Wilma Rudolph

Wilma Glodean Rudolph was born in Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee, on the twenty-third of June 1940, the twentieth of twenty-two children of a railroad porter and a domestic worker. She was born prematurely at four and a half pounds and survived through her childhood a sequence of severe illnesses: double pneumonia, scarlet fever, and polio, the last of which left her with a paralyzed left leg.

Her mother drove her ninety miles round-trip every week for two years to Meharry Medical College in Nashville for physical-therapy treatment — Meharry being the only medical institution in Tennessee that would treat Black patients in the late 1940s. By eleven, Rudolph had recovered the use of the leg. By thirteen, she was playing high-school basketball; by fifteen, she was the leading sprinter on the Tennessee State University women's track team.

She qualified for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics at sixteen and won a bronze medal as part of the U.S. 4x100-meter relay. At the 1960 Rome Olympics she won three gold medals — the 100 metres, the 200 metres, and the 4x100-metre relay — becoming the first American woman to win three gold medals at a single Olympic Games. She set a world record in the 200 metres in the semifinal and an Olympic record in the 4x100-metre relay.

The 1960 Tennessee A&I State University delegation refused to accept the segregated welcome-home parade that the Clarksville, Tennessee, municipal government initially planned. The parade and banquet that followed in October 1960 were the first racially integrated public events in Clarksville's history.

She founded the Wilma Rudolph Foundation in 1981 to support amateur athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds. She died of brain cancer in Brentwood, Tennessee, on the twelfth of November 1994, age fifty-four.

She is honored here as the sprinter whose three Rome gold medals made the rejection of a segregated parade an act of national authority.