Women in Sport: Alice Coachman, High Jump
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Being a woman attempting to reach the pinnacle in sports has not been easy. Sure, it's getting better all the time, but we only need to look at the 20th century to see how hard it has been.
Now imagine you are also black in the 1940s.
Being born in the early 20s, a female, and non-white was not serendipitous to becoming an athlete, but with the encouragement of her teacher and her aunt - although her own parents were not behind her with her own endeavours, her father prescribing to the idea that sports was not for women - she took to it culminating in her joining the track team once she had joined High School in 1938. And this is where it got interesting because she was not allowed to train with or even use equipment reserved for whites.
It was just a year later that her exploits had caught the attention of the Tuskagee Institute in Alabama, whereby she was offered a scholarship, whereby she was also required to work alongside her studies and training. After winning four National Championships in sprinting and the high jump, she was pushed to try out for the Olympic Team, but both the 1940 and 1944 events were cancelled due to war. This did not stop her competing nationally though, and from 1939 to 1948 she won the high jump every single year.
Whilst reluctantly competing in the 1948 trials, with a back injury, she obliterated the National high jump record, and as such, in London in August of that year, at her first attempt she cleared 5' 6⅛" - a new Olympic record. She was the only American woman to win a gold medal, and the first black woman ever.
Despite President Truman congratulating her, a party thrown in her honour, and a day of recognition in her name, it was an altogether different matter back home in segregated Alabama; the town mayor refused to acknowledge her at the ceremony and was forced to use 'black exits'.
At the age of 24, she retired from athletics and after finishing her university degree became a High School teacher and, naturally, a track coach.
She passed away at the age of 90 in 2014, being a member of nine Hall of Fames, and had started the Alice Coachman Track and Field Foundation twenty years prior for gifted underprivileged students.
"Keep going. Hang in there.’...Guts and determination will pull you through."
