Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  The economic depression that began in 1893 further exacerbated the plight of blacks. Its tragedy enveloped the entire country. Competition for jobs and even basics like food became fierce. Desperate whites often took their anger out on blacks. A black man who was sexually, physically, intellectually, or economically threatening became a sacrificial scapegoat.

  Successful athletes became especially vulnerable. Black jockeys who had long dominated horse racing were already feeling the pressure. They would soon be pushed overseas or out of the sport altogether, never to return. On the equine backstretch, it was all about owner and horse. The black men piloting the winning thoroughbreds in one Kentucky Derby after another were often viewed as diminutive extensions of the animals they rode. Major League Baseball gave up on its fleeting toleration of blacks and wouldn’t revisit the issue until the Jackie Robinson era a half-century later.

  In the halls of the League of American Wheelmen—bike racing’s governing body—influential forces were already gathering, hoping to prevent African American infiltration into “their” sport. Down in Louisville, a particularly militant man named Colonel Watts tried etching exclusionary language into racings bylaws. It would have disallowed blacks from racing on Kentucky tracks and, if he got his way, national ones as well. After failing to get a majority vote against blacks in ’92 and ’93, Watts, who was running for mayor with a slogan of “no discrimination against wheelmen,” returned in 1894 with a grand new scheme. At the league’s annual convention held on his home turf—usually festive affairs attracting large delegations from all over the country—instead of selling the virtues of his beautiful city to visiting dignitaries or addressing pressing financial matters, he used his pulpit to further his racial aims.

  To sway his visitors, he had concocted a fantastical plan. With the aid of a case of Kentucky Wild Turkey Whiskey, Watts had bribed a rather myopic leader of a local black cycling club into signing a letter stating that his club no longer wanted to be part of the league. Some hoodwinked delegates felt relieved; if blacks didn’t want to be a part of the League of American Wheelmen, they would feel less remorse voting against them. A few Northeastern states, sensing mischief by the Southern leader, objected. But in a secret vote, inserting the words “whites only” gained 127 votes against 54, only to be blocked by the Massachusetts delegation.

  Soon afterward, a heated debate spilled out into the nation’s newspapers, sometimes alongside articles or advertisements of a lynching. A civil war of words continued between Northern and Southern states. But since few elite black cyclists were pounding down their doors, many delegates took the same tack that national politicians used when faced with issues they didn’t want to address: wait for the problem to come to them and when it does, shovel it into the hands of individual states to handle.

  As 1894 melded into 1895, the issue remained open, controversial, and ambiguous. In New York, the lords of American racing crossed their fingers, hoping no talented black rider would come along and press the issue.

  June 30, 1895, dawned cloudy and muggy. Major Taylor secreted himself behind a stand of oak trees, staring nervously at a field of riders as they prepared for a road race. A wealthy realtor, railroad magnate, and cycling enthusiast named George Catterson was sponsoring the annual seventy-five-mile race from Indianapolis to Matthews, Indiana. Though short-distance track racing was his forte, Taylor was attracted to the significant prizes and high-caliber competition slated for the distance event. Catterson was familiar with Taylor and wanted him to compete in the race, but Taylor had already been taking heat from some locals for having the cheek to compete against whites. Foretelling racial tension, Catterson—probably with Munger’s blessing—decided to keep Taylor’s entry secret. Had the other riders known, Catterson reasoned, few if any would have competed.

  Seventy-five miles northeast in the finishing town of Matthews, Indiana, a solid wall of rain had formed and was driving right for Indianapolis. At the starting line, the first few droplets began falling. Thousands of racing fans holding umbrellas choked off Massachusetts Avenue, peering up at the ominous skies and questioning whether they could get the race in.

  Shortly after the crack of the pistol with the field in full flight, Taylor emerged from behind the tree line. He mounted a bike he had borrowed from Munger and began plowing a lonely furrow through the back of the field. He raced up to the peloton (in racing parlance, peloton means main pack of riders) and began feeding off their vacuum. His stealth tactic only worked for so long. When his white rivals finally spotted his dark form stealing in behind them, a steady barrage of racial epithets, attempts to knock him down, and threats of violence followed. Taylor was stuck in a cloud of angry riders, draping over him like a parka. He soldiered on, enduring the same brand of threats that would dog him for the next fifteen years. The intimidation grew nastier as the peloton wended down a serpentine patch of road, thinly inhabited. On one side of the road were weeping willows, on the other, a cemetery. “The thought ran through my mind,” Taylor later recalled, “that this would make an ideal spot for my competitors to carry out their dire threats.”

  At the halfway point, Taylor had finally had enough. Fearing for his safety, he rose out of his saddle and mashed on his pedals, trying to separate himself from the pack. Suddenly the dark, threatening skies opened in a fury, dumping buckets of rain on the riders and the unpaved clay roads below. Before long, the earth beneath them softened, coagulated, and turned into mud pie. When they neared the town of Muncie, three-quarters of the way in, the sludge was flinging up into the riders’ eyes, drenching their uniforms, and clinging to their tires, spokes, and rims. Taylor, sloshing along in the slop, took the lead. Riders tried desperately to shepherd in behind him, but one by one they began peeling off, succumbing to fatigue, saturation, or mechanical failure. Taylor began thriving on the elements as though the mud was flowing up in a lyrical slow motion. Like a spray of gold dust, it was transfiguring him from a gentle young boy into a streaking cheetah.

  Somewhere near the outskirts of Matthews, Taylor craned his neck back, waiting for his rivals to counterattack. No one was there. At the finish, with prizes in hand, promoter Catterson looked on as a solitary figure pedaling for the line materialized from under the dark skies, his body soaked through and through. It was Taylor, the only rider to even finish the race.

  It was just a local race on an inclement afternoon, but those who braved the rainstorm that day witnessed the embryonic stages of an athlete with an indomitable will to win and an unusual capacity to either ignore all obstacles or to feed off them. Despite the pouring rain, they saw an intense fire burning in him.

  Waterlogged and rubber-legged, Taylor quickly tucked the first-place prize into his pocket—a deed to a lot in the center of Matthews—sped home, and gave it to his stunned mother. Saphronia was proud of his ambition to race and the free lot was nice, but the danger of riding among those white folks made her cautious. “She made me promise I would never ride a road race of that length again,” he remembered.

  He never would.

  The words Jim Crow—the name of the infamous laws that symbolized lynching and race separation in America—still send shivers down some people’s spines. In one form or another, the Jim Crow era was responsible for keeping blacks and whites apart and often hostile toward one another from the 1830s to the 1960s. In line with the segregationist mentality of the time and the hostility directed toward them, black cyclists, like black ballplayers, talked of forming a separate league similar to the League of American Wheelmen. Names were bandied about—The Colored Men’s Protective Association, the Afro-American Racing Union, and the Afro-American Cyclists, to name a few. They would never become as well organized or have the caliber of riders as the League of American Wheelmen, but they did provide a safe sanctuary where blacks could compete against one another.

  After enduring the enmity of his white rivals during the Indianapolis-Matthews race, Taylor decided to join the See-Saw Cycling Club, a local organization
consisting of one hundred black men. On July 4, 1895, less than a week after the Matthews race, the all-black club sponsored a ten-mile road race. The winner was to receive a personal trainer and an all-expenses-paid trip to the Black National Championships in Chicago. Taylor was already considered among the best overall local riders, so winning the ten-mile race in Indianapolis against a field of thirty-three local black men came fairly easy to him.

  A few weeks later, Taylor’s free train ride clattered northwest to Chicago where the competition would prove to be more formidable. In 1895, there were few places in America more bike crazy than the Windy City. On any given day, there was almost always a bike race, bike parade, or bike show of some type clogging up the streets. New bike tracks were being erected in alarming numbers, making it a place and a time of bliss for dedicated wheelmen. Legions of riders rode in testosterone-laden wolf packs by day, then gathered in dense, loud cliques by night, committing to games of ten cent poker and rounds of ale at one of the myriad local cycling clubs. When Taylor arrived, the best black riders from all over the country were already there, surrounded by thousands of cheering black men and women, most of them hovering around one man.

  Not long afterward, Taylor first saw the massive physique of Henry F. Stewart. Dubbed the “St. Louis Flyer,” Stewart, who had been racing since 1887, was the undisputed king of black bike racing. Everywhere he went, blacks idolized him. With broad shoulders, gargantuan tree-trunk thighs, and only somewhat smaller tree-trunk arms, his imposing figure could have passed as a bodybuilder’s. Some even described him as a “brick shit-house.” Unlike Zimmerman, Stewart appeared to be somewhat of a misanthrope who had little time for aspiring young riders. He had more of a boxer’s mentality, using intimidation tactics against his rivals to scare them half out of their wits before races even began. And it usually worked.

  But with patient schooling, Munger had trained Taylor well. Rarely the strongest rider in his day, Munger had to rely on cunning and superior strategy to win races. He transferred his vast pool of knowledge, teaching Taylor to feed off his rivals’ aggressiveness when they were strong and prey on their weaknesses when they weren’t. As the heavy race favorite, Stewart started from scratch (the scratchman starts from the rearmost position). Because of his recent victories, Taylor was also placed on scratch. Regrettably, someone introduced Taylor to Stewart. Twelve years his senior, Stewart, cocky and high on himself, stared Taylor’s reedy body up and down with his cold, resolute eyes. He smirked and then stalked off. Taylor, a few months shy of seventeen, winced nervously. “It was the first time in my life that I had experienced such a reaction,” he said of the meeting. Stewart’s next move converted Taylor’s disposition from fright to one of anger. He walked over to the racing officials and, within earshot of Taylor, suggested they move Taylor to the limit (or front) position. “He looks as though he’s going to need it,” Stewart bellowed for all to hear.

  At the starting line, Stewart peeled off his bright purple bathrobe—a common garment worn by cyclists before a race at the time—exposing his muscular frame and further intimidating his weary rivals. Given his prerace antics, Stewart had no choice but to affirm his supremacy by leading the pack. Aggressively, he did just that, setting a gut-wrenching pace right from the start—the kind of pace better suited to two miles, not ten. Taylor slowly moved up through the pack, positioning himself right behind Stewart, whose large body formed a perfect wedge from the blowing wind. It was well into the race before Stewart finally realized, much to his surprise, that he wasn’t going to shake Taylor from his rear wheel easily. But by then it was too late; he had wrung himself to exhaustion while Taylor had been husbanding his energy. He could only watch as the young upstart from Indianapolis stormed by him at a blistering pace right before the finish line. Taylor crossed it ten lengths ahead, the new Colored Champion of America. His accomplishment went virtually unnoticed by the nation’s press.

  After defeating Stewart during that summer of 1895, Taylor kept finding the winner’s circle, including at three blacks-only events in Kentucky.

  At Munger’s behest, he also began coaching other would-be cyclists. During his era, nearly every high school and college featured cycling as a centerpiece of its athletic curriculum. In search of valuable publicity, manufacturers tripped over one another in their zeal to infiltrate schools with their products. Their strategy was elementary: help youths get a few wins under their belts while simultaneously thrilling them so much with their shiny new models that they would charge home, bat their eyes at their parents, and leave them no choice but to clean out their bank accounts.

  Munger had two secret weapons. He assembled a superlight custom bicycle and sent Taylor, who was becoming known around town, to various high schools to train their students. Munger added further sizzle by offering a free Birdie Special bicycle with a silver emblem featuring an owl on the front—thus the name Birdie—for any student who could whip Taylor in a race. It was a strong incentive. As a percentage of the average person’s annual income—about 30 percent—custom bicycles were exceedingly expensive at the time. Being intimately aware of Taylor’s fledgling speed, however, Munger probably wasn’t too concerned about any run on his bank account.

  The high schools were singular places for a black man to be, but the nascent young stars apparently took well to Taylor’s tutelage. He espoused the virtues of Munger bicycles, trained the poor kids half to death, and listened gaily as they tried every kind of bribery they could think of to get their hooks on a free custom bike. Surely Munger dropped by on occasion, so he could peer out over the track rail and laugh as the high schoolers tried in vain to catch Taylor. Throughout the training process, Taylor’s own form continued to blossom.

  As summer waned, Taylor’s name had been appearing in local papers more often than certain people in certain entrenched circles cared to see. Most of the attention had centered on his road-racing victories, but as time rolled on it became obvious to him, and to Munger, that his greatest strength was in the faster, more explosive sport of track racing. So Taylor began haunting Indianapolis racetracks during his spare time, trying to talk his way into races, once again testing the racial divide.

  The timing of his partial conversion was good and bad. Cities were overwhelmed with road races, and enough horsemen had voiced their contempt that some cities began regulating their frequency. Unfortunately for Taylor, there were no blacks-only racetracks to speak of. His development was effectively in the hands of track owners and local riders, virtually all of them white. Some days he was able to use the track for training purposes while on others he met stiff resistance.

  Occasionally, he would test his speed against proven local white riders. Because of his color, he couldn’t compete head to head against them, so he would wait until they had finished, then quickly rip around the track, often unofficially besting their times. These were bold moves that few if any blacks dared try at the time. But for Taylor, it was just the beginning of a lifetime filled with nonconformity and the fearless rejection of stale traditions. These incidents would prove to be seminal moments for Taylor and Munger. While living in the cloistered environment of the Southard home or toiling in Hearsey’s shop, he had experienced little of “that dreaded monster prejudice.” But now that he emerged into the broader world and had shown promise in the nation’s fastest growing sport, he found himself entering a new life dynamic. Faced with angry riders, some track owners began barring him from their tracks. His world was getting squeezed—an agonizing reality for a young man whose life’s passion was bike racing.

  Less ambitious men may have quit right then and there, retreating to the relative safety of factory life or the simplicity of farm life. But Major Taylor was wired differently. “Down in my heart,” he noted, “I felt that if I could get an even break, I could make good as a sprinter on the bicycle tracks of the country.” But for a black man living in 1890s America, getting an even break came as often as snowfall in summer.

  The vibrant colors of s
ummer gave way to the variegated hues of autumn. Because of his racing successes, Taylor gained confidence daily.

  He was also becoming more inconspicuous at Munger’s factory and home. When Taylor was nowhere to be found one morning, Munger threw a leg over his bicycle and set out in search of his protégé. He rolled through an Indianapolis that, like other cities, was scarred by the depression. He finally halted at one of the worst of the local tracks—nothing but a rundown old horse track, probably one of the only tracks that Taylor hadn’t been kicked off of yet. Sure enough, there was Taylor, zigging and zagging around the oval at breakneck speed. With the track nearly deserted, Munger leaned his bike against the grandstand, gnawed on a strip of buffalo jerky, and watched Taylor uncoil.

  Sensing that Taylor had good legs that day, he instructed him to ride an unpaced mile flat out. Taylor nodded. Bending over the track rail, Munger reached into his pocket and fished out his stopwatch. Like a flat rock skimming across a glassy pond, Taylor skipped around the track, his small, jockey-like frame showing remarkable power and grace, all things moving forward. As Taylor crossed the mile marker, beads of sweat rolling down his forehead, Munger snapped his thumb down on his stopwatch and then looked up. His face was a picture of sheer joy. Taylor had spun off an unpaced mile in 2:09. The record was 2:07. This blackbird could fly! “I can ride a wheel almost as fast as some of the cracks,” he would tell Munger, the words bounding out his mouth.