Before Jackie Robinson dared to cross baseball’s color line in the spring of 1947, there was Moses Fleetwood Walker – the pioneer that time always forgets
Second-degree murder was the charge that they gave him, and his win probability did not look good. For one thing this was the 90s – the 1890s – and he was Black in Syracuse, New York. For another the man he killed was white. It hardly mattered that this man – some yob named Patrick “Curly” Murray, a cousin of the local alderman – came looking for trouble with a group of white men outside a bar, and struck first with a rock. A knife to the stomach had extinguished Murray in the prime of life, and the job of apportioning blame had fallen to an all-white jury. Surely, they’d throw the book at Moses Fleetwood Walker. But as luck would have it, he was a helluva catcher.
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