Alice Coachman from Albany, Georgia, clears the bar 5 feet, 6-1/8 inches breaking the previous record at the 1948 Olympics held in London in front of 65,000 spectators. The last member of the team to compete, Coachman said in a 2003 interview for the National Visionary Leadership Project, that her coach criticized her for not working out the day before her jump, fearful that she would not medal, like most of the 11-member team. “I let her do all her fussing, while I was talking to the man above, telling him ‘If it’s your will, let it be done.’ The 25-year-old Coachman won gold, besting British opponent, Dorothy Odam Taylor. She would be the first African-American woman to win gold at the Olympics, but not the first one to win a medal. That honor would go to her teammate, 22-year old Audrey Patterson, who won a bronze in the 200 meter race a few days earlier.
Alice Coachman (far right) with members of the Tuskegee Institute relay team, ca. 1940s. Coachman, who competed with the boys on the playground at school from an early age, (“they’d say “you can’t beat me,” and I’d say “oh yes I can,” and I would beat them”), was noticed for her extraordinary track skills as early as the 7th grade. Asked to compete for the local high school in relays at Tuskegee Institute, she broke the high school and college record for the high jump in 1939.
After graduating high school, Coachman enrolled in Tuskegee Institute, taking on any task she could, including cleaning the gym and mending football uniforms, to pay for room and board. She maintained a rigorous schedule of training, studying, working, and singing in the college choir, and competing.
“I went to Waterbury, Connecticut, and entered in the AAU [Amateur Athletic Union] and won my first gold medal. I didn’t look back until 1948.”
Alice Coachman clears the bar at five feet to win the running high jump in the Women’s National Track Meet in Grand Rapids, Iowa, July 1948. From 1939 to 1948 Coachman swept high-jumping competitions, and also won national titles in the 50- and 100-meter days, and the 400-meter relay race. Fellow athlete Stella Walsh, who held 24 U.S. titles and was herself an Olympic medalist in 1932, said that Coachman was the “toughest opponent I have ever met” during an interview with the Baltimore Afro-American at the close of the 1944 Women’s National AAU track and field games. “I think Alice Coachman is the finest runner I’ve ever raced against.”
Coachman graduated from Tuskegee with a degree in dressmaking. She would then enter Albany State College (now University), where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in home economics, with a minor in science in 1949.
World War II had scuttled Coachman’s chances to compete during what she considered her prime, as the Olympic games had been cancelled in 1940 and 1944, but she was determined to make it to London for the TK Olympiad and qualified for the 11-woman team in breathtaking fashion. “Coachman drew the attention of every spectator in the gathering darkness as she surpassed the American high jump record and was about to attempt to break the Olympic record,” reported the Los Angeles Sentinel. “She decided not to try the mark when the official had to light matches in order to set the bar in place. Evidently the risk of personal injury from any miscalculation was too great for the Albany star with the Olympics yet to come.”
Alice Coachman stands on the Olympic podium at Wembley Stadium in 1948 waiting to receive the gold medal from King George VI for winning the women’s high jump. To her left is D.J. Tyler of Great Britain, who placed second for silver, and to her right is M.O.M. Ostermeyer of France who won the bronze medal. In a 2004 interview on NPR Coachman spoke about the moment it was certain she won gold. “I saw it on the board, ‘A. Coachman, U.S.A., Number One.’ I went on, stood up there, and they started playing the national anthem. It was wonderful to hear.” Of her competitors she told Renee Poussaint, who interviewed her for the National Visionary Leadership Project, “That was the toughest victory I ever won. Those girls from Europe jump from odd angles. Every time I jumped one distance they came back and matched it.”
Coachman was feted on her return to the United States, riding in a TK mile motorcade from TK to TK where a victory rally in her name was organized. President Harry Truman congratulated her in person along with other members of the team at the White House. Still racism hung like a shadow around her victories. The mayor of Albany refused to shake her hand even as he stood on the same stage as Coachman at the celebration in her name. Flowers and gifts filled her uncle’s home, many of them sent anonymously by white admirers who did not want their friends and neighbors to know they had acknowledged the black champion.
Coachman (later Coachman Davis) went on to become a track-and-field coach and teach science, physical education and dance in schools in Georgia and South Carolina. She was honored as one of the 100 greatest Olympic athletes of all time at the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta, and was inducted into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame and the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
“I made a difference among the blacks, being one of the leaders,” she told The New York Times in 1996. “If I had gone to the Games and failed, there wouldn’t be anyone to follow in my footsteps. It encouraged the rest of the women to work harder and fight harder.”
