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

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

David W. Zang. University of Nebraska Press, $40 (171pp) ISBN 978-0-8032-4913-4

Moses Fleetwood Walker (1857-1924) played pro baseball from 1882 until 1889, when the ban on black players became total. He had started to play in earnest as an undergraduate at Oberlin and continued at the Univ. of Michigan. A mulatto, he was raised in Mount Pleasant, Ohio, a Quaker community where he encountered little racism. But as racial discrimination increased nationwide, he came to see himself as living between black and white worlds while holding a number of jobs, from mail clerk (he went to prison for a year for stealing from the mails) to entrepreneur of an entertainment business in Cadiz, Ohio. His frustration at not being accepted by either world was expressed in his 1908 pamphlet ``Our Home Country,'' which urged blacks to return to Africa. Zang, who has taught at the University of Maryland and Penn State, has effectively re-created the society in which Walker lived and worked. Illustrations. (May)