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Fleet Walker's Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball's First Black Major Leaguer. David W. Zang. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. 157 pp. $21.50 cloth.
Up until the publication of this biography, Moses Fleetwood Walker (1857-1924) has been little more than a baseball trivia question that could trip up those unfamiliar with the nineteenth century National Game. Walker was a catcher on the 1884 Toledo team in the American Association (considered a major league from 1882 through 1891), making Fleet Walker the first African-American player in the major leagues. His younger brother, Weldy Wilberforce Walker, also played five games as an outfielder for Toledo during that season. In all, Fleet Walker would play seven seasons (1883-1889) of professional baseball in the white leagues, with his last two seasons spent planning for Syracuse in the International Association. However, Walker's career, like that of other talented players such as George Stovey and Frank Grant, was to be cut short by the imposition of the racial "color line" that cleared the major and minor leagues of black players.
Zang's thesis about Fleet Walker is that he, as a mulatto, was a "divided man" who admired and hated white society and who felt anger and rage for his "forced departure from the International Association" in 1889. As the son of a physician and Methodist minister, Moses Fleetwood Walker went to Oberlin College, where...