Wilma Rudolph

Wilma Glodean Rudolph was born on June 23, 1940, in Saint Bethlehem, a community near Clarksville, Tennessee, into a large working family. Her father, Ed Rudolph, worked as a railway porter and handyman, and her mother, Blanche, cleaned houses and took in laundry. Wilma arrived prematurely, weighing about four and a half pounds, and was one of twenty two children across her father's two marriages ^[1].

Her childhood was shaped by illness. She survived bouts of pneumonia and scarlet fever before contracting polio around the age of five, which left her left leg weakened and partially paralyzed. Because Clarksville's medical facilities were segregated and limited for Black patients, her mother took her roughly fifty miles by bus to Meharry Medical College in Nashville, a historically Black institution, for regular treatment ^[2]. At home, her mother and siblings massaged the leg several times a day, following the therapists' instructions.

For years Wilma wore a metal leg brace and an orthopedic shoe. By her own later account she was determined to shed both, and around age nine she began walking without the brace, at first only in secret. By twelve she had recovered enough to move freely, and she threw herself into the games her brothers and sisters played in the yard, especially basketball ^[1].

Basketball, not running, was Rudolph's first sport. At Burt High School in Clarksville she became a standout guard, once scoring 49 points in a single game, a state record for girls' basketball at the time ^[3]. Her speed on the court caught the eye of Ed Temple, the track coach at Tennessee State University in Nashville, who was refereeing high school games while scouting talent for his celebrated women's team, the Tigerbelles.

Temple invited the teenager to his summer training camp at Tennessee State, and she developed quickly under his coaching. In 1956, at just sixteen years old, Rudolph qualified for the United States Olympic team and traveled to Melbourne, Australia. She was eliminated in the 200 meters but ran a leg on the American 4 x 100 meter relay team that took the bronze medal ^[2].

After high school she enrolled at Tennessee State, where she studied education and trained with the Tigerbelles. Her progress was interrupted in 1958 when she became pregnant with her first daughter, Yolanda, but she returned to competition the following season. By 1960 she was setting world class times: at the Olympic trials she ran the 200 meters in 22.9 seconds, a world record ^[3].

The 1960 Olympic Games in Rome made Rudolph an international celebrity and remain the core of every account of Wilma Rudolph achievements. Competing in searing heat, and despite twisting her ankle the day before her first final, she won the 100 meters by a wide margin, took the 200 meters, and then anchored the 4 x 100 meter relay to a third gold medal. Her relay team of Tennessee State teammates had set a world record of 44.4 seconds in the semifinal ^[1].

With those victories she became the first American woman to win three track and field gold medals at one Olympics ^[2]. The Rome Games were among the first to be televised widely in Europe and the United States, and audiences embraced her graceful running style. The Italian press called her La Gazzella Nera, the Black Gazelle, and French journalists dubbed her La Perle Noire, the Black Pearl ^[3].

Honors followed rapidly. The Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year in both 1960 and 1961, and in 1961 she received the James E. Sullivan Award as the outstanding amateur athlete in the United States, one of the first Black women so honored ^[4]. In 1961 she also set a world record of 11.2 seconds in the 100 meters. She retired from competition in 1962, at the height of her powers, saying she wanted to be remembered at her best.

When Rudolph returned to Clarksville after Rome, the town planned a parade and banquet in her honor. She refused to attend unless the events were open to Black and white residents alike. Officials agreed, and the celebration on October 4, 1960, is remembered as the first fully integrated municipal event in Clarksville's history ^[5].

The episode gave her achievements a meaning beyond sport. At a moment when the sit-in movement was spreading across the South, a hometown parade for a Black woman that white and Black neighbors attended together carried real weight. Rudolph later took part in protests against segregated restaurants in Clarksville, lending her fame to local desegregation efforts ^[5].

She was never a full-time activist, and she generally described herself as an athlete and teacher first. Even so, historians of the civil rights era regularly cite her insistence on an integrated homecoming as an example of how Black athletic celebrity could be converted into concrete social change ^[2].

Rudolph graduated from Tennessee State University in 1963 with a degree in elementary education. That year she also traveled to West Africa as a goodwill ambassador for the United States government, attending the Friendship Games in Senegal, and she made an appearance in Japan ^[4]. She married her high school sweetheart, Robert Eldridge, in 1963; the couple had four children before divorcing in 1980 ^[1].

After leaving the track she worked as a teacher and coach at her old school in Clarksville, then held a series of positions in community programs, athletics administration, and broadcasting in cities including Chicago, Indianapolis, and Detroit. In 1977 she published an autobiography, Wilma, which NBC adapted that year into a television film starring Shirley Jo Finney, with Cicely Tyson playing her mother ^[3].

In 1981 she established the Wilma Rudolph Foundation in Indianapolis, a nonprofit that provided sports training and academic support to underprivileged children. She often said that helping young people mattered more to her than her medals. In the summer of 1994 she was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died on November 12, 1994, at her home in Brentwood, Tennessee, at the age of 54 ^[6].

Rudolph's influence on women's sport was direct and traceable. Sprinters of the next generations, including Florence Griffith Joyner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, named her as an inspiration, and her Rome triumph helped push American schools and colleges to take women's track seriously ^[4]. She was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1974 and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1983, and she received the National Sports Award in 1993 ^[3].

Her memory is woven into public life in Tennessee and beyond. A section of U.S. Route 79 in Clarksville is named Wilma Rudolph Boulevard, a statue of her stands in the city, and Tennessee State University named a residence hall for her. In 2004 the United States Postal Service issued a 23 cent stamp bearing her image in its Distinguished Americans series ^[6].

For readers asking who was Wilma Rudolph, the answer resists a single label. She was a polio survivor who became the fastest woman in the world, a Black woman from the segregated South who made her hometown integrate its own celebration of her, and a teacher who spent decades working with children. Among the most repeated Wilma Rudolph facts is her own summary of the journey: the child who could barely walk became, for a time, the most famous female athlete on earth ^[1].