August 10, 1883: Toledo, Ohio and Baseball’s Color Line

Friday, August 10, 1883, promised excitement for baseball fans in Toledo. The Toledo Blue Stockings of the Northwest League played host to the three-time world champion Chicago White Stockings, and thou­ sands jammed League Park at Monroe and 13th Streets to see the greatest team in baseball and its star player-manager, Cap Anson. What the crowd did not know was that this game would become one of the most critical in the history of the sport.

The White Stockings, following the custom of the day, played exhibition games against the better teams of the minor leagues on off days from National League play. The Blue Stockings, who would not be called Mud Hens for another decade, qualified as worthy opponents. After losing 11 of its first 17 games, the Toledo club pulled together under manag­er Charles Morton and won the pennant of the Northwest League that year.

The only storm cloud on the horizon settled over a member of the Toledo team. Toledo’s catcher, Moses Walker, was a former Oberlin College student who played ball to earn money for law school at the University of Michigan. He also happened to be one of the few African American players in organized baseball at the time.

Anson, the playing manager of the Chicago team, had made it known to the Toledo management that he objected to sharing the field with black players, and the locals planned to oblige him. Walker, suffering from a sore hand, had not been penciled into the line­ up anyway. The Chicago team arrived at Union Station that Friday morning and was informed that Walker would be kept on the bench. However, according to the Toledo Blade, “not content with this, the visitors during their perambulations of the forenoon declared with the swagger for which they are noted” that they would not step onto the field “with no damned n–.” Anson, further inflaming a situation that the Toledo management had thought resolved, loudly reiterated this demand upon arriving at League Park.

Charles Morton was not pleased with the demeanor of the visitors. “The order was given, then and there, to play Walker and the beefy bluffer [Anson] was informed that he could play his team or go, just as he blank pleased,” reported the Blade.1 When Anson saw Walker warming up before the con­ test, he exploded. “Get that n– off the field!” he shrieked to manager Morton. He threatened to pull his team off the field without playing the game, but soon relented after a period of confusion and the threat of forfeiture of the gate receipts. The Blade quoted Anson as saying, “We’ll play this here game, but we won’t play never no more with the n– in.”2 The exhibition played in Toledo turned out to be one of the most important games in baseball history. From this game came the impetus for the systematic expulsion of blacks from the game, a ban that would last for 63 years.

During the early 1880s there was no official color line in professional baseball, although no African Americans had yet played in the National League. Eighteen years after the Civil War ended, America was still struggling with the placement of newly freed blacks in society. The cries grew louder that blacks did not belong on the same playing fields as whites. African Americans also began to find theaters, restaurants, transportation, union shops, and skilled vocations closed to them. Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan became more prominent in American political life.

Adrian Anson leaped into this controversy with both feet. Anson dominated baseball for three decades. He became one of the sport’s earliest stars as a teenager in 1871 and moved to Chicago when the National League was formed in 1876. Anson became playing manager of the White Stockings in 1879, which gave him the nickname “Cap,” and he held the post for 19 years before he retired as both player and manager in 1897. He was the first batter to reach 3,000 hits and win four batting championships, and the first manager to win five pennants. Loud, belliger­ent, and foul-mouthed, Anson also refined umpire intimidation to a science. He is usually considered the greatest player of the 19th century, and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939.

Unfortunately, Cap Anson was also an outspoken bigot. His autobiography, written in 1900, made no mention of Moses Walker, but related in gleeful detail how the team treated its “mascot,” a black man named Clarence Duval, who entertained the crowds before Chicago games. Anson described Duval as a “coon” and “a no-account n–.” Historian Bill James wrote, “They treated Duval exactly as one would treat a dog.” Anson made no secret of his con­ tempt for African American ballplayers, repeating the statement “Gentlemen don’t play baseball with n–s” to anyone who would listen. People listened to Cap Anson, the towering figure of baseball in the 1880s.

Though Anson’s racial views were in no way unusual for the era, it appears that, even in the 1880s, he was considered an extremist. As the noted African American baseball historian and player Sol White wrote in 1907, “[Anson’s] repugnant feeling, shown at every opportunity, toward colored ball players, was a source of comment throughout every league in the country.”3 What made Anson’s apparent hatred of blacks unusual was the fact that he was not a Southerner, nor had he been a sympathizer of the Confederate cause during the recently completed Civil War. Anson was born and raised in Marshalltown, Iowa, where he played with Pottawatomie Indian children in his youth. Marshalltown was hardly a hotbed of racial strife.

On the other hand, Moses Walker earned respect for his play and his hard work on and off the field. Born in 1857, he was the son of Dr. Moses W Walker, one of the first African American physicians in Ohio. The Walker family settled in Oberlin, where Moses spent two years at Oberlin Preparatory School before he was admitted to Oberlin College in 1879. Walker attended the college for three years and then enrolled in the law school at the University of Michigan in 1882, though he did not earn a diploma from either institution. The Blade story of August 11, 1883, praised Walker as “a gentleman and a scholar, in the literal sense,” “entirely lacking in bummer instincts” and “the superior intellectually of any player on the Chicago club.” The Blade also pointed out that Walker had already played for Toledo in exhibitions against teams from New York, St. Louis, and Columbus without incident or complaint.

The catching position was the most dangerous spot on the field in those days. Pitchers had been restricted to underhand throwing motions until the 1880s, but by 1883 the leagues allowed hurlers to throw faster pitches with sidearm and, soon after, overhand deliveries. Moses Walker wore a mask, but had only two thin, fingerless gloves to protect his hands. Broken fingers and sore hands were an occu­pational hazard for catchers in the 1880s, and Walker stood up to the pounding with the courage required of any catcher of that era. He played right field against the White Stockings because his hands were too sore to catch.

The game itself was, according to the Blade, “only a fair exhibition of ball playing,” with the world cham­pions winning 7-6 in ten innings. The Blue Stockings battered Fred Goldsmith, the champions’ second­ string pitcher, for sixteen hits and held Chicago to only ten. The score was tied three times before Toledo took the lead in the top of the tenth, only to see Chicago score twice in the bottom of the inning to win the game.4 Anson hit a double and a single for Chicago, while Walker was the only Toledo batter without a hit. Walker reached base on an error and scored a run, and played errorless ball in right field. Chicago’s home run champion, Ed Williamson, was held hitless. Billy Sunday, who later became America’s leading evangelist, played right field and managed one hit for Chicago.

The Blade scorched Anson and his men the fol­ lowing day. “It is not putting it too strongly,” said the paper, “to say they were the most untidy looking lot of ball players that have ever graced the City with their presence. Their baggy white uniforms, dirty white stockings, and variegated assortment of caps gave them a slouchy, uncouth appearance which, with their braggadocio manner, was in strange contrast to what most of the audience had expected to see.” The Blade also stated, “It is likely to prove a very cold day when they again carry a substantial bundle of gate receipts out of Toledo.”5 

The game attracted national attention and crys­tallized the segregation forces already at work in pro­fessional baseball. The Peoria team of the Northwest League had petitioned the circuit to ban blacks, specifically Toledo’s Moses Walker, before the 1883 season began, although Peoria withdrew its request after much “excited discussion.” Cap Anson was not alone in his opposition to minorities in the profes­sional ranks, and as the months passed, more high­ level teams began to release black players and refuse to hire new ones. Historian Sol White placed the blame directly on the shoulders of Cap Anson. “[Anson’s] opposition,” wrote White some 25 years later, “with his great popularity and power in baseball circles, hastened the exclusion of the black man from white leagues.”6

The American Association, then considered a major league, expanded to 12 teams after the 1883 season, and the Toledo Blue Stockings quit the Northwest League and joined the Association for the 1884 campaign. When Moses Walker caught for Toledo against the Louisville nine on May 1, 1884, he became the first African American to play in a major league game. The second black major leaguer made his debut for Toledo in July of that year when the injury-riddled ballclub hired Welday Walker, Moses’s younger brother, to fill in as an outfielder for three weeks. Welday Walker played in five games and batted .222. 

Anson did not enjoy his stay in Toledo, but the game was a profitable one, so the White Stockings scheduled another exhibition with Toledo for the 1884 campaign. However, Anson made certain to avoid a replay of the previous unpleasant controversy. In April 1884 the Chicago club sent a letter to Toledo manager Charles Murton which stated, “No colored man shall play in your nine and if your officers insist on playing him after we are there you forfeit the Guarantee and we refuse to play. Now I think this is fair as we refuse point blank to play colored men.”7 On July 25, 1884, Anson and the White Stockings returned to Toledo for another exhibition game, but this time controversy was avoided as Moses Walker remained on the bench. Anson belted a home run in the fourth inning of the contest, and the White Stockings defeated Toledo by a score of 10-8.

Fans around the circuit responded positively to Anson’s campaign. Moses Walker was booed and hissed at a game in Louisville in early May, but mat­ters took a more serious turn later in the season. Before a series against the Richmond Virginians, Charles Morton received a letter from four Richmond fans that threatened mob violence if Walker appeared on the field in uniform. Sporting Life magazine investigated and determined that the four names on the letter were bogus, but Walker did not play against the Virginians either in Toledo or in Richmond.

Walker also had trouble with teammate Tony Mullane, one of the great pitchers of the era, who joined the Toledo club for the 1884 season. Mullane was born in County Cork, Ireland, and, like Anson, freely expressed his low regard for players of African descent. Years later Mullane described his relation­ ship with his catcher. “[Walker] was the best catcher I ever worked with,” said Mullane in 1919, “but I dis­ liked a Negro and whenever I had to pitch to him I used anything I wanted without looking at his sig­nals.” Mullane added, “One day he signaled me for a curve and I shot a fast ball at him. He caught it and walked 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 the season he caught everything I pitched without know­ing what was coming.”8

Toledo employed eight catchers in 1884 (includ­ing a teenage “Deacon” Jim McGuire, whose major league career spanned 26 seasons), but Walker was the best of the lot, and he caught in most of Mullane’s appearances that year until injuries drove him to the sidelines. Of course, Mullane’s shenanigans added errors and passed balls to Walker’s statistics and increased the possibility of injury. Walker batted .263 for the 1884 season, but he led the circuit in passed balls, and his sore hands caused his release on September 23, 1884. No African American would play in the major leagues again until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

Walker played for minor league teams in Cleveland, Newark, and other cities for several years thereafter, and he crossed paths with Cap Anson again. In 1887 Anson threatened to cancel an exhibi­tion against the Newark club rather than face George Stovey, the black pitching star of the team. Stovey and his catcher, Walker, both remained on the bench for the duration of the game. After the season Newark released Stovey despite his 33 wins, and when the New York Giants tried to sign Stovey to a National League contract for 1888, Anson’s ferocious objections forced the Giants to back off. By 1889 Walker was the only African American remaining in the high minor leagues, and within two years the color line was firmly in place throughout professional ball.

Moses Walker led a difficult life after baseball. He killed a man in a fight in 1891 and stood trial for murder, though he was eventually acquitted on a claim of self-defense. A few years later he was accused and convicted of stealing money from a mail sack, and served a year in prison. He turned to politi­cal pursuits upon his release, editing a newspaper with his brother Welday and advocating black reset­tlement in Africa. He died in Cleveland in 1924 and was buried in Steubenville. The grave remained unmarked until 1990, when a group of Oberlin grad­uates raised money for a proper headstone.

Anson also experienced his share of troubles. “Cap Anson was a blowhard,” wrote Bill James, “and the older he got, the harder he blew.” His obstinate nature caused his dismissal as Chicago manager in 1897 and kept him from returning to baseball. Bad investments soon forced him into bankruptcy. In 1920 Judge Kenesaw M. Landis was appointed the first commissioner of baseball; the 68-year-old Anson campaigned for the job, but was ignored by the press and the public. The National League paid Anson’s funeral expenses when he died in 1922.

The Chicago White Stockings of the National League are now known as the Cubs, and Cap Anson is still the team’s all-time leader in hits, runs batted in, and batting average. However, his reputation rests on the campaign he began in Toledo on that August day in 1883.

DAVID FLEITZ is a SABR member and author of Shoeless: The Life and Times of Joe Jackson and Seymour Medal finalist Louis Sockalexis: First Cleveland Indian, both published by McFarland.

 

Notes

1. Toledo Blade, August 11, 1883.

2. Toledo Blade, August 11, 1883.

3. Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 30.

4. Toledo, the home team, batted first. In those days the home club was allowed to decide which team batted first.

5. Toledo Blade, August 11, 1883.

6. Peterson, 30.

7. Peterson, 43-44.

8. David W. Zang, Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 43. This text comes from an interview with Mullane in New York Age, January 11, 1919.