Coachman, Alice

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Coachman, Alice

Sex:  Female

Born:  Near Albany, Georgia, United States
9 November 1923

Activity/Profession:  Olympic Medalist, Track and Field Athlete

(b. 9 November 1923),
the first African American woman to win a gold medal at the Olympic Games.

Today, when black women dominate track-and-field events, it is difficult to remember that the first Olympic medal won by an African American woman was not awarded until after World War II. The first gold medal was won at the same Olympics; that medal went to Alice Coachman, a legendary high jumper from Tuskegee Institute.

Coachman was born (some sources say 1921 or 1922) near Albany, Georgia. She was one of ten children of Fred and Evelyn Coachman, who worked most days picking cotton. Sometimes her father traveled to Ohio to work as a plasterer, and sometimes her mother cleaned the houses of white families, but usually the entire family worked in the fields at nearby plantations.

Coachman started her jumping career on the red-clay roads of Georgia. The children would tie rags together and appoint one child to hold each end of the homemade rope. Then they jumped. Coachman says she was about nine or ten when she first started jumping with the neighborhood boys, and her father deeply disapproved of such activity for a girl. “It was in me,” Coachman said in an interview in 2000, “and I paid for it by getting whippings every time I went there.” At first she didn't know it was an actual sporting event, but eventually she was high jumping at school. She jumped barefoot because the family could not afford track shoes. When she was sixteen, she broke the collegiate high-jump record at a meet in Tuskegee, Alabama, and was given a working scholarship to Tuskegee Institute. Every morning, she worked cleaning the school's pool and sewing uniforms before she went out to practice the high jump in the afternoon.

For ten years, Coachman was the best American woman high jumper, with a record no one has ever broken, but she didn't go to the Olympics. There were no Olympic Games in 1940 or 1944 because of World War II. Then, in 1948, she tried out and qualified for the Olympic team. Of the eleven women on the American track-and-field team, nine were black. Four of those nine had been trained at Tuskegee. Coachman and her colleagues—Nell Jackson, Theresa Manual, and Mabel Walker—had benefited from a remarkable coaching program developed by Major Cleveland Abbot, who began the Tuskegee Relays in 1927. They were based on the interracial Penn Relays at Franklin Field in Philadelphia. Abbot recruited the best athletes he could find for the program, and that included women. One of his coaches, Amelia C. Roberts, was a woman. Beginning in 1937, the Tuskegee Tigerbelles, the women's team, won the American Athletic Association Nationals on a regular basis. Most of their competitors were from athletic clubs because women in mainstream colleges were not allowed to engage in athletic competition. Track and field was a working-class sport, in part because it did not require equipment and was too strenuous for “ladies.”

Coachman would have been ready to compete in the Olympics in 1944, after having been national champion for six years straight, and she suffered a back injury just three months before the games in 1948. In addition, the trip to London on the America was not conducive to a hard training regimen. Most of the young women on the team had grown up poor and were faced for the first time with everything an ocean liner has to offer, from multicourse meals of rich food to dance bands that played into the night. Nell Jackson said many years later, “Sometime I think we ate ourselves out of some of the races on the boat.”

The first American woman to win in London was Audrey Patterson, who took home a bronze medal in the 200-meter race. She took her place in history as the first African American woman to win an Olympic medal. Then, Alice Coachman tied with a British jumper at 5 feet 6½inches. Coachman was awarded the medal because she had fewer misses in the preceding jumps. It may not have been a dramatic win in the athletic sense, but it was certainly dramatic in every other way. Coachman was introduced to Charles de Gaulle. Lady Nancy Astor invited the eleven young women to tea. The actor Fredric March traded autographs with the gold-medal winner.

On her return to the United States, Coachman was invited to the White House by President Harry S. Truman and met Eleanor Roosevelt. Count Basie threw a party in her honor before she went home to Georgia in triumph. Her hometown declared Alice Coachman Day, which included a motorcade and a parade of floats. The national media were there, including Time and Life magazines and the newsreels. People cheered and honored the young athlete, and then Mayor James W. “Taxi” Smith got up to address the crowd. He spoke about a former Olympic champion from Georgia, and he never looked at or shook hands with Coachman, nor was she allowed to speak. On the other hand, the members of Coachman's sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, honored their sister with a huge banquet.

Coachman went on to earn her degree from Albany State College, married Frank Davis, and worked as a high-school teacher and track coach. The Coca-Cola Company featured her on a billboard with her fellow Olympic athlete Jesse Owens, and she is believed to be the first African American woman ever paid to endorse a product. In 1994 she created the Alice Coachman Track and Field Foundation, which is dedicated to helping young athletes and former Olympians. At the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 she was athletic ambassador for Avon Products. Alice Coachman has been honored with memberships in eight halls of fame, including the National Track and Field Hall of Fame and the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.

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