1888, The Cleveland Gazette wrote that Weldy was "making quite a success of the Keystone Base Ball Club." Civil rights efforts and business career 1884 civil rights lawsuit Walker became involved in a civil rights lawsuit in 1884 after a roller-skating rink in Steubenville denied entry to Walker and his friend, Hannibal Lyons. The Cleveland Gazette, an African-American weekly newspaper, described the circumstances as follows:Steubenville, like many other places, is suffering now from the roller skate craze. There are now three in full blast and prospects for more. Discrimination on account of color never was carried on in Steubenville until these strangers starting rinks here issued the edict "No Negroes need apply except for positions of menials." On the 16th there was an opening night at the South Side Rink, and two of our young men of gentlemanly deportment and honest reputation applied for admission. The proprietor of the rink flatly told them, "You are colored and you can't skate." Walker and Lyons filed a civil rights lawsuit accusing the operator, Massey & Son, of racial discrimination. Some local newspaper accounts of the suit suggested that "Walker and Lyons were troublemakers stirring a 'political and social racket.'" Following a trial in January 1885, the presiding judge, Justice May, ruled that the skating rink operator had violated the rights of Walker and Lyons "under the civil rights law, and a special law of the Ohio Legislature giving the colored man certain privileges." The court awarded them each fifteen dollars in damages, with costs. However, the court declined to enter an order requiring the rink operator to admit African Americans. In his biography of Fleetwood Walker, David Zang called the court's ruling "a judgment that nominally supported integration while doing nothing to promote it in everyday reality." Negro Protective Party During the 1890s, Walker became active in politics. Walker's activism was heightened by an incident in June 1897 in which residents of Urbana, Ohio, formed a lynch mob, removed a black man named "Click" Mitchell from the town jail, and publicly killed him by hanging. Believing that Ohio's Republican Governor Asa Bushnell had failed to conduct an appropriate investigation into the lynching, Walker and other African Americans in Ohio left the Republican Party and formed the Negro Protective Party. As a member of the party's Executive Committee, Walker helped organize the party's convention at Columbus, Ohio in September 1897. The party adopted