Special to the AmNews
I was pleasantly surprised when a good friend asked me if I had ever heard of Major Taylor. Yes, I told him, and he began to tick off what he knew of the great African-American cyclist.
Not many folks today can cite chapter and verse on Taylor and his phenomenal feats that began in the 19th century, particularly with cycling—unless you are talking about Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France—long ago a thing of the past.
Marshall “Major” Taylor was born in 1898 in Indianapolis to poor parents with eight children. A significant practice of the slavery his grandfather endured continued into Taylor’s early life when he was made a companion to Dan Southard, the son of his father’s employer. As an “adoptive” child of the Southards, when the family moved to Chicago, Taylor was left behind with only the gift of a bicycle from his former keepers.
But it was a boon to the energetic young boy, who used the bicycle to peddle newspapers, sometimes riding barefoot for miles. When he wasn’t earning money on the bike, he was learning all sorts of trick riding that brought him to the attention of the owner of a bicycle shop. The owner hired Taylor, dressed him in a military uniform—thus the nickname “Major”—and asked him to perform in front of the shop to attract customers.
“He rode his bicycle to and from work, 25 miles each way,” daughter Sydney Taylor Brown told a reporter. “That’s why his legs were so strong.”
This was done to such remarkable success that he quit delivering papers, bought a new bike and improved his riding skills. The shop’s owner, always looking for ways to build his business, entered Taylor in a 10-mile bicycle race, something the young man—he was just 13—had never done before. He won the race handily, and while he won a medal and collapsed at the end, it was the beginning of his racing career.
Taylor’s emergence was a timely one because bicycle racing was fast becoming a major sport. No matter how fast he was during this golden age of cycling, he could not speed by the racial discrimination. While he was permitted to compete in stunt riding, he was barred from joining the prestigious bicycle clubs, where he could have achieved even more fortune and fame.
If he wasn’t allowed to enter big time events, Taylor found many opportunities to demonstrate his speed and capability. In one contest, where his sponsor smuggled him into the race, Taylor went around the track, breaking records at one-mile and at one-fifth of a mile in back-to-back races. At 17, he was living up to the press notices that he was the “Black Cyclone.”
Near the dawn of the 20th century, and by the time he was in his 20s, Taylor was a professional rider of national prominence, having won 29 of the 49 races he entered. In 1899, he won the world championship of cycling. Such acclaim placed him on a plateau with great Black boxers of the era, including heavyweight immortal Jack Johnson.
When Taylor was attacked by an angry contestant he had soundly defeated, he felt it was time to stop trying to outmaneuver the country’s widespread racism. It took several years before he agreed to race in France where, as a practicing Christian, he disavowed their policy of Sunday racing. He didn’t change, but France did, and in 1902, he completed a European tour, winning most of his races.
During the next decade, Taylor amassed considerable earnings, making him one of the wealthiest athletes of his era, no matter the color. But as the automobile gained popularity, the bicycle was soon following the horse and buggy to the dustbin of history. In 1910, at 32, his strong and magnificent legs all but depleted, he retired. What fortune he had accumulated also withered away after a series of bad investments and the stock market crash of 1929.
His money all but gone and his marriage over, Taylor struggled to survive, spending what little cash he had left on his self-published autobiography, “The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World,” which he then sold door-to-door, mostly in Chicago. He had his run in the sun, and now he sought to capitalize on a rapidly dwindling fame.
For all the celebrity he acquired at home and abroad—and it’s a shame that he never realized the praise and recognition in America that he had in Europe—he died in almost obscurity with only the Chicago Defender publishing an obituary. He was 53 when he died in 1932, and while he had a daughter, his body lay unclaimed in a morgue. He was later buried in a pauper’s grave at the Mount Glenwood Cemetery in Chicago.
It was only after the Olde Tyme Athletic Club in Chicago convinced Frank Schwinn, owner of the Schwinn Bicycle Company, to pay to have his remains exhumed and reburied did Taylor receive the final resting place he deserved. Now he is buried at the cemetery’s Memorial Garden of the Good Shepherd, where a bronze tablet spells out some of his fantastic achievements.
One line states that he was a credit to his race, and that could have been both the human one and the one on wheels as he sped around the velodromes of the world.
“The sheer joy of winning in competitive arenas is not lost on me,” his granddaughter Jan Brown related to a reporter. “But for me, the most breathtaking part of his story is his resistance to the limitations that others would have had for him. … The fact that he retained the focus and sense of spirit necessary to define and pursue his own goals is itself a prize. The fact that he achieved them, and did so in such a stirring way, is pure icing on the cake.”
