This part isn’t important but I need y’all to understand how my mind works and why I randomly end up spouting trivia at the dinner table that is absolutely useful to no one.
I was talking to this girl who lives in Toledo and she was dragging NYC…so I was dragging her little nobody Ohio city right back. At one point I said Toledo wasn’t even a real city because they don’t have a baseball team. She said they had the Toledo Mud Hens (a whack ass mascot if ever I did see!), but obviously they’re a minor league team so they don’t count. Because I like random info, I wanted to look up a mud hen to find out what it is and why they would be named that, and when I did I saw that the Mud Hens play for the American Association. But then I found out that there was another Toledo team that played for an extinct American Association which was a major league organization from the late 1800s.
And that team, the Toledo Blue Stockings, had Moses Fleetwood Walker as a catcher.
Rewind back to a post-Civil War United States. Black people were free…and Black people were making moves. With the (short-lived) protection of the federal government, formerly enslaved people were buying property, starting businesses, building flourishing communities, and running for office. During Reconstruction there was a time where 4 of the 5 US Representatives from South Carolina were Black. After George W. Murray, a Black teacher, was run out of office in 1897, South Carolina didn’t elect another Black person to the House of Representatives until 1993 when Jim Clyburn began his first term.
Professional sports often mirrors the tenor of the country.
The history of Major League Baseball (MLB) is really long (and boring), but working backward from the present…
MLB is now one large organization, but there used to be two leagues up until 2000: The American League and the National League. The winner of the AL and the winner of the NL would meet at the World Series to crown the winner of baseball. The AL and the NL were two separate leagues who signed an agreement back in 1903 to basically be the two professional leagues of baseball under the banner of Major League Baseball and play a lil World Series at the end of the season. From the baby beginnings of professional baseball through 1903, there were 5 to 7 different major leagues (depending on who you ask) and the most successful of those was the American Association (the first AA, not the current minor league AA). The winner of the AA and the winner of the NL met up in the 1880s, and those were the first World Series. Eventually the NL swallowed up the AA, but while it was in existence, the AA had a team called the Toledo Blue Stockings with a philosophy student from Oberlin College playing catcher by the name of Moses Fleetwood “Fleet” Walker.
Depending on your definition, Fleet wasn’t the first Black man to play a major league game either — that would’ve been William Edward White who subbed in for a game with the Providence Grays in 1879, but William was passing as white. Fleet on the other hand had two visibly Black (mixed-race, but still labeled Black) parents and he was a Black man who faced hostility when he was signed by the Blue Stockings. Motions were introduced to ban Negroes from the leagues, and players from other teams said they wouldn’t take the field if Fleet was playing. But they were empty threats, and Fleet played one season with the Blue Stockings before his injuries eventually got othe better of him.
And just like elected officials, it would be decades before white people would allow Black people to enter the halls of one of their sacred institutions again. The federal government handed the reigns of the country over to Southern white supremacists whose will prevailed across the country in various forms of segregation and oppression. Black people couldn’t vote, hold office, or play baseball for a few generations.
And then came Jackie Robinson who ended racism for good and we all lived happily ever after!
Interesting sidenote about Fleet Walker: after he retired from baseball, he eventually became a successful businessman who held patents that helped boost the budding film industry. Between baseball and his business success, he was charged with murder. Walker was attacked outside of a bar by a group of white guys, one of whom was the cousin of a city council member. Walker stabbed the guy, in self defense, and was arrested and charged with murder. A Black man murdering a white man who is related to a politician could reasonably expect to go to jail in 2022, let alone in 1891.
But, an all-white jury acquitted Fleet Walker. They concluded that Walker hadn’t been the aggressor and he was defending his life against a group of thugs. Imagine that.
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