Major Taylor

Major Taylor (born November 27, 1878, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died June 21, 1932, Chicago, Illinois) was the 1899 world champion in cycling, a winner of many national and international honors, and the first American-born Black athlete of wide renown to reach his sport’s international pinnacle.

Taylor overcame racism, including Jim Crow restrictions, bans by racing organizations, and even death threats. In doing so, he paved the way for other Black athletes, including boxer Jack Johnson, Olympian Jesse Owens, and baseball barrier breaker Jackie Robinson. His 1928 autobiography, The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World, chronicles his life. In 2023 a resolution was introduced in the U.S. Congress to give him a rarely awarded Congressional Gold Medal.

The “monster prejudice”

Marshall Taylor’s father, Gilbert, served in the Union army during the American Civil War and was in Richmond, Virginia, when the Confederates, who wanted to preserve slavery, surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. After the war, Gilbert Taylor, with his wife, Saphronia, moved to Indiana with hopes of better economic opportunity and social freedoms. Marshall Taylor was born in Indianapolis, where the family settled.

Taylor became friends with a white boy, Daniel Southard, whose family was wealthy. He stayed with the Southards for long stretches of time. He and Daniel rode bicycles together. “When I was there,” Taylor later wrote of Daniel’s playroom, “I was the happiest boy in the world.” Eventually, Taylor got a job at a nearby bicycle shop. Because he wore a military-style jacket while performing stunts—apparel that may have been a remnant of his father’s army service—Taylor acquired the nickname “Major,” which stuck with him for life.

A gifted athlete who said he could win at any form of competition, he began to focus on what was the widely popular sport of cycling. In his autobiography, Taylor, a devout Baptist, wrote that he knew nothing of racism until one day when he was refused entry to train at the local YMCA. “It was there that I was first introduced to that dreadful monster prejudice, which became my bitterest foe from that very same day,” Taylor wrote.

Even though a number of white friends got their parents to protest, the YMCA barred him at the door. “How my poor little heart would ache to think that I was denied an opportunity to exercise” in the same manner as whites who were permitted into the gymnasium, Taylor later lamented. The denial further motivated him to be the fastest cyclist in Indianapolis, and his skills caught the attention of a former national champion who ran a local bicycle manufacturing company. His name was Louis de Franklin (“Birdie”) Munger, a white man to whom Taylor later dedicated his autobiography.

Under Birdie’s wing

Munger watched with astonishment as Taylor, with little formal training, beat the city’s best cyclists. He trained Taylor, provided him with a state-of-the-art bicycle, and introduced him to some of the world’s top racers. Taylor learned the most-modern racing techniques as well as how to use nutrition and weight training to increase his fitness. However, Munger’s business associates were angered by his association with the 16-year-old Taylor on account of his skin color. Munger told them that Taylor was “as game a youngster as I have ever seen” and “can beat any boy in the city right now,” Taylor later wrote.

Munger decided to leave Indianapolis for Worcester, Massachusetts, and he asked Taylor to go with him. With his parents’ assent, Taylor agreed. As the duo departed for their new life, Munger vowed that one day Taylor would return as the “champion rider of America.” Upon arriving by train in Worcester, Taylor soon sought out the local YMCA. Here, unlike in Indianapolis, he was welcomed, and he soon began training in earnest. While Taylor did not have the bulk and height of many of the best racers, he shaped his frame of 5 feet 7 inches (1.7 meters) into extraordinary musculature, avoided tobacco and alcohol, and, keeping a promise to his mother, refused to race on Sundays, for religious reasons.

His aim, Taylor said later, was to become “physically perfect.” Any deviation from his ideal weight could result in defeat on the track, he believed. He tested his strength by racing up Worcester’s George Street, which had a top grade of 24 percent. Crowds gathered to watch Taylor make the climb, and thousands soon assembled to see him race at local courses.

A bicycling craze had captured the nation’s attention; there were four million bicycles and only about 300 automobiles in 1896. The bicycle soon became a symbol of freedom for many Americans. Suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony said in 1896 that bicycles had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

For Black people such as Taylor, the bicycle helped broaden the world beyond racist boundaries. Taylor and Munger began to see a greater goal than a cycling race: to disprove racist theories about Black people. If Taylor could compete with and defeat the best white riders, he could advance the cause of Black equality. It became important to prepare Taylor not just to be another racer but to be the greatest one.

Munger’s confidence in Taylor only grew, and one day he proposed that his protégé switch from amateur races to his first professional contest. Taylor, now 18 years old, was to enter a six-day race to be held in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. It was December 1896, six months after the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled 7–1 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which in effect institutionalized racist Jim Crow laws by saying that it was legal to require Black people to use a separate train car from that of white people. This “separate but equal” ruling had encouraged racing organizations to enforce restrictions that made it difficult for Taylor to participate in races dominated by white athletes. Promoters eventually concluded that a race that featured a Black cyclist competing against a white field might draw more spectators, and Taylor was allowed to participate.

A series of preliminary matches drew thousands to Madison Square Garden. The favorite was Edward C. (“Cannon”) Bald, who was widely profiled in the city’s newspapers. Taylor was almost entirely unknown. Yet, when the half-mile (805-meter) sprint was set to begin, Taylor and Bald joined others at the starting line. Even though he initially misjudged the number of laps, Taylor was so strong that he beat Bald and the rest of the field. The band struck up Dixie, the racist Southern anthem. Bald lamented to a reporter that, going forward, Taylor “will be pointed out as the colored gentlemen who licked Eddie Bald.” Taylor won a prize of $200, which he sent to his mother.

Taylor subsequently participated in the main attraction of six straight days of racing. The winner was to be the rider who logged the most miles, which provided an incentive to take as little rest as possible. The race conditions were so inhumane that such contests were later banned. The grime and tobacco smoke in the arena were so thick, Taylor said later, that a white rider could have passed as his brother. During the grueling race, Taylor became drained, and no rider of his age and experience could have been expected to perform well. He hallucinated and momentarily fell asleep on the saddle, but he still performed remarkably. He traveled 1,787 miles and finished in eighth place. By the time the contest ended, Taylor was no longer an obscure racer nor one dismissed on account of his skin color. Instead, his exploits were widely chronicled, and his success soon grew so great that some white riders tried to ban him by invoking racist restrictions as a means of avoiding such stiff competition.

Threats

As organizers sought to keep him off the track, and threats against his life continued to be made, Taylor reluctantly agreed to let Munger apply a skin-lightening lotion on him that was supposed to make him appear to be a white man. “Birdie Munger…tried in various ways to make me white,” Taylor said to a reporter, “innumerable times by scaring me nearly to death, and on one occasion by the bleaching process.…I thought I was going to die.” Taylor stopped the operation.

Three days after the Madison Square Garden race, on a track in Taunton, Massachusetts, 25,000 turned out to watch a race in which Taylor finished second. After the race, a white rider who alleged that Taylor had cut him off suddenly lunged at Taylor and choked him into what one newspaper said was “insensibility.” For 15 minutes Taylor lay unconscious, and some believed he had died. Munger, who was at the track, managed to revive him.

When Taylor went to Savannah, Georgia, to train during the winter, he easily outdistanced some white riders whom he had encountered on the road. They wrote to him demanding that he leave within 48 hours “if you value your life.” Taylor reluctantly departed but became only more determined. The combination of events—the application of skin-lightening lotion, the choking, and the death threat—added up to an epiphany. Never again would Taylor accede to suggestions that he would do better to try to lighten his skin to pretend to be white. He was a proud Black man who would compete to help break down racial barriers. “My color is my fortune,” Taylor declared in 1898. “Were I white I might not amount to a row of shucks in this business.”

Taylor is champion

Taylor raced with new determination, defeated his old nemesis Eddie Bald, and became National Mile champion. He sharpened his skills by riding in the slipstream of motorized vehicles, known at the time as “motocycles,” and set new records. His accomplishment earned him an invitation to compete at the cycling world championship to be held in 1899 in Montreal.

A number of white riders from the United States refused to compete with a Black entrant, but many of the best racers from around the world attended. Taylor had become one of the most famous and feared riders, and he sealed his reputation by winning the championship. Here, instead of playing Dixie, as musicians would do when he won a contest at some U.S. races, the band struck up The Star-Spangled Banner, which then was informally known as the American national anthem. Taylor was deeply moved but also saddened that it took a contest outside his homeland for him to receive such an honor.

“I never felt so proud to be an American before, and indeed, I even felt more American at that moment than I ever felt in America,” Taylor said.

Taylor saw that his ability to compete in the United States was becoming more difficult as riders sought to ban him or refused to race with him. Instead, he focused his attention on international venues, and in the following years he became a sensation in Paris, where he beat the French champion Edmond Jacquelin, and in other locations across Europe. Year after year he won races and earned tens of thousands of dollars. He made two tours of Australia, where he was greeted by a flotilla at Sydney Harbor. Taylor was accompanied by his wife, Daisy, who gave birth to their only child, a girl they named Sydney after the place where she was born.

Taylor did eventually come back to Indianapolis as a champion, just as Munger had promised. But, time and again, Taylor would return from being feted abroad to find racism in America, where he was sometimes refused entry at hotels. He retired in 1910, sought to build an automobile tire business, but eventually lost much of his investment, a fate that his family attributed to racism. He published his autobiography in 1928, but his fame had diminished, and the Great Depression hurt sales. He became ill and destitute and moved into a YMCA in Chicago, where he died in 1932. He was buried in a pauper’s grave. Sixteen years later he was reburied elsewhere at the cemetery with a proper tribute and headstone.

Taylor’s legacy

Taylor once summarized his life by saying, “In a word I was a pioneer, and therefore had to blaze my own trail.” Many great Black athletes followed that trail, and many would become better known. Taylor seemed lost to history, but gradually his descendants and historians and others helped revive his legacy. Cycling clubs named for Major Taylor sprang up across the United States and around the world, a trail named for him was built in Chicago, books were written about him, and word of his legendary feats reached more people.

In December 2023 U.S. Rep. Jonathan L. Jackson, a Chicago Democrat who is the son of the civil rights leader and Baptist minister Jesse Jackson, introduced legislation to give Taylor the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest civilian awards that can be bestowed by the U.S. government. Jackson told The Washington Post that he was impressed by the story “of Blacks and Whites working together. It’s a story of redemption and reconciliation. There are lessons from that to learn today.”