by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, GBN Founder and Editor-in-Chief
You’ve likely heard of Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight champion boxer and Jesse Owens, the first Black world champion sprinter. But have you ever heard of Marshall “Major” Taylor, the first Black world champion of cycling?
Taylor not only was the first African-American world champion in cycling, he might have been the first internationally known sports celebrity ever.
Born in 1878 in Indianapolis, Taylor was one of eight children and the son of a formerly enslaved Civil War veteran. In his youth, Taylor was given a bicycle by the wealthy family his father Gilbert worked for, and was soon earning money delivering newspapers and riding barefoot for miles a day.
When he wasn’t working his paper route, Taylor mastered several stunts and tricks on his bicycle. To drum up business, Taylor was hired by a local bicycle shop to dress in a military uniform and perform his feats in front of the store – and it worked.
Taylor was nicknamed “Major” and was soon hired to work for the shop full-time. By the 1890s, America was experiencing a bicycle boom, so shop’s owners also entered Taylor into local cycling races, which he easily won.
Though Taylor was prevented from joining any local riding clubs, he kept competing and winning. When there were “whites only” races, friends would smuggle him in and though he couldn’t officially compete, his times could be measured.
At 17, Taylor knocked two-fifths of a second off the world record held by professional racer Ray MacDonald. Taylor’s time could not be submitted for official recognition, but everyone watching the race knew what they had witnessed. Major Taylor earned a second nickname: “The Black Cyclone.”
Taylor soon became a professional racer and won 29 of the 49 races he entered. By 1899, he won the cycling world championship officially, and the victory earned Taylor widespread fame.
Even so, Taylor remained barred from cycling races in the South. Even when he wasn’t, racist spectators would at times throw ice or nails at him, and several white cyclists would jostle him, shove him or box him in.
Taylor started using his competitors’ hatred as fuel — in order to ensure that he wouldn’t be physically accosted or pulled from his bike, he would ride several lengths ahead and stay there.
At the end of a one-mile race in Massachusetts however, cyclist W.E. Becker, upset he finished behind Taylor, pulled Taylor to the ground after the race. “Becker choked him into a state of insensibility,” the New York Times reported, “and the police were obliged to interfere. It was fully fifteen minutes before Taylor recovered consciousness.” Becker was fined $50 for the assault.
After that, Taylor started competing in Europe, where a Black athlete could ride
without fear of racially-motivated violence. Promoters shifted events from Sundays to accommodate Taylor, who refused to race on the Sabbath. In 1902, Taylor dominated the European Tour, winning the majority of races he entered and cementing his reputation as the fastest cyclist in the world.
Reportedly earning $30,000 a year, Taylor raced consistently for the rest of the decade, making him one of the wealthiest athletes of his day, Black or white. But as the automobile emerged as a more exciting mode of movement, mass interest in cycling began to ebb.
In 1910, 32 year-old Taylor retired, living off his sizable earnings. But by 1929, with the Wall Street crash and some other bad investments, Taylor’s fortune was all but wiped out. He self-published his autobiography, The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World in 1929 and spent the last years of his life in Chicago selling it door-to-door. When Taylor died in 1932 at 53, he was buried in a pauper’s grave at the Mount Glenwood Cemetery in Chicago.
When some former racing stars learned of this, they convinced Frank Schwinn, owner of the Schwinn Bicycle Company, to have Taylor’s remains exhumed and transferred to the cemetery’s Memorial Garden of the Good Shepherd and mark it with a bronze tablet that reads: “Worlds champion bicycle racer who came up the hard way —Without hatred in his heart—An honest, courageous and God-fearing, clean-living gentlemanly athlete. A credit to his race who always gave out his best—Gone but not forgotten.”
To learn more about Taylor, check out the 2012 Smithsonian.com article by Gilbert King, the 2024 PBS documentary Major Taylor: Champion of the Race, 2021’s The World’s Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America’s First Black Sports Hero by Michael Kranish, or Major: A Black Athlete, a White Era, and the Fight to Be the World’s Fastest Human Being (2009) by Todd Balf.
Other Sources:
- https://www.indianamuseum.org/experience/major-taylor/
- https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/biking/why-havent-you-heard-marshall-major-taylor/
- http://www.majortaylorassociation.org/who.shtml
- https://www.schwinnbikes.com/blogs/compass/the-great-major-taylor?srsltid=AfmBOoqQgMpme1wM6i_rxBAIuhSfJ0XRp85HHG80Q5qs8yHFX9FALpvg
- https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-major-taylor
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