Black History Month: Day 13 – HBCU Women’s Track and Field Champions

I think this is the next to last day that I talk about sports, but I did want to touch on women’s track and field. (Tomorrow is basketball; I just got a book called Black College Sports and I want to share what’s in it before moving on.)

In 1927, Coach Cleve Abbott, Athletic Director for Tuskegee Instiute, (who also coached tennis, golf, track, baseball and football,) started the Tuskegee Relays , which became the third largest track event in the country after the Penn Relays. His inclusion of women’s events was monumental for women’s sports. In 1929, Abbott organized and developed the Women’s Sports Carnival. He hired Amelia Roberts to coach the Tuskegee women’s track team, the Tigerettes and in 1937, they won the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) Nationals, the highest honor of a track team. During that competition, Mable Smith was the first African American woman track star to win a national individual championship (18-0.0 in the long jump). The Tigerettes won again in 1939. One of Abbott’s greatest success stories was Alice Coachman. Abbott saw Coachman compete when she was in high school and asked her to come to Tuskegee to attend school, and train with the Tigerettes. In addition to the high jump, Coachman also ran as anchor on the 400-meter relay team. In the 1945 AAU nationals, Coachman scored a triple win in the 50- and 100- meter sprints as well as the high jump. In 1948, Tuskegee sent 4 women to the Olympics: Mabel Walker and Nell Jackson ran the 200-meter dash, Theresa Manual ran the 80-meter hurdles and threw the javelin, Coachman won the high jump, beating out France and England for the gold. Coachman was the only American woman to win a Gold medal in the 1948 Olympics. Other athletes coached by Cleve Abbott included Mildred McDaniel and Nell Jackson. McDaniel was the U.S. women’s high jump champion in 1953, 1955 and 1956 and was the U.S. indoor champion in 1955 and 1956 as well. She also was the 1955 Pan-American Games winner with a leap of 5′ 6 1/4″, a meet mark that stood until 1967. Though she twice raised the U.S. high jump record during 1956, she entered the Olympic competition as an underdog. She emerged as gold medalist with a world record leap of 5′ 9 1/4″, a resounding 3 1/2″ higher than her closest competitor. Nell Jackson was a sprinter. In 1946 she won the 200 meters in the first US Junior Nationals for women. At the 1951 Pan-American Games she was on the gold-medal winning 4×100 relay team (with Dolores Dwyer, Janet Moreau, and the non-Olympian Jean Patton) and won a silver medal in the 200 metres. Jackson won the AAU Championship in 1949-50 in the 200. In 1956, a year after Cleve Abbott died, Jackson became the U. S. Olympics women’s head coach and was the first African American to be named head coach of a U. S. Olympics team.
Ironically, Cleve Abbott’s daughter Jessie Abbott, a former Tigerette, headed over to Tennessee State to coach the Tennessee Tigerbelles along with legendary coach Ed Temple. The Tigerbelles became the state’s most internationally accomplished athletic team in the mid-twentieth century. The sprinters won some twenty-three Olympic medals, more than any other sports team in Tennessee history. Mae Faggs was the first student-athlete to receive a track scholarship from Temple in 1952 earning the nickname of “mother of the Tigerbelles”. Mae Faggs and Barbara Jones became the first Olympic-winning Tigerbelles in 1952, and the Tigerbelles won another medal in 1956. In 1956 Wilma Rudolph and five other Tigerbelles qualified for the Olympic team, returning to Nashville with several medals and plaques. In 1959 Rudolph accompanied the team to the Pan American Games, where they also won several medals. At the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Italy, Rudolph won three gold medals, prompting Coach Temple to proclaim, “I was so happy I was bursting all the buttons off my shirt.” Eventually, Gold Medal winners from Tennessee State included Edith McGuire, Madeline Manning, Barbara Jones, Martha Hudson, Lucinda Williams, Chandra Cheeseborough (two), Wilma Rudolph (three), and Wyomia Tyus (three). Tyus was the first athlete to win Gold Medals in the sprints in two consecutive Olympiads (1964 and 1968).
Chandra Cheeseborough-Guice joined the Tigerbelles in 1977 after bursting onto the scene by winning a pair of gold medals at the 1975 Pan American Games. Under the guidance of Coach Temple, Cheeseborogh-Guice qualified for the Olympics in 1980- the year that the U.S. boycotted the games. Cheeseborogh-Guice’s next chance at the Olympics was 1984 in Los Angeles, Cal. She made the most of her time on the west coast, winning one silver and two gold medals. She made history when she became the first woman to win gold medals in both 400-meter relays, which were held less than an hour apart. At TSU, Cheeseborough-Guice was a member of National Championship teams that set world records of 1:08.9 minutes in the 640-yard relay and 1:47.17 minutes in the 800-yard sprint medley relay. She won the national indoor 200-yard dash in 1979, 1981, 1982 and 1983. Cheeseborough-Guice returned to her alma mater in 1994 and has led the track and field program to six Ohio Valley Conference Track and Field Championships.