A Spectacular Leap: Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America

5. “The Swiftie from Tennessee State”

F i v e “the Swiftie from tennessee State” Wyomia Tyus and the Racial Reality of Black Women Track Athletes in the 1960s and 1970s No one had ever done it before. In seventy years of modern Olympic history , no track sprinter, man or woman, had ever repeated as 100-meter champion at the Olympic games. Not Jesse Owens. Not Wilma Rudolph. Not an American, a Russian, or an Aussie.There was good reason. As amateur athletes, Olympians who hoped to compete in multiple games needed not only staying power but also money. For track and field athletes, it was the latter that was most often in short supply. But in 1968, one athlete stood poised to capture the elusive prize. Her win in 1964 at the Tokyo games had been somewhat unexpected. She had been barely nineteen and regularly taken the silver medal in competitive meets just behind her Tigerbelle teammate, Edith McGuire. But WyomiaTyus eclipsed McGuire in Tokyo. Now here she was four years later in Mexico City, just seconds away from what could be Olympic track and field history. When she crossed the finish line eleven seconds later, she had not only won her second consecutive gold medal but also set her seventh world record. The quiet, twenty-three-year-old “swiftie from Tennessee State” had just raced her way into the record books as the first Olympic sprint champion to repeat. She would enjoy her next Olympics, she told reporters, as a spectator.1 True to her word, Tyus retired from amateur competition after the Mexico City games. During her amateur career, she had held world records eight different times, and, at twenty-three, she undoubtedly still  had some good years of speed in her.2 With her college days at an end and no professional track circuit available, however, her future in the sport looked bleak. But her retirement was short lived, for a pro track circuit emerged in 1973. Its promoters encouraged Tyus out of retirement to compete, this time for profit. Her athletic success as a professional was every bit as complete as it had been as an amateur. She continued to set records, this time in indoor track, and finished the 1974 season unbeaten in the 60-yard dash. By the time she retired from the sport for good, she had set eleven world records. And it would be twenty years before another sprinter would duplicate her most significant amateur achievement—consecutive 100-meter Olympic victories.3 These victories—in reality Tyus’s entire career—played out during a time of radical social change in American society. It was change that, as both African American and women, deeply affected Tyus, her teammates, and competitors. Frustrated by the slow pace of the civil rights movement, a younger generation of African Americans began challenging Martin Luther King’s adherence to nonviolent resistance, and splinter groups of black activists began to look and sound more militant in their activism. It was natural that some of this radicalism spilled over into the world of sport where black athletes became inspired to do more than compete.They chose to speak out on racial injustices that they continued to experience, looking more like the radical activists on the outside of sport than black sport stars of earlier decades. For eight months, America’s black athletes had contemplated boycotting the 1968 Olympics to protest the continued oppression they experienced both inside and outside the world of sport. In the end, most of them decided to compete, choosing instead to win their medals and make whatever statements or protests each felt individually appropriate . When two male sprinters, in a cry for freedom from racial oppression, raised black-gloved fists on the Olympic victory stand, Mexico City forever became the Olympics of racial, political protest and the capstone of 1968, an athletic “year of awakening” for African American athletes.4 As the 1960s gave way to a new decade, the birth of the women’s movement, inspired in part by African Americans, reawakened a feminism that had seemed to languish since the 1920s. Women began agitating for reproductive rights, equal pay, and general recognition of equality in a society that had long been grounded in patriarchy.The women’s movement also spilled over into the world of sport, and women athletes became more vocal about  THE SWIFTIE FROM TENNESSEE STATE the ways in which their competitive opportunities and earnings...