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FORGOTTEN FOREMOTHERS
Profiles of lesser-known heroines in the fight for women's rights
Alice Coachman and Audrey "Mickey" Patterson
At the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, sprinter Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals for Team USA. “Go anyplace and people will tell you Wilma Rudolph was the first Black woman to win a medal—it’s not true,” Alice Coachman told The Birmingham News in 1997.
As a young Black girl in the United States South in the early 1930s, Alice wasn’t welcome much of anywhere when it came to sports. Most leagues only accepted white children. Those that allowed Black children, only accepted boys. So, the roads and fence posts became Alice’s training grounds. She often ran and jumped barefoot. “You had to run up and down the red roads and the dirt roads. You went out there in the fields,” she told The Kansas City Star, “where there was a lot of grass and no track. No nothing.”
At age 25, Alice traveled to London for the 1948 Summer Olympics. She was just one of 12 women on Team USA, and of those, she was one of 9 Black women. Her fellow history-makers were Mabel Walker, Lillian Young, Nell Jackson, Mae Faggs, Cynthia Robinson, Theresa Manuel, Emma Reed, and Audrey “Mickey” Patterson, whose coach called her “the female Jesse Owens.”
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Kathryn S Gardiner
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