Michelle Styles

Woman of the Day Alice Coachman, born OTD in 1923 in Georgia, the first black woman from any country ever to win a gold medal at the Olympics. She jumped 5ft 6 and 1/8 inches at the 1948 London Olympics, setting a new Olympic record, and King George VI placed the medal around her neck. There were no training facilities for Alice when she was a girl, no organised sports open to her. She faced the twin barriers of exclusion of the basis of her sex and ethnicity. If girls then were really intent on taking part in sports, they were only meant to take part in “ladylike” activities like swimming and tennis, not athletics. Her own father whipped her for jumping and running. She was supposed to sit on the front porch and look “dainty.” Natural talent cannot be denied though. Alice enjoyed playing baseball and softball with the boys and she could run and jump better than anyone else. It was her aunt Carrie and her fifth-grade teacher who encouraged her to carry on running and she resorted to running barefoot on dusty roads near her home to build up her stamina. She used sticks and rope to practice the high jump. “To be a champion, you got to have determination, you've got to have guts; you have to train and let nothing come between you and what you want, that goal you want to reach.” By the time that Alice was competing for her high school track team in Albany, she was already attracting attention with the result that a coach at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama was able to persuade her parents to let her transfer there to complete high school. “Track and field was my key to getting a degree and meeting great people and opening a lot of doors in high school and college.” She won four national championships for sprinting and high jumping at college level and was one of the best in the country, winning titles in relay and high jump. Trying out for the 1948 Olympics was a gamble — Alice had a back injury — but she still managed to demolish the existing US high jump record. In August 1948, Alice cleared the 5 feet 6 1/8-inch bar first time at Wembley Stadium and took her place in history as the first black woman to win gold AND the only American woman to take gold at the 1948 Olympics. The crowd cheered when she stood on the podium and King George VI awarded that medal. When she returned to the US after the Games, Alice was met by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and President Harry Truman and she was honoured with a 175-mile motorcade and parade from Atlanta to Albany…where she was promptly brought down to earth with a bump. Georgia was segregated. Atlanta held civic ceremony in her honour but it was segregated. The white mayor of Albany sat on the stage with Alice but refused to shake her hand and she was made to leave by a side door. It beggars belief that people were ever treated in this way but it is a matter of record. It beggars belief that women like Alice ever had to face twin barriers just to be accorded the same human rights as others but it is a matter of record. This is why Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989; for women like Alice. She did NOT mean blokes in dresses. Alice died in 2014 aged 90 but in the years since her historic win, American African women have made up a majority of the US women's Olympic track and field team and brought honour and glory to their country. “I think I opened the gate for all of them.”