Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes

12. Wilma Rudolph: The Making of an Olympic Icon

Wilma Rudolph receiving the World Trophy from Bill Shroeder at the 1961 Los Angeles Invitational Indoor Track Meet. (Photo by Cecil Charles Spiller) 2WIGGINS_pages_133-262.qxd 9/12/06 12:00 PM Page 206 12 Wilma Rudolph The Making of an Olympic Icon W A Y N E W I L S O N Track athlete Wilma Rudolph is best remembered for her participation in the 1960 Rome Olympic Games, where she won three gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters and 4 x 100-meter relay. Rudolph was one of the most-publicized stars of the Rome Games. Her celebrity at the games grew out of a number of factors, including her visibility as the first female African American Olympic star, her role as symbol of American athletic success during the cold war, the influence of television , and a remarkable personal story of overcoming adversity. Rudolph competed at a world-class level for six years, but occupied the limelight as an athlete for only about two years, between 1960 and 1962. Her impact during that brief period, however, was such that she became an icon of American sport whose legacy is closely associated with the rise to prominence of African American athletes from the 1960s forward and with the expansion of sport opportunities for women. Rudolph was born on June 23, 1940, and reared in Clarksville, Tennessee. She was the sixth of her mother and father’s eight children. Rudolph’s father had had fourteen other children by a previous marriage , but most of those children were adults and did not live with Rudolph when she was growing up. Both parents’ educations ended before finishing elementary school. Rudolph’s father was a railroad worker, who also picked up other odd jobs when he could. Her mother was a maid, who cleaned white peoples’ homes. Rudolph estimated that when she was a young girl her parents’ combined income never rose above $2,500 a year. The Rudolph family was by all accounts a stable one. The parents were strict, religious, and involved in their children’s lives. The large 2WIGGINS_pages_133-262.qxd 9/12/06 12:00 PM Page 207 family regularly came together for special occasions. Rudolph remembered Christmas as an especially exciting time of year when the extended family would gather and exchange gifts. Rudolph was born prematurely, weighing four and a half pounds at birth. Throughout her early childhood, she suffered a variety of ailments including measles, chickenpox, whooping cough, and mumps. Rudolph had double pneumonia twice, had scarlet fever, and was unusually susceptible to colds that lingered for weeks. When Rudolph was four, it became apparent that she had a serious problem with one of her legs. Accounts of the precise nature and cause of the problem vary. Rudolph described her leg as being crooked and her foot as turning inward. She wrote that her mother sometimes told her that she had been born with polio. Other accounts maintain that Rudolph contracted polio at age four, causing a partial paralysis of the leg.1 Doctors fitted Rudolph, at age five, with a steel leg brace that she wore for the next six years. For Rudolph, the experience of wearing the brace was psychologically devastating. She yearned to be accepted as “normal.” She cited the taunts she endured from other children as a motivating factor in her drive to excel in sports. The leg problem kept Rudolph out of school in kindergarten. For four years, between the ages of six and ten, Rudolph received physical therapy at Meharry Medical College, an African American medical center in Nashville. The round trip from Clarksville was about one hundred miles. Rudolph made the trip once and sometimes twice a week in the back of a segregated bus accompanied by her mother on her days off from work. The physical therapy regimen included exercise, traction, and massage. The therapy gradually yielded results. Eventually, Rudolph learned to walk around the house without the brace. Her first public outing without the aid of the brace was a Sunday visit to church when she was nine and a half. She continued to wear the brace sporadically, as well as a specially designed shoe, until she was twelve. By the time she was twelve and entering seventh grade, Rudolph felt completely healthy for the first time in her life. In Wilma, her 1977 autobiography, Rudolph described herself as a child who was...