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Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 192
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 09:05 pm: | 
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The Life of Baseball's First Black Major Leaguer (University of Nebraska Press, 1995)
Remarkable book. A well-documented biogaphy of a 19th century black sports figure seems unlikely enough, but what I found impressive was the author's depth of knowledge about the changing race theories, dogma, and myths of the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as his ability to place baseball and other forms of entertainment in a historical and cultural context. The author has taught sports studies and American studies at a number of colleges and universities.
And the subject himself is so interesting. Moses Fleetwood Walker (1857-1924) was born into a racially tolerant Quaker community in eastern Ohio just 15 miles from the notorious Wheeling, WV slave market, during the time of the Fugitive Slave Act. His father was an interesting man, a physician and a preacher.
Walker attended abolitionist Oberlin College and transferred to U Mich at Ann Arbor where he eventually received a law degree, although he never took a bar exam.
The first black player in the major leagues (the American Association, which was formed to rival the National League), he spent a half decade in the upper-level minor leagues (like the International League) where there were other black players, until the late 1880s when blacks were forced out of the game. So Walker was the last black player in the International League until Jackie Robinson.
At the end of his baseball career his life fell apart in some ways, mostly due to alcoholism. He was acquitted on murder charges but later convicted and imprisoned for embezzling small amounts of money from the mail when he worked for the Post Office.
He later published a black-issues-oriented newspaper and finally a 48-page book/treatise called Our Home Colony, which advocated African emigration for all black Americans.
On the first page David Zang states:
I confess to having had the biographer's fantasy of discovering the secret diary of my subject. Moses Fleetwood Walker was a good candidate to have kept one, but if he did so, it is still at large.
Adam Mansbach's novel, Angry Black White Boy begins with fictional entries from Fleet Walker's diary. Which is where I first heard about this biography.
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bookinfo/2943.html
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Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1666
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 02:38 pm: |
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Boy Steve this was really controversial.
What next? "Holiday Cooking with Oprah?" |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 200
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 11:51 pm: |
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I didn't say it was controversial, I said that Adam Mansbach's novel is based on it.
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