February is Black History Month and 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, a sacred year for the activist athlete.
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1968 press photo of Wyomia Tyus with 2 Olympic gold medals.
That means remembering John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists on the podium at that year’s Mexico City Olympics. It was a time when Muhammad Ali, arguably the world’s greatest athlete, sat stripped of his title for refusing to fight in the war in Vietnam, saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”
Yet often written out of this history is the role of black women. That’s why it’s important to remember the remarkable legacy of Wyomia Tyus.
Yet often written out of this history is the role of black women.
A resident of Georgia, Tyus was the first person in history, male or female, to win track and field’s glamour event—the 100-meter dash—in consecutive Olympics. She did so first in 1964 at the Tokyo games and then in Mexico City in 1968. Tyus then demonstrated uncommon valor by dedicating her win in the women’s 4x100m sprint relay to Carlos and Smith.
She took this chance and dared to offer solidarity, even though the movement of Carlos and Smith, the Olympic Project for Human Rights, made no effort to organize female athletes. Decades later she said, “It appalled me that the men simply took us for granted. They assumed we had no minds of our own and that we’d do whatever we were told.”
Tyus is part of another hidden history as well. She attended the historically black college Tennessee State University, where she was one of the celebrated Tigerbelles, a program that won thirty-four national championships in forty-four years. The school’s legendary coach Ed Temple, in this time before Title IX, trained forty black female Olympians, who won a combined twenty-three Olympic medals, thirteen of them gold.
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Tyus, in front, as she becomes the first women to retain the Olympic 100m title, winning gold at the Mexico 1968 Olympic Games
I met Wyomia Tyus several years ago, interviewing her in front of a crowd of people who barely knew who she was. By the end of the event, the people in that audience were aware that they were in the presence of greatness. It wasn’t just the medals. It’s a story of navigating the Jim Crow south as a black woman. This is someone who grew up in Georgia, in an area where her family couldn’t vote and where, now, a beautiful, publicly funded recreation center bears her name.
Afterward, I asked Wyomia why she never wrote a book, given the importance of this history. I introduced her to author Elizabeth Terzakis, whose new book, Tigerbelle, should be out in time to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the storied 1968 games.
Tyus’s “vision of a movement for equality based on inclusion, on the idea that we are all in this together, has the potential to light the way to a better future.”
I spoke with Terzakis recently about why this story matters. “At one point in the book, Wyomia points out that if you are a pioneer—if you make history—then they can’t leave you out of it. If you are, say, the first person ever to win a gold medal in the 100 meters in back-to-back Olympics, no one can talk about the 100 meters without mentioning your name—not if they want to be taken seriously.
“In the age of ‘alternative facts,’ true stories of people who were able to reach past and around and over the expectations of the moment to achieve their dreams—in Wyomia’s case, not only gold medals but also a college education—are vital.”
Terzakis goes on to say that Tyus “demonstrates how individuals can make history and allows us to draw hope and inspiration from the past.” Hers is the story of a woman who overcame great obstacles “to excel on a world stage at a time when women were not supposed to be athletes and black people were treated as second-class citizens.”
Today, Terzakis says, Tyus’s “vision of a movement for equality based on inclusion, on the idea that we are all in this together, has the potential to light the way to a better future.”
The resurgent movements for women’s rights and movies like Hidden Figures, about the key role played by African American women in the space program, provide fresh opportunities to recenter narratives around the black women whose stories have faded from memory. We must not let those opportunities go to waste.
Dave Zirin is the host of the popular Edge of Sports podcast and sports editor of The Nation.