Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  At the peak of his young career, Taylor found himself unemployed, a world champion without a guardian. Taylor sank into despair, expecting the worst. With the league out of racing for good, the NCA’s ban on blacks, and the heightened hostility toward him from the rival league’s riders, there seemed no way out of his malaise. A Massachusetts paper, in bold type, highlighted his solemn mood: LITTLE HOPE FOR MAJOR TAYLOR. Sensing this as an opportunity, a French promotional concern tried luring him overseas with a lucrative offer. But because the contract called for Sunday racing, Taylor rejected it.

  With the American racing season just months away, Taylor strategized means to get the union leaders within the NCA (ARCU) to drop their ban on blacks and reinstate him. Bike racing, after all, was his passion, the only thing he really loved. He sent out feelers, which fell on the deaf ears of the union’s governing board. He grew more desperate with each passing day. Eventually, he hired attorney William Allen, a Worcester resident and a vice president of the NCA, but even he didn’t seem overly confident. “I fear my sentiments do not meet with favor in the minds of the majority of the officials of that body,” said Allen, speaking candidly.

  February snows were followed by March showers. Like a giant iceberg, Massachusetts melted, sending torrents of water gushing into numerous tributaries, lakes, and rivers. Rivers overflowed, turning streets into flowing streams, some as deep as eight feet. Horses drowned in their stables. Boats floated down several roads. Electric streetcars sat idle. Unable to ride as often as he wished, Taylor’s form worsened and his hopes dwindled. “Major Taylor’s chances of reinstatement into the NCA,” commented one reporter, “are just about one in a thousand.”

  But Taylor, Allen, and the press continued to push the issue all spring. Various newspapers printed conflicting reports: he’s in, he’s out; the Western riders were against him; the Eastern riders for him. Taylor was confused. The pressure was building. Finally, crossing the wires one spring day came word of a special meeting to be held in New Jersey. Nervous, Taylor immediately packed his bags. “If favorable action is not secured,” warned a journalist, “Taylor’s career as a racing man is ended . . .”

  In mid-May, shortly before the start of the racing season, a collection of white riders amassed at the Continental Hotel in Newark, New Jersey, to discuss Taylor’s lifetime ban and the broader issue of blacks in professional bike racing. Recognizing this as the most important race of his life, Taylor sped into town and stormed toward the hotel meeting room. Even though the meeting was about him, he wasn’t allowed in. Taylor paced about the lobby, anxiously awaiting news from the men who controlled his destiny. Reporters swarmed the issue.

  The executive session brewing inside that hotel conference room would prove to be one of the most fantastical in the 134-year annals of organized bike racing. Seven of the nine members of the Grand Council—with titles ranging from secretary to president—were present: the previous year’s American champion Tom Cooper, Earl Kiser, John Fisher, Jay Eaton, Edward Spooner, Howard Freeman, and a westerner named Orlando Stevens, one half of the infamous “I and Stevie” combination that had caused Taylor infinite grief.

  On their way to the hotel, these seven men had galloped under Major Taylor billboards, browsed ads for Taylor-sponsored bicycles, and read endless articles rehashing Taylor’s accomplishments—world champion, American champion, holder of seven world speed records. They watched people cool themselves with Major Taylor fans, knew children who exchanged Major Taylor trading cards, had neighbors who smoked Major Taylor cigarettes and wore Major Taylor buttons. Firsthand, they knew he was kind and unassuming to a fault. Yet here they were, noisily debating his continued permanent ban from the nation’s tracks. For what?

  With years of pent-up hatred behind them, those opposed to his entry pounded on the table with what amounted to two objections—neither deserving of a lifetime ban. First, Taylor still owed the NCA $400 for abandoning the controversial Cape Girardeau race back in the fall of 1898. Second, he had black skin.

  Shouting from his San Jose, California, soapbox against Taylor’s inclusion stood a six-foot-four rider who held a hypnotic “influence” over everyone. His name was Floyd MacFarland, the other half of the “I and Stevie” combo, and a man who could start a fight in an empty room. Including Taylor would, he and others thought, hurt the sport’s pure image.

  Conceding that Taylor was the best drawing card in the business, someone pounded on the table reminding the assembly of biking’s stiff competition from baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and that deep-pocketed promoters like Brady and Kennedy wouldn’t stand for Taylor’s exclusion.

  The first reports were negative. “Almost certain defeat stares him in the face,” reckoned one reporter.

  For Taylor, time stood still. He moseyed about the hotel lobby displaying a bizarre combination of apprehension and confidence. He had always thrived on being an in-control perfectionist: rigid training routine, clothing always tidy and proper, bicycles maintained meticulously, handwriting neat and orderly, every penny spent entered in his diary. Yet here were nine men, many of whom burned with racial contempt toward him, controlling his fate without allowing him any say in the matter. Feelings of helplessness ran through him.

  But he was well aware of his popularity and his ability to fill the stands. Surely this key fact would be considered. He also had, without even trying, powerful friends in high places. Taylor stepped outside for a breath of fresh air and let his allies in the press go to work. Before, during, and after the meeting, these newsmen—recognizing this as much more than a sports story—read the men of the Grand Council the riot act. “The riders have drawn the color line,” wrote one columnist. “It is unconstitutional, un-American, unsportsmanlike . . . the color line will not be accepted by the American public as a valid excuse for the ruling off of a champion.” Some scribes were more forceful and no doubt caused the council, which tilted against Taylor, to pause. “If the NCA wants the endorsement of every fair-minded lover of sports in the country,” hollered another reporter, “it had better strike out that word ‘white’ in its rules . . . and strike it out quick.” All Taylor could do was wait. Finally, as dusk fell over New Jersey, a disheveled band of men emerged with their verdict in hand. Someone stepped forward and grunted out the council’s ruling. In the end, the forces united for Taylor proved too much for the union lords. With payment of a $500 fine, Taylor was readmitted and American cycling had one unified governing body again. The news was cabled to the rest of the wheelmen. Back in San Jose, Floyd MacFarland plotted his revenge. Some observers later wondered what would have happened had Taylor been just an average rider like the men deciding his fate.

  Behind in his conditioning, Taylor hopped on a streetcar outside the Continental Hotel en route to the rail station to catch a red-eye. He boarded the train a happy man. Waving to friends and reporters as the whistle sounded, Taylor’s train ground toward Worcester and the one dream that still eluded him—the undisputed champion of America.

  The life of a turn-of-the-century professional bike racer was inherently peripatetic. Some riders had grown so accustomed to the daily howl of a train’s whistle, the hard feel of strange hotel beds, and the incomplete taste of restaurant meals that they occasionally forgot where they were. Competing in scores of races at different towns all over the country, several had lost the need to ground themselves to any one place. Many seasoned pros found it difficult to buy a home and settle into a normal family life. The more one could ignore or at least delay this familial urge, they reasoned, the more races they could win, the more money they could earn, and the more praise they could receive from the public. Some riders were torn between these two worlds. Others thoroughly enjoyed the sights, sounds, and feel that went with being a professional bike racer at the time of its greatest glory, sifting through wine and women as often as others chewed tobacco.

  Most riders sought balance. It was this yearning for balance and his urge to feel rooted, not to mention flush accounts a
t several banks, that caused Taylor to shop for a home of his own early in 1900. With the exceedingly positive coverage he received from the local newspapers and Worcester’s claim of being an open-minded community, it seemed like a good place for him, as a black man, to settle down. Like any home buyer, Taylor wanted his to be of a quality commensurate with his ability to pay. The only problem was that few, if any, blacks lived in those high-end neighborhoods at the time. In the areas Taylor had been shopping, the most “select” section of town, no precedent existed. But Taylor needed no precedent. After shopping all over town, he fell in love with a seven-bedroom home on Hobson Avenue on the north side of town and prepared to buy it. One of the benefits of spending so much time training and traveling was that it didn’t leave a man a lot time to spend the money he had earned. Taylor, whose only real monetary indulgences involved his clothing, had amassed more than enough money to pay the $2,850 asking price in cash. He had found the home of his dreams and had the money. His American dream was in full swing. Or so he thought.

  Somewhere along the way, perhaps anticipating trouble, Taylor contacted Cornelius Maher, a local realtor, and asked him to close the deal for him. But the developer, wanting to keep the neighborhood an “ideal residential locality,” had inserted certain restrictions to help keep out “undesirable people.” So, unsure of the developer’s position on blacks, they devised a plan to circumvent the usual approval process. Taylor gave Maher power to sign on his behalf and went about his business. But when Maher went to close on the property, he was grilled with questions about the buyer.

  “Is he a good Yankee?” the developer asked.

  “Yes,” Maher responded.

  “Is he financially viable?”

  Maher said that he was well to do and, unlike most people who typically put down only a few hundred dollars, he was paying cash for the house.

  “What’s his name?” pressed the developer.

  “M. C. Taylor,” Maher replied coyly.

  The seller, perhaps sensing something funny, balked. He repeatedly asked for a meeting with the actual buyer present. At each subsequent meeting, Maher told the seller his client was an extremely busy man on the road all the time and would be unable to attend the closing. “You’ll see him soon enough,” he promised. Finally after several meetings, the seller relented. At the scheduled closing, Taylor apparently stood in the hallway waiting impatiently. The developer, a non-sports fan who apparently wouldn’t have known the difference between a Kentucky Derby–winning jockey and a world champion wheelman, thought Taylor was just Maher’s coachman. Red-faced, Maher signed for Taylor and the property changed hands.

  When the 399 white folks living in Taylor’s neighborhood caught wind of this transaction, some of them stormed the realtor’s office claiming they were tricked and bemoaning the fact that a black man lived in their neighborhood.

  “What do you mean by this outrage,” one of them hollered, “this violation of confidence and agreement, sir?”

  The seller also felt deceived. “I consider it an injury to me to have him come in and squat down on my plot against my will . . .”

  Amid threats of lawsuits, the deal stood. After Taylor moved in, the seller’s and the realtor’s reputations fell through the roof.

  For a city that often boasted of being open-minded, hypocrisy ran thick. Apparently it was okay for blacks to live in certain sections of town, perhaps as a valet of a white man, but when it came to living next door in the finer part of town, that was another story altogether. Nervous and fearful, some neighbors gathered in clandestine meetings. They emerged with what they believed was a brilliant plan. They offered Taylor nearly double what he paid for the house if he would just move elsewhere. One resident even offered Taylor a deal he couldn’t possibly turn down on a quaint home in a more appropriate part of town.

  Unmoved by the offer and all the hoopla, Taylor refused. “I don’t know why I haven’t as much right to buy a little place as any man in town,” he said defiantly, as though there was nothing unusual about his purchase.

  After reminding locals that their ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War and Civil War for freedom and equal rights, local journalists joined in a chorus of catcalls against the residents. “There must be Democrats out at Columbus Park,” barked a writer for the Worcester Telegram. “They are making a lot of fuss because a good Republican is to be one of the neighbors.”

  Once the dust settled, Taylor began employing the unique communicative skills he had honed over the years. One of his most effective weapons against racism was his belief that people can be taught to treat you the way you want or expect to be treated. So Taylor lifted his chin, introduced himself to his new neighbors, and rolled through the very streets where monuments of him would one day stand, new furniture protruding out the back of his horse-cart. Over time, his strategy worked. One neighbor after another slowly warmed up to the idea of having the gentle world champion living in his or her backyard. So much so that when he needed them in the future, they would be there for him.

  Many stood up and took notice. Like his fight with the NCA, the news was viewed as more than just a sports story. It flowed through the local papers and down to the black press before spilling out into several major papers. This unprecedented move would further elevate him in the eyes of those of his era—and those who, more than one century later, can view its import through the lens of history.

  One of Taylor’s motives for buying his new home likely went beyond having a nice roof over his head. For some time, the press had been snooping for information on his romantic life, but their intrusiveness only caused Taylor to tighten his sphinx-like silence on the issue. However, the frontal assault continued. “How about it, Major?” they kept asking. “How about it?” Uncomfortable with reporters poking their pens into his every move, he went to great lengths to ward off their scent into his romantic life, even to the point of fabricating stories.

  He once told Harry Sager that he was married, just to get him and others to shut up. It was all over the papers the next day. Worse yet, Sager insisted that he and his fictive wife come to his palatial Rochester estate for a formal sit-down dinner. Taylor now had to unwind what began as a jest. “If I was married I didn’t know when it happened . . . Just the work of some of those paragraphers,” he told a newsman, buckling over in laughter. “They are always making me married.”

  The truth was, around the time he bought his new home Taylor first set eyes on the stunning face and captivating eyes of Daisy Victoria Morris. The daughter of a black mother and white father, Daisy was born in Hudson, New York, in 1876, making her two years older than Taylor. Her sweeping beauty, refined grace, and sharp intellect turned heads at a private academy where she schooled in the mid-’90s. When her mother Mary died, Daisy moved to Hartford to live with a relative named Reverend Louis Taylor. There, she joined the esteemed Amphion Social Club, where she dazzled crowds at the dramas and concerts in which she performed.

  Though she appears to have grown up on the rougher side of Hudson and under less than ideal circumstances, it did not adversely affect her comportment. Everything about her spoke of elegance. Beyond her striking beauty, people couldn’t help but notice her fashionable velvet walking suits with vested fronts, her gored accordion skirts with silk taffeta at the hems, or her assortment of lovely Victorian-era hats trimmed with colorful silk flowers. In stark contrast to the usual hourglass shape favored at the time, Daisy carried an athletic, twenty-first-century figure. Her appearance even captured the attention of the society writers: her face stared out from the cover of a black society magazine that had found its way into Taylor’s hands.

  In 1897, Reverend Taylor was uprooted from his Hartford congregation and transferred to Worcester. Because Major and Daisy were both deeply religious, they may have met at a local church function. Or, like so many other couples of the era, perhaps they met on a leisurely Saturday afternoon bike ride on the streets of Worcester. A stroll through town on a “wheel” or on
a visit to the local racetrack had become a fashionable way to meet potential mates.

  In fact, few inventions had a greater impact on women—or stirred up as much controversy—than the bicycle. Since the Civil War, little had changed in women’s clothing or in their general subservience to men. But once the bicycle came along, this “new woman”—and Daisy was most likely one of them—was free to go about as she wished and form her own ideas about what she wore. And since travel had become less cumbersome, women had a wider base of prospective mates to choose from beyond the traditional, pre-arranged match ups.

  The press did its part in perpetuating this new belief. The New York Herald reassured all brides-to-be that a bicycle was a better matchmaker than a mother, and that more often than not, the tinkling of a bicycle’s bell turned into the pedaling of wedding bells. The most effective way to elicit masculine approval, wrote cycling historian Robert A. Smith, was to take a short spin down a country lane “under the cycle moon.”

  But all this freedom concerned some groups. The radical Women’s Rescue League believed that “bicycling by young women had helped more than any other media to swell the ranks of reckless girls, who finally drift into the standing army of outcast women of the United States.” Several Kentucky newspapers carried out a deliberate campaign to discourage women’s cycling by printing pictures of absurd-looking bicycle attire, combined with reports suggesting that women were incapable of controlling a bicycle. A medicinal company warned of many harmful effects to all those of the “weaker sex” who rode bikes. But just in case one succumbed to the peer pressures of riding, it had the answer to the inevitable “heating of the blood.” All one had to do was drop $1.50 for a patented cure-all, Payne’s Celery Tonic.