The Fastest Man in the World
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Half a century before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball and a decade before Jack Johnson claimed the heavyweight boxing title, Major Taylor was the first African American to reach the pinnacle of the most popular sport of his day.
In the 1890s, the bicycle was the focus of an astounding craze. Everybody wanted one. Bicycle racing, both on roads and on the steeply banked tracks of velodromes, offered unprecedented speed, palpable danger, and frequent crashes.
Major Taylor—his given name was Marshall—was the son of a coachman who worked for a wealthy Indianapolis family. The employers invited Marshall to live with them as a companion to their son. When they moved to Chicago, they gave him a bicycle, a luxury beyond his own parents’ means.
Taylor found work with a bicycle store in Indianapolis. Having taught himself tricks, he put on a military uniform— hence the nickname—and performed in front of the store every afternoon. Later he teamed up with Louis “Birdie” Munger, a champion racer who built racing bikes in the city. Munger saw Taylor’s potential and helped him train until he was bringing home prizes for Midwest races limited to Black riders.
Munger moved his shop to Worcester, Massachusetts, and took Major Taylor with him. These were the peak years of Jim Crow. In 1894 the League of American Wheelmen, the group that oversaw racing, caved to southern demands to exclude blacks from membership. At Munger’s urging, they made an exception for Taylor, allowing him to keep his license to race.
Six hundred professionals competed at the many velodromes around the country. In his first outing, Major Taylor amazed everyone by beating Eddie “Cannon” Bald, the reigning American sprint champion. He won $200, almost six-months wages for a workman. He became an immediate celebrity.
White riders were humiliated. They began to taunt Taylor, elbow him, box him in, and crowd him off the track at speeds of more than forty miles an hour. In 1897 Taylor could not vie for the national championship because he was barred from southern tracks. He received death threats.
But the next year, Major Taylor, at age 19, came into his own. He dominated the sport, beating the best riders before crowds of thirty thousand spectators. He was the “Ebony Streak,” the “Fastest Man In the World.” Speed was Major Taylor's specialty. Among the first athletes to follow a strict, year-round training regime, he was able to achieve explosive acceleration. Promoters knew he filled seats.
In 1899 he won 22 of the 29 races he entered. He won the national sprint championship, defeating the top riders in the country. That August he traveled to Montreal for the world championships. He narrowly lost in the half mile. But in the mile, he powered across the finish line ahead of the best riders in the U.S., Canada, and France. At the age of twenty, he became the first African American to hold an important world championship.
He went on to tour Europe, where bicycle racing was a mania. He won nearly every race. Coming home at the peak of his renown, Taylor walked into a hotel in Syracuse, New York. A bellboy insisted that he get out. The best paid athlete in the world was not wanted there.
He continued to win, but bicycle racing took a toll on the riders. In 1910, at the age of thirty-one, Major Taylor retired. The sport itself was declining as the motor car became the new arbiter of speed.
Taylor had married, fathered a daughter, and purchased a fine home in Worcester. He had made as much as $35,000 in a year when Ty Cobb, the baseball phenom, was making less than $5,000. But risky investments in the early automobile business did not pay off for Taylor. He eventually found himself running a tire repair shop. He sold his wife's jewelry. She took in work as a seamstress. They split up.
Although he had received very little education—Indianapolis schools were off limits for Black children—he liked to read and was an avid letter writer. He decided to write his autobiography. He painstakingly documented his life and races, but could find no publisher. He used his dwindling savings to bring out an edition himself in 1928. He dedicated the book to Birdie Munger.
As the Depression closed in, he moved to Chicago. He lived at the YMCA and tried to peddle copies of his book to fans of a sport that had virtually disappeared in America. The return to poverty was wrenching. He died in 1932 at the age of fifty-three. The man who had thrilled tens of thousands was buried in a pauper's grave. Only in 1948 did a group of Black athletes organize a memorial for Major Taylor.
In his book, he expressed his feelings for Black children. “I can hardly express in words my deep feelings and sympathy for them, knowing as I do, the many serious handicaps and obstacles that will confront them in almost every walk of life.” He regretted that there had been no one of his own color to look to for similar advice. “In a word,” he wrote, “I was a pioneer, and therefore had to blaze my own trail.”