In White Center, the YES Foundation, along with Community Schools Collaboration, partnered up with Cascade Bicycle Club in 2009 to create the Major Taylor bike project, an “after-school cycling program for young people aged 11-18 integrating bicycle riding, healthy living, cycle maintenance, road safety awareness, and the importance of working toward individual goals” (link). The project continues to offer opportunities to youth in White Center involving bike riding that they couldn’t find anywhere else.
But who exactly is “Major Taylor”? For Black History Month, we’d like to offer a brief profile of this bicycling great.
Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor (26 November 1878 – 21 June 1932) was an American cyclist who won the world 1 mile (1.6 km) track cycling championship in 1899 after setting numerous world records and overcoming racial discrimination. Taylor was the first African-American athlete to achieve the level of world champion and only the second black man to win a world championship—after Canadian boxer George Dixon.
Taylor was the son of Gilbert Taylor, Civil War veteran and Saphronia Kelter, who had migrated from Louisville, Kentucky with their large family to a farm in rural Indiana. He was one of eight children, five girls and three boys. Taylor’s father was employed in the household of a wealthy Indiana family, the Southard’s, as a coachman, where Taylor was also raised and educated. When Taylor was a child, his father would bring him to work. The employer had a son, Dan Southard, who was the same age and the two boys became close friends. Taylor later moved in with the family and was able to live a more advantaged life than his parents could provide.
This period of living and learning at the Southard house lasted from the time he was eight until he was 12 when the Southard’s moved to Chicago and Taylor “was soon thrust into the real world.”
At age 12, Taylor received his first bicycle the Southard’s and became such an expert trick rider that a local bike shop owner, Tom Hay, hired him to stage exhibitions and perform cycling stunts outside his bicycle shop. The name of the shop was Hay and Willits. The compensation was $6 a week, plus a free bike worth $35. Taylor performed the stunts wearing a soldier’s uniform, hence the nickname “Major.”
When he was 13 in 1891, Taylor won his first race, an amateur event in Indianapolis. Two years later, in 1893 at age 15, Taylor beat the 1 mile (1.6 km) amateur track record where he was “hooted” and then barred from the track because of his color.
Although he was greatly celebrated abroad, particularly in France, Taylor’s career was still held back by racism, particularly in the Southern states where he was not permitted to compete against Caucasians. The League of American Wheelmen for a time excluded blacks from membership. Other prominent bicycle racers of the era, such as Tom Cooper and Eddie Bald, often cooperated to insure Taylor’s defeat. During his career he had ice water thrown at him during races and nails scattered in front of his wheels, and was often boxed in by other riders, preventing the sprints to the front of the pack at which he was so successful.
In his autobiography, he reports actually being tackled on the race track by another rider, who choked him into unconsciousness but received only a $50 fine as punishment. Nevertheless, he does not dwell on such events in the book; rather it is evident that he means it to serve as an inspiration to other African-Americans trying to overcome similar treatment. Taylor retired at age 32 in 1910, saying he was tired of the racism. His advice to African-American youths wishing to emulate him was that while bicycle racing was the appropriate route to success for him, he would not recommend it in general; and that individuals must find their own best talent.While Taylor was reported to have earned between $25,000 and $30,000 a week when he returned to Worcester at the end of his career, by the time of his death he had lost everything to bad investments (including self-publishing his autobiography), persistent illness, and the stock market crash. His marriage over, he died at age 53 on June 21, 1932-a pauper in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, in the charity ward of Cook County Hospital-to be buried in an unmarked grave. He was survived by his daughter.
In 1948 a group of former pro bike racers, with money donated by Schwinn Bicycle Co. (then) owner Frank W. Schwinn, organized the exhumation and relocation of Taylor’s remains to a more prominent part of Mount Glenwood Cemetery in Glenwood, Illinois, near Chicago. A monument to his memory stands in Worcester, and Indianapolis named the city’s bicycle trapock after Taylor.
Information via Wikipedia
Post a comment
