Stuggles of a baseball pioneer: In Syracuse, the trials of Fleet Walker

walker_moses_fleetwood.jpgMoses Fleetwood Walker: The first African-American in the Major Leagues experienced triumph and tragedy in Syracuse.

He was a ballplayer, on trial for murder. That in itself was enough to seize the attention of greater Syracuse. But there was a more volatile element to the case against Moses Fleetwood Walker. District Attorney T.E. Hancock characterized it as the defendant's "peculiar disposition."

Walker was an African-American, the first to ever play major league baseball. That is acknowledged by historians at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. But he finished his playing days in the International League with the Syracuse Stars, where his career ended under the spike of the game's new color line.

Within two years, in the spring of 1891, he was thrown in jail, accused of murdering an ex-convict called "Curly" in a street fight. It was a killing, Walker maintained, set off by racial taunts and performed in self-defense. But one of baseball's pioneers was hurtled into a dramatic trial.

A century later, his life takes on remarkable dimensions. He was a bare-handed catcher who spent the 1884 season with a major-league team in Toledo, where he batted .263. But not all crowds were glad to see a black player coming. According to historian Jerry Malloy, Walker - while with the Stars - was once arrested in Toronto for carrying a gun to protect himself from an angry, baiting crowd.

In a game dominated by products of the working poor, Fleet Walker was a college-educated man who had spent a year in law school. In 1889, after the Syracuse Stars let him go and no other team would pick him up, he quickly found a good job handling registered letters on the New York Central Railroad.

But it was hard to surrender his devotion to baseball. On the afternoon of April 9, 1891, Walker was searching for "Icewater" Joe Simmons, his former Syracuse manager, among the barrooms of the old Seventh Ward. Walker had a "baseball matter" to discuss, although it remains unclear if he still hoped to get back into the game.

A group of idlers, standing outside the Crouse Saloon at the corner of Monroe and Orange streets, demanded to know what brought Walker into their neighborhood. A rock was thrown. A couple of men moved toward Walker, who drew a knife. Within hours, Patrick "Curly" Murray was dead of a stab wound, and Walker was in prison.

"In those days, " says Phil Dixon, a baseball historian who has researched Walker's career, "a black man charged with murder usually ended up buried deeper than the bottom of the jail."

A baseball rarity

Riding home from Rochester on a fall day in 1888, Walker, like the rest of the Syracuse team, had no idea what kind of welcome was waiting at the old Central station.

The Stars were coming back from their last road trip of the season, winners of the International League championship. Their train pulled in at 9 p.m., and the players were greeted by flares and fireworks, illuminating a crowd that spilled over the platform.

Team president Thomas O'Neill introduced the fans to every player on the roster, telling them, "We consider each one of you a Star in his place."

Walker's presence originally made it easier for Syracuse to carry Robert Higgins, a black pitcher. Dixon says many white catchers refused to share a battery with Higgins. Indeed, the rest of the Stars, in 1887, had been accused of throwing a game to Toronto to make Higgins look bad. Two players, says Malloy, refused to pose with Higgins in a team picture.

It didn't stop Higgins from contributing in the early drive for the '88 pennant. But by mid-season, Dixon says, Higgins grew weary of racial trouble and returned to his Memphis barber shop.

Walker remained the team's starting catcher. The pounding on his bare hands affected his hitting, says Malloy. His average that year was .170, although he stole 30 bases, and his home run to left field at the old Star Park was the high point in a pennant-clinching victory over Albany.

It was a time of brief opportunity for black baseball players. While some popular sentiment, and some pragmatic owners, favored integrated baseball, America was already shoving blacks into the long twilight of Jim Crow. Baseball's progressive element would soon be overwhelmed by reactionaries, who held sway until Jackie Robinson joined Montreal in 1946.

Walker was among a handful of blacks in the 1880s playing in "white" leagues. Before joining the Stars, he did time with Toledo, Cleveland, Waterbury and Newark. He was talented enough that Newark fans were angry when he left. In Toledo, in 1884, he spent one year in the majors.

"The ease, grace and celerity through which he caught and threw to bases was admired by everybody, " remarked the old Syracuse Courier.

No matter. His talent was unrelated to his prospects. By 1887, the International League agreed in principle to stop signing new black players, although the few active blacks were not barred from competing. When the Stars released Walker in August 1889, he represented the last black in the league.

No African-American would play again in the International League until Robinson joined Montreal. As for Walker, he settled into his job on the railroad, and led a quiet life until the day he walked past the Crouse Saloon.

Unwelcome climate

Walker's troubles were magnified by the racial tenor of the times. His attorneys fretted about finding an unbiased jury. Two days before the trial began, the Standard reported on Page One how Tump Hampton, a black man in New Orleans, had been "incinerated" by a lynch mob.

That animosity was not reserved to the South. Two weeks after the arrest of Walker, a fraternal group known as the Colored Knights of Pythias asked Syracuse Mayor William Cowle if they could raise the flag on the Liberty Pole during a convention.

According to the Standard, the mayor refused to respond. Finally, Jonas Johnson of the Knights approached Cowle on the street. The mayor, Johnson later complained to a reporter, "was in a hurry to raise the flag on every holiday imaginable, " including such feasts as St. Vitus' Day.

Not for the Colored Knights. Cowle "dismissed the matter with a word and moved on, " the Standard said.

In that climate, black ballplayers were celebrated within the African American community. Malloy says black leaders in the city sent a community letter of support to Stars officers in 1887, thanking them for their fight against the ban on black players. Throughout the three-day trial, local papers noted how a large group of blacks kept patient vigil at the courthouse.

The case

Some things were working in Walker's favor. He had a skilled defense team, led by Harrison Hoyt of Syracuse and reinforced by A.C. Lewis, an Ohio attorney who had once tutored Walker in the study of the law.

Each day, as he entered the courtroom, Walker was greeted by his young son, who would offer his dad a bouquet of flowers. The boy would crawl into his father's lap, while Walker would sit and clasp the hand of his wife, whose name was never identified in accounts of the trial. That scene was repeatedly described in the papers, and it had an effect.

"Public sympathy seems to be strong for Walker, " remarked the Standard.

The trial itself was a muddle. The key issue of provocation was hard for either side to establish. It was difficult to tell whether Walker, who received a severe blow in the head during the incident, pulled his knife before or after he was struck with the stone.

The prosecution maintained Murray, a notorious drinker who had spent three years in state prison, only wanted to shake Walker's hand. That was tough to swallow, although Murray's cronies all swore under oath it was true, and Hancock tried to prove Walker was drunk.

The trial boiled down to Walker himself, who took the stand with "quiet demeanor, " according to the Standard.

He recounted how he had been searching for Simmons throughout the Seventh Ward, before he stopped to have a few beers with a friend. They talked about that year's version of the Stars. A couple of hours later, Walker said, he walked past the group of men on the street corner.

Walker was wearing a derby hat and a nice suit. He testified the men asked why he was in their neighborhood. The exchange became increasingly hostile. He said one of the men accused him of putting on airs "for a damn nigger." The men said Walker cursed them. Walker said he left.

"I turned across the street when I was hit in the back of the head with a stone, " Walker testified. He said he turned to defend himself, and was charged by two attackers coming off the barroom stoop. One held something in his hand. Walker drew his knife and struck. Murray, cousin of a city councilman, died less than a day later.

If the question of race had only simmered throughout testimony, it flared up when Hancock offered his fiery summation. "If Walker, with his peculiar disposition and the blood that flows in his veins, is put in such a state that he magnifies every trivial incident into a cause for crime, then he ought not to touch the stuff, " Hancock declared.

That attempt to win over the skeptical jury backfired when Walker's little daughter - frightened by the anger and volume of Hancock's voice - started crying while seated on her father's lap.

The all-white jury needed less than three hours to make a decision. Walker was called back, and he sat down and gave his wife a kiss. The courtroom was packed when foreman James Hill, an Eighth Ward farmer, stood and declared Walker to be innocent.

"The announcement of the verdict, " said the Standard, "was followed by one of the most remarkable demonstrations of approval ever witnessed in a courtroom in this city."

The crowd let out a roar of jubilation and headed for the Walkers. Court officers slammed long rods on the floor to try and restore order. Judge George Kennedy demanded the arrest of anyone making excessive noise. "I would have to arrest them all, " replied an overwhelmed sheriff.

Kennedy banged his gavel so hard that the head flew off. Peace was eventually restored to the courtroom. But even the judge seemed pleased with the verdict. He made a point of warning Walker to stop drinking, and then the judge shook hands with Walker's wife. Walker himself thanked each of the jurors, before his family left through a side exit, avoiding well-wishers and the curious jammed around the front door.

Walker's sentence

It is difficult to say how much effect the trial had on the Walkers. They soon moved back to Ohio. No longer entertaining dreams about baseball, Walker became a theater owner, a journalist and an author. He despaired of any chance for an integrated America. In a 47-page book, "Our Home Colony, " he warned blacks of potential genocide and urged them to strive to return to Africa.

Dixon, the historian, speculates that baseball and the trial may have helped to shape that view. Considering the times, it is remarkable - and a testimony to the bonding power of baseball - that Walker even won acquittal.

But he still spent two months of that year in jail, and he was reminded how some neighborhoods, and minds, remained closed to his people. In 1924, the man once called "a Star in his place" died convinced that place could never be the nation of his birth.

Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Post-Standard