Today In Black History: Alice Coachman
The 1st Black woman to win an Olympic Gold Medal
Issue #608 Today In Black History, Monday, May 20, 2024
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Today’s Black History WOW!
Alice Coachman was born on November 9, 1923, in Albany, Georgia, and her daily routine included going to school and supplementing the family income by picking cotton, supplying corn to local mills, or picking plums and pecans to sell.
When Coachman was a child, it was questionable for women to compete in sports. More “ladylike” sports included tennis or swimming, but many people, including her father, thought women should not compete in sports at all. However, not only did she run, but she also played softball and baseball with the boys. Coachman did not think of pursuing athletics as a career and instead thought about becoming a musician or a dancer. It was her fifth-grade teacher at Monroe Street Elementary School, Cora Bailey, and her aunt, Carrie Spry, who encouraged her to continue running.
By seventh grade, she was one of the best athletes in Albany, boy or girl. Yet that did not give her equal access to training facilities. Barred from training with white children or using white athletic facilities, young Coachman trained on her own. She ran barefoot on dusty roads to improve her stamina and used sticks and rope to practice the high jump.
As one of the best athletes in Albany, Georgia, Coachman caught the attention of the HBCU Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and a coach at Tuskegee asked her parents if Coachman could train with their high school team during the summer. Coachman transferred to Tuskegee in her sophomore year to complete high school. Starting in 1943 as a member of the track-and-field team, she won four national championships for sprinting and high jumping.
People started pushing Coachman to try out for the Olympics, yet for many of those years, the Olympics were out of reach. In 1940 and 1944, the games were canceled due to World War II. In 1948, she eventually attended the trials and, while competing with a back injury, she bested the existing US high jump record.
On a rainy afternoon at Wembley Stadium in London in August 1948, Coachman competed for her Olympic gold in the high jump. She became the Gold Medalist when she cleared the 5 feet 6 1/8-inch bar on her first attempt. It was a new Olympic record. King George VI of Great Britain put the medal around her neck. With this medal, Coachman became not only the first Black woman to win Olympic gold, but the only American woman to win a gold medal at the 1948 Olympic Games.
Upon her return to the United States, she was celebrated. Count Basie, the famous jazz musician, threw her a party. President Truman congratulated her. She also got a 175-mile motorcade from Atlanta to Albany and an “Alice Coachman Day” in Georgia to celebrate her accomplishment. But this was still the segregated South, and the white mayor of Albany sat on the stage with Coachman but refused to shake her hand. She had to leave her own celebration by a side door.
After the 1948 Olympics, Coachman’s track career ended at the age of 24. She completed her degree at Albany State College (now University), where she enrolled in 1947. She graduated with a B.S. in Home Economics and a minor in science in 1949. She then became an elementary and high school teacher and track coach. In 1952, Coachman became the first Black female athlete to endorse an international consumer brand, Coca-Cola.
Coachman was inducted into nine halls of fame including the National Track-and-Field Hall of Fame (1975) and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Hall of Fame (2004). In 1994, she started the Alice Coachman Track and Field Foundation to aid young athletes and former competitors in financial need.
Alice Coachman died in Albany, Georgia on July 14, 2014, of cardiac arrest at the age of 90.
Today In Black History
In 1704, Elias Neau formed the first school for slaves in New York.
In 1861, North Carolina became the 11th and last state to secede from the Union.
In 1868, at the Republican National Convention that nominated General Ulysses S. Grant for president, there were also Black politicians attending for the first time, and several Blacks became official electors.
In 1890, John Stephens Durham was named U.S. Consul to the Dominican Republic.
In 1958, Robert Nelson Nix, Sr. was elected as the first Black Congressman from Pennsylvania.
In 1942, the U.S. Navy permitted Black recruits to serve.
In 1961, a white mob attacked the Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Alabama. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy dispatched 400 U.S. Marshals to Montgomery to keep order and protect the Freedom Riders.
In 1971, a Pentagon report stated that Black soldiers comprised 11% of all U.S. soldiers in Southeast Asia and that 12.5% of all soldiers killed in Vietnam since 1961 were Black.
In 2003, tennis champion Serena Williams won a Laureus World Sports Award as Sportswoman of the Year.
In 2003, Tyra Banks premiered her reality TV series, “America’s Next Top Model,” on UPN.
In 2008, Senator Barack Obama obtained the majority of pledged delegates for the Democratic presidential nomination.
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