him past the color line if he simply pretended he was a different color than black. "So, the skipper dressed him up as the Hollywood version of an Indian, face paint and all, according to Black Diamond. Nothing about the get-up was authentic to the Cherokee culture, but that didn't matter. McGraw found the name Tokohama by looking at a map of Hot Springs. It was a nearby creek." The players on the team seemed fine with the ruse, but Charles Comiskey objected and revealed his true identity. He returned to his Negro League team and never saw another opportunity to play in the MLB. After this attempt, McGraw gave up on his idea of secret integration and the league went another 46 years before seeing Jackie Robinson in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform.  

TO READ MORE OF THE STORY OF THE INTEGRATION OF MLB, LOOK FOR THE REST IN MY UPCOMING BOOK "You're Not Welcome Here: Stories of Discrimination and Exclusionary Practices in Baseball"