Walker, Moses Fleetwood ‘Fleet’ (1856–1924) and Welday Wilberforce (1860–1937)

US baseball players, businessmen, and civil-rights pioneers. Sons of an Ohio physician, Fleet became the first African-American in the major baseball leagues, batting .263 in 42 games and earning respect as a catcher, while Welday played five games as a major league outfielder in 1884, batting .182. Both played for the Toledo Blue Stockings in the American Association league. In 1887 the International League voted to bar contracts with blacks, and the Walker brothers' careers soon declined.

They published Our Home Colony – A Treatise on the Past, Present and Future of the Negro Race in America (1908), advocating the return of African-Americans to Africa.

In 1895 Fleet killed a man in self-defence in a racial attack in Syracuse and, although exonerated, he left the area and went to Steubenville, Ohio, where Welday followed him. They managed a hotel there and eventually owned a few cinemas. Meanwhile the brothers had become increasingly open in their opposition to the growing segregation in US society, and Moses became the editor of the Equator, a periodical devoted to African-American concerns. The brothers later set up a travel office to enable African-Americans to go to Liberia. Moses was born in Mount Pleasant, Ohio, and Welday in Steubenville, Ohio.