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 (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 who admired and hated white society and who felt anger and rage for his departure from the International Association in 1889. As the son of a physician and Methodist minister, Moses Fleetwood Walker went to Oberlin College, where he starred on the baseball team, and then to the University of Michigan, where he studied law and also played baseball. However, he never finished his law studies, as he moved on to play professional baseball, earning an estimated $2,000 a season in his first year. But in order to remain in organized baseball, Walker and others had to endure racial prejudice and practices that were constant and painful. Succeeding against white players brought only grudging acknowledgment and incurred inevitable hostility and resentment. Walker was, by no means, a top star of his time, but he was a skilled and steady performer as a catcher. As biographer Zang documents, Fleet Walker's life after baseball was marked by a number of perplexing incidents and developments. In April, 1891, he stabbed and killed a man in Syracuse, but was acquitted of the charge. In September, 1898, he was indicted for mail robbery while working as a U.S. Postal Service employee, convicted, and spent a year in a federal prison. In 1908, he and his brother edited a black issues-oriented newspaper, and Fleet published a pamphlet entitled Our Home Colony: The Past, Present and Future of the Negro Race in America. In this work Walker argued for black emigration to Africa (to Liberia) and even advocated a forced return, if necessary, by deportation. Walker rejected assimilation and determined racial coexistence since he saw only a poisoned and dangerous racial atmosphere in which there was no chance of social equality for black people. …