Marlene Wagman-Geller

      One of the most iconoclastic moments in Olympic history occurred in 1936 Berlin where, in a stadium draped with red and black swastika banners, Jesse Owens’ historic victory signified the triumph of sportsmanship over tyranny. Adolph Hitler did not appreciate the African-American, the sharecropper’s son from Alabama, the grandson of slaves, best his Aryan athletes. In contrast to Owens’ immortal chapter, Alice Coachman, the first African-American woman to compete and win a gold medal, became a forgotten footnote in Olympic lore.

      The fifth of ten children, Alice Marie Coachman grew up in Albany, Georgia, in 1923, the daughter of strict Baptist parents, Fred, a plasterer, and Evelyn, a maid. As a girl, Alice picked cotton to help her family’s finances during the Great Depression. She did not have female friends because they acted too ladylike and instead she played baseball with the boys. Fred insisted his daughters should act dainty, sit on the porch, and drink tea. Nevertheless, any chance Alice could get she slipped away to the playground. At age eleven, her mother caught Alice jitterbugging at a local dance hall, after having been warned if she ever found her daughter dancing her mother would give her a whipping. The memory of the corporal punishment remained, and later in life, Alice recalled, “Lord, have mercy, she wasn’t lying. “WHUP! WHUP! Y’ know what? I could run, but she was fast enough to run after me and whup my tail...Shoot, I’m almost seventy-four years old and I still think of that. I still feel it.” 

        Initial training consisted of running barefoot on dirt roads despite sweltering Southern temperatures. She especially enjoyed defying gravity, using ropes and sticks for makeshift high jumps. A family acquaintance who saw Alice’s potential told her mother that one day the girl was going to jump over the moon. Mrs. Coachman responded, “She’s going to break her neck, that’s what she’s going to do.” Because of segregation, Alice could not train at athletic fields with whites. Alice said of her first training grounds, “You had to run up and down the red roads and the dirt roads. You went out there in the fields, where there was a lot of grass and no track. No nothing.” Despite her prowess, Alice never envisioned an athletic career and dreamed of becoming a musician or a dancer, having been enthralled by saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and by actress Shirley Temple.

     By the end of seventh grade at Madison High School Alice was such an outstanding runner who had also succeeded in clearing a hurdle of more than five feet that Cleve Abbott, a coach at Tuskegee Institute asked her parents to let her train with its high school team during the summer. During those months, Alice shattered so many records Coachman invited her to attend as a full-time student. Although her working scholarship entailed cleaning the gym and the swimming pool, sew football uniforms, and maintain the tennis courts, she still found time to compete in sports. The school gave her a gift of store-bought shoes, and when asked what they felt like, the teen who had only participated in athletics barefoot replied, “They hurt.” Coachman also played basketball, and Tuskegee won three consecutive titles and went on to compete at increasingly advanced levels. Three years later she enrolled at its university and became a pillar of its outstanding track team. Alice’s successes were startling: from 1939 to 1948, she garnered ten consecutive wins in the Amateur Athletic Union high jump championships, the first at age sixteen. Alice told the Associated Press, “My dad did not want me to travel to Tuskegee and then up north to the Nationals. He felt it was too dangerous. Life was very different for African-Americans at that time. But I came back and showed him my medal and talked about all the things I saw. He and my mom were very proud of me.” 

      In 1948, the year after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, the London Games offered Ms. Coachman her first-and ultimately, her only-opportunity to compete in the Olympics. The years she had been at the peak of her ability World War II had resulted in the cancelling of the 1940 and the 1944 Games. Initially, she was reluctant to accept because of a back injury, but she underwent a change of heart. As Alice explained, “I didn’t want to let my country down, or my family and school. Everyone was pushing me.” Upon her arrival, she found herself staying, for the first time, in integrated housing. She said, “It was a beautiful thing to be around that camp. All those people from different countries doing their thing, singing and dancing.” Before Coachman’s event, the Games had gone badly for the United States women’s track and field team. Coachman recalled of the disappointing news, “All the fast girls we had, they would come in last. It was kind of sad.” On a rainy afternoon, wearing a tracksuit top, Coachman cleared 5 feet 6 inches on her first attempt and thus defeated Dorothy Tyler of Britain (who won silver) and Micheline Ostermeyer of France (who won the bronze). Ms. Coachman became the only American that year to garner the gold. She also earned the distinction of becoming the first black woman to take Olympic gold home. She reminisced of that magic moment, “I didn’t know I had won. I glanced over into the stands where my coach was, and she was clapping her hands. I saw it on the board, ‘A. Coachman, U.S.A., Number One.’ I went on, stood up there, and they started playing the national anthem. It was wonderful to hear.”

      After Owen’s victory, there was no invitation to the Fuhrer’s box. When Baldur von Schirach tried to persuade Hitler to at least be photographed alongside Owens, Hitler retorted, “These Americans should be ashamed of themselves for letting their medals be won by a Neger. I would never shake the hand of one.” Twelve years later, in England, Coachman experienced a far different reception in Wembley Stadium. The young woman who grew up running barefoot on the dirt roads of rural Georgia received a gold medal from King George VI, Queen Elizabeth II’s father. Post award, Alice had an invitation to cruise on a British royal yacht and met French President Charles de Gaulle in Paris on a post-Olympic tour of Western Europe.

       What Owens experienced after he had scaled the Olympic heights was Jim Crow still recoiled from his dark pigmentation. His sleight from the Fuhrer in Berlin was matched by the one from Franklin D. Roosevelt in the capital. There was no White House reception for the U.S. star; the President was scared if he had invited the track star, there would have been a backlash from southern voters.

      Upon Coachman’s return, she was the guest of honor at a party thrown by Count Basie, and President Harry S. Truman invited her to the White House where former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt gave her a warm reception. Alice enjoyed a 175-mile motorcade ride that wound its way through Georgia from Atlanta to her hometown. Albany welcomed her with a ceremony- one where whites and blacks were seated separately. Although King George VI had given Alice a gracious greeting, her hometown mayor-although he appeared with her on the auditorium stage- refused to shake her hand. As an additional affront, Alice had to enter and exit through a side door. Although many white supporters, grateful for Alice bringing victory to America, sent her gifts without a card to a party at her godfather’s home; they were afraid of a negative reaction from white neighbors. Bitterness, however, held no place in Coachman’s DNA. She philosophically observed, “We had segregation, but it wasn’t any problem for me because I had won. That was up to them, whether they accepted it or not.” Fortunately, there were many on the acceptance side. Alice became the first black woman to endorse an international product, Coca-Cola, and she appeared on billboards with Jesse Owens. Not one to rest on her laurels, she received a bachelor’s degree from Tuskegee and another in home economics from Albany State College. Moreover, she created the Alice Coachman Track and Field Foundation to help young Olympic hopefuls and veteran Game participants who were in straightened financial circumstances. After riding the wave of fame, she encountered a series of hard knocks: a break-up with her fiancée and a series of dead-end jobs, including a stint as a maid. 

        Coachman explained her retirement from track and field by declaring she had accomplished what she had set out to do and now there was a new arena on which to set her sights. “It was time for me to start looking for a husband. That was the climax. I won the gold medal. I proved to my mother, my father, my coach and everybody else that I had gone to the end of my rope.”  Alice married Dr. N. F. Davis with whom she had son, Richmond, and daughter, Evelyn. She never showed them her gold medal, “I figured that sooner or later, if I hold on to it, when they got interested, they would sit down and look at it.” After her divorce, she married another Davis, Frank-her former fiancée- and went by the name Alice Coachman Davis.

      Despite her trailblazing accomplishment, Coachman faded into obscurity. A popularly held belief was that Wilma Rudolph, a triple-gold medalist in sprints at the 1960 Rome Olympics, was the first African-American woman to bring home the top prize.  Alice attributed the misconception to the fact that Italy’s games were televised while earlier competitions depended on photographs. Another reason for Coachman’s fading from view can be attributed to modesty. As Alice put it, “From the very first medal I won in 1939, my mama used to stress being humble. You’re no better than anyone else. The people you pass on the ladder will be the same people you’ll be with when the ladder comes down.” Self-effacement is indeed a feat for one inducted into both the USA Track and Field Hall of Fame and the US Olympic Hall of Fame-of which honor she said it “was as good as it gets,” and a school and a street named after her in Albany. 

     During an Atlanta press conference that showcased several of 100 American Olympic greats in conjunction with the Centennial Games amongst the media darlings such as Mark Spitz and Mary Lou Retton, a virtual unknown Olympian attracted the greatest number of reporters. Alice Coachman sat in a corner of the Hyatt hotel ballroom, charming the media. Alice was tickled pink at the lens directed at Olympic history and its Southern connections.

      At a time when there were few high-profile black athletes beyond Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and Joe Louis, Coachman served as a pioneer. She was aware she was a role model for other black women athletes and stated, “If I had gone to the Games and failed, there wouldn’t be anyone to follow in my footsteps.” Those who followed in her steps were track stars such as Wilma Rudolph, Florence Griffith Joyner, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee; since her Olympic triumph, black women have comprised a majority of the US women’s track and field team.

       A quotation Alice borrowed from Booker T. Washington proves it was not only on the field where she aimed high, “I let no man drag me down so low as to make me hate him.”