Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  The slow carriage ride back to Munger’s home would be the most inspirational experience of Taylor’s early life. After returning from Europe with “a trunk full of gold and silver,” and then winning the World Championships in Chicago earlier that month, Zimmerman had returned to his New Jersey home to one of the most intense hero’s welcomes ever seen. More than five thousand people had greeted him, tossed him on their shoulders, then carried him into town. Nearly every home, business, and government building in the Manasquan borough, and later in Asbury Park, flew American flags with a giant “Z” attached. Large blue streamers with national colors in graceful folds adorned every cornice. The parade route, which had been heavily advertised weeks before his arrival, was lit up with Chinese lanterns, Roman candles, and Greek fires. The air crackled with the endless thunder of cannon fire. Later in the evening, Parkers Hall was taxed beyond capacity. Thousand more spilled out onto South Street, never to make it inside. Young boys had shimmied up the columns of the building’s portico, fighting for a glimpse of Zimmerman through the windows. “The town is yours,” proclaimed the mayor.

  And here was Taylor, a fourteen-year-old obscure black boy from rural Indianapolis, already with bike racing aspirations, alone with a man who was the daily cynosure of thousands of eyes. If he was nervous, Zimmerman quickly put him at ease, smothering him in wide smiles and warm gestures. “I was always the friend of the struggling amateur,” he told a reporter, “and many times have gone out of my way, at a loss of time and money, to assist a brother rider in poor luck.”

  In stark contrast to the constant drone of racing sycophants following Zimmie everywhere he went, Taylor was evidently a welcome change. To Taylor, Zimmie was a welcome surprise. Instead of treating him like a servant as most blacks were at the time, and instead of talking about himself the whole trip, Zimmerman showed interest in learning about Taylor. He spent much of the time inquiring about the gold medal that Taylor had won in the ten-mile race in Indianapolis. “He was surprised when I told him of that feat,” Taylor recalled, “and even more so when I told him of many other boys’ races since winning that gold medal.”

  When they arrived at Munger’s home later that evening, dinner was served. At Zimmerman’s insistence, Taylor joined in. The three of them ate a large dinner, then sat around talking about bike racing into the night. Taylor must have been mesmerized as Zimmerman shared story after story of his racing exploits at cities nationwide. His ears must have perked up when Zimmerman poured over his experiences overseas, meeting princes and dukes in exotic faraway cities, where he was hailed by “crowds greater than would turn out to greet the king.” He beamed about meeting, learning from, and competing against the greatest cyclists in the world. He described the fervor of the crowds, the masses clamoring for his autograph, the extensive coverage in the press, and the beautiful scenery and history of the countries he had visited.

  Before bedding down for the evening, Munger—sipping an ice-cold glass of egg lemonade—looked Zimmerman in the eye and made a bold prophecy. “I am going to make a champion out of that boy some day,” he said unreservedly. “I have told Major Taylor that if he refrains from using liquor and cigarettes, and continues to live a clean life, I will make him the fastest bicycle rider in the world.” Having been through the trials and tribulations that go with being an elite athlete, Zimmerman reminded Munger and Taylor that they had a long, difficult road ahead. He then turned to Taylor and uttered words that would forever remain seared in his head. “Mr. Munger is an excellent advisor,” he said in a sincere tone, “and if he tells me that you have the makings of a champion in you, I feel sure you will scale the heights some day.”

  On August 23, 1893—the night before the race that brought Zimmerman into town—the streets of Indianapolis were lit up with elaborate events. The largest parade of its kind ever given was put on by the Zig Zag Club, and the streets were lined with thousands of people. All the usual horse and pedestrian traffic came to a halt to make way for elegant carriages and five hundred cyclists, seven blocks deep. There were lanterns and bunting and bright-colored paper in abundance. The streets over which they passed, noted the Indianapolis Sun, “looked as though peopled with harlequins of some other time and place.” Regally dressed, Taylor’s former employers Harry Hearsey and Tom Hay caused a royal stir, rolling down the parade route in an elegant four-horse tally-ho, winding up their horns and making the course ring with their imitation of the Zig Zag yell.

  Taylor looked on bewitched, his eyes glittering in the bright lights as his heroes, Munger, Zimmerman, and other crack cyclists circled by him several times. Awards were handed out for best decorated rider-bicycle combinations. Known for his eccentric costumes, Birdie Munger had gone all out, flitting through the streets sporting a white duck frock suit, an immense buzz-saw hat, and a conspicuous paper monocle. A writer for the Indianapolis Sentinel clearly wasn’t too impressed with his getup. “It was the most ridiculous exhibition of them all,” he wrote.

  As the riders prepared to earn their share of the $5,000 purse the following day, Taylor met another cycling hero named Willie Windle. Windle had been the Sprint Champion of America for several years before Zimmerman came along and stole his thunder. “While on my way out to the track on an errand,” Taylor gushed, “I found myself sitting alongside one of the biggest champions of the day, Willie Windle, of Millbury, Massachusetts. I was the proudest boy in the world as it became noised about that I had shaken the hand of the two outstanding greats.”

  For a young black boy living in 1890s America and poking around in local bike races, Zimmerman and Windle formed towering athletic figures. But it was their genial personalities and kindness—qualities that transcended their athleticism—that Taylor cherished most. “I was especially impressed with the friendliness of the two of them, especially toward me, a colored boy. In my youthful mind the thought flashed that men can be champions and still be broad-minded in strange contrast to the young would-be champions that I had met in and about Indianapolis. There was no race prejudice in the makeup of Zimmerman and Windle; they were too big for that.”

  The Indianapolis Military Band greeted the large crowd as people streamed into the state fairgrounds for the one-mile open. Taylor watched with a keen eye as trick riders warmed up the crowd, bringing back memories of his days on the Southards’ estate. As always, the press doted on Zimmerman. “He is closely watched by a hundred critics as if he were a derby favorite,” someone wrote. When one reporter punched through the crowd and asked him for his opinion of the track, Zimmie gazed out at the oval, his angular body leaning over his bicycle. “I think I will set a world record today, boys,” he sang out, cocksure.

  With Munger, Zimmerman, and Windle all lined up alongside a large field of riders, it must have been difficult for Taylor to decide who to root for. He wouldn’t have much time to decide. Zimmerman “shot by the grandstand like a stone from a catapult,” leaving the rest of the field gasping in his wake. And, as he had prophesized, he had set a new record. “They might as well have chased a locomotive,” wrote one reporter, “so far as there was any chance of catching him.” Windle drifted back to fourth place. Further confirming his best days were behind him, Munger’s homely legs waddled in near the back and out of the money.

  At a post-race soiree held at Tomlinson Hall, corncob pipes with Zig Zag ribbons were smoked, and champagne glasses were clinked. Men and women danced while two black entertainers banged on pianos—all ignoring the thunderstorm brewing outside. A crowd hovered over Zimmerman as he accepted a diamond-studded gold cup and then quickly got off the stage before anyone asked him to speak. Taylor surely squeezed his eyes shut, visualizing himself accepting those medals in front of a rapturous crowd.

  Following the festivities, with the rail station overwhelmed by departing racegoers and eventually shuttered down from the storm, Munger likely escorted Zimmerman back to his home for one last night before he shipped overseas. To the sound of raindrops pinging off the carriage top, his new bi
cycle nestled by his side, Taylor could fall fast asleep, the indelible images of the past few days still burning in his head.

  In the summer of 1893, Munger, Zimmerman, and Taylor found solidarity in their worldly dreams, tolerant minds, and common obsession with bike racing. But impossibly hard times would dawn with an unprecedented economic depression, government-sanctioned race segregation laws, and unspeakable racial cruelty. During these times young Taylor would need strong allies and enduring inspiration. Above the frames, spokes, and wheels of the Munger Cycle Manufacturing Company, he had found just that in the unusual partnership that had formed among them.

  Chapter 3

  ALL THAT REMAINED OF A BLACK DESPERADO

  On July 7, 1893, fifty miles south of Taylor’s hometown state of Indiana near the Western Kentucky town of Bardwell, a husband and wife finished their breakfast while browsing an advertisement that invited locals to an event in town. Excited about attending, they told their coachman to prepare the horse and carriage for the ride into town.

  When they arrived in Bardwell around ten o’clock that morning, a long line of horses, carriages, and bicycles already filled both sides of the street in the small, normally sedate town. Numerous trains coming from the north continued to drop off spectators throughout the morning. Near Cairo, Illinois, the steamboat The Three States, having been hastily chartered, steamed south down the Mississippi River with another five hundred people onboard. By ten-thirty the carriages had backed up to the city limits and the clamor from the throng rose. By eleven o’clock well over one thousand people hovered outside the local rail station waiting for a special train to arrive. When the train finally sighed into town, the local sheriff struggled to hold back the animated crowd. Once the railcar door flung open, a bound and handcuffed black man stumbled out of the train and into the onrushing crowd. In concert with the crowd, the couple began calling for a burning. Just then, the black man spoke, momentarily silencing the crowd.

  “My name is C. J. Miller, of Springfield Illinois . . . I am here among you, a stranger; am looked on by you as the most brutal man that ever stood on God’s green earth. I am standing here, an innocent man, among men excited, and who do not propose to let the law take its course. I have committed no crime . . . I am not guilty.”

  Working his way up to the front of the crowd, the husband yelled for someone to prepare the fire pit. His wife joined in, followed by their two children. Soon the entire orgy of spectators, joining in the chant, lunged at Miller, trying to separate him from the deputies. Of the more than one thousand men, women, and children in the crowd, only two were reluctant to drop the gauntlet on Miller just yet. One was the sheriff. The other was the father of two girls who were recently slain.

  On a clammy afternoon two days before the heavily advertised event, sisters Mary and Ruby Ray, ages twelve and sixteen, had gone with their dog to pick berries near their family’s farm north of Bardwell. When the family dog returned home alone and in an agitated state, the girl’s mother became alarmed. A search of the area by police and neighbors discovered Mary and Ruby lying near each other, their throats slashed with a razor.

  People with their bloodhounds came from miles to help find the “hell-fiend” responsible for the slaying. The trail went cold until the next morning when a report arrived from Bird’s Point, near Sikeston, Missouri. Officials there believed a young black man they had arrested for freeriding on a freight train might be the Bardwell murderer. When the abducted girls’ father and the county sheriff went to interrogate the man, they were disconcerted to discover that he was very dark, not mulatto, as witnesses had described. The sheriff then made the ill-fated decision to bring Miller, whose guilt seemed improbable, back to Bardwell where the bloodthirsty mob stood waiting.

  Meanwhile back at the rail station, the crowd had nearly overtaken the deputies when John Ray, the father of the slain girls, arrived. At first Ray, who appeared uneasy about disappointing the people who had traveled so far, tried to delay their calls for “justice.” But after seeing the intensity of the crowd, he changed tactics. “This is the man who killed my daughters,” he told them, “but let us keep quiet and at the proper time burn him.” He went on to say that the authorities would take Miller to jail, and promised the teaming crowd that they would complete their investigation by three o’clock that afternoon. As the police nervously telegraphed Springfield to corroborate Miller’s alibi, trains continued dropping people off outside their station.

  When the appointed hour arrived and no verdict had been rendered, the crowd became unruly, demanding that they stick with the 3:00 deadline. At 3:30, Ray emerged. Clearly trying to balance his own misgivings with the inevitability of violence, he announced that he was still not convinced Miller was the culprit who had murdered his daughters. Therefore, he reasoned, a burning would be inappropriate. His next words did not, however, disappoint some of the people there. “Under the circumstance,” he continued, “a hanging would be acceptable.”

  The mob would not be denied. They rushed forward and seized Miller, stripping the clothes from his body and placing a heavy log chain around his neck. He was dragged through the streets to a crude platform of old barrel staves and other kindling. With one end of the chain around his neck and the other attached to a telegraph pole, he was raised several feet from the ground and let to fall. Though the first fall broke his neck, his body was repeatedly raised and lowered while the crowd peppered him with gunfire. Miller’s corpse hung high above the street for two hours and was repeatedly photographed by the newsmen who placed the ads to draw the large crowd. Miller’s toes and fingers were cut off, then his riddled corpse was lowered onto the waiting pyre and set ablaze.

  Another couple, unaware of the event, trotted into town the next day. Noticing a miasma of particles floating in the air and settling in the trees, they asked a local man what it was and where it came from. “They were all that remained of a notorious character who lived by crime,” they were told, “a black desperado who had murdered two white girls.”

  No one ever produced evidence definitively placing Miller at the scene of the crime or even in the state of Kentucky on the day of the murders. The murdered girls’ father—the only one who seemed troubled by what had occurred—tried to have the case reopened after he found evidence that the guilty person was a white man living in Missouri. No crowd large or small was interested and the case was never officially reopened. “In Kentucky this Christmas,” read one editorial later that year, “the favorite decoration of trees is strangled Negroes.”

  During the latter third of the 1800s, graphic stories like C. J. Miller’s were as common in the South as falling snow in the North. It was, by some accounts, among the harshest era for blacks in America. Writing in the 1890s, Ida Wells, one of the first antilynching advocates (whose letters Major Taylor would keep in his scrapbook), estimated that ten thousand negroes had been killed at the hands of whites since 1865. Author Dorothy Sterling, who had combed through thousands of documents and oral histories, cited twenty thousand as the number killed by the Ku Klux Klan over just a four-year period. In the 1890s, the back-to-Africa leader Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, eschewing numerical estimates, noted that enough black people had been lynched in America that the victims would “reach a mile high if laid one upon the other.”

  Raised in the relative serenity of the Southard estate, Major Taylor’s adolescent eyes had been largely unexposed to the extreme racism taking place just miles from the Indiana borders. But there was no escaping its hideous grip entirely. Occasionally, he and Daniel had wandered into the local YMCA to play and exercise. But because blacks were not allowed to join the Y, Taylor was forced to watch from the gallery while his white friends played down below. Disgusted, Daniel had appealed to his parents who enjoyed a position of prominence in the community. Their appeals had fallen on deaf ears. “It was there,” Taylor remembered, “that I was first introduced to that dreadful monster prejudice, which became my bitterest foe from that very same day . . .” />
  In states like Indiana, exclusionary policies like those at the Y replaced lynching as a means of control. Blacks were often separated on trains, trolleys, restaurants, and restrooms. Miscegenation was illegal until the 1960s and schools remained segregated until 1949. Indiana also gave rise to a breed of “regulators” called the White Caps. Influenced by the original Ku Klux Klan, these White Cappers wore masks and bed sheets to intimidate, and disciplined their subjects with castration or painful floggings. They meted out punishment without trial against alleged adulterers, drunkards, petty thieves, or any others they so decided. They justified their acts by comparing them to something even worse. “Why kill out the race by lynching,” asked the Herald & Advertise, “when subordinancy through fear of the lash will stop it all?” Supreme Court Justice Simeon E. Baldwin promoted legalizing floggings and castration as a “humanitarian policy” that would save lives and spare society the shame of lynching.

  Apart from the physical horror of lynchings, castrations, and floggings, perhaps the greatest legacy arising from the period was the sheer degradation of the human spirit. The steady weakening of one’s confidence and assertiveness and the vast outlay of time and energy spent thwarting the forces of iniquity happened at the expense of personal advancement. As innocuous as nonviolent racial policies may have appeared, it was their compounded effect over days, months, and years that caused all but the strongest people to succumb. Blacks were effectively put in their place and asked to heal. “How my poor little heart would ache,” Taylor wrote of the incident at the Y, “to think that I was denied the opportunity to exercise and develop my muscles in the same manner as they, and for really no reason that I was responsible for.”