Major Taylor

Marshall Walter Taylor was born on 26 November 1878 near Indianapolis, Indiana, one of eight children, into poverty. His father, Gilbert, a Union army veteran, worked as a coachman for a wealthy white family, the Southards, and Marshall was raised as a companion for their son. The family gave him a bicycle, and a job performing tricks outside a bicycle shop in a military-style uniform earned him the nickname Major.

He entered his first race in 1890 and began setting local records, but racism followed him. After he set records at an Indianapolis track in 1896, he received death threats and the city's tracks were restricted to white riders. With his mentor, the bicycle builder Louis 'Birdie' Munger, he moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, and won his first professional race in December 1896.

Taylor dominated the sport. By 1898 he held seven world records at distances from a quarter mile to two miles, and in 1899, at a championship in Montreal, he won the world one-mile championship, becoming the first African American world champion in cycling. He was only the second Black athlete to win a world title in any sport, after the Canadian boxer George Dixon, and was also American sprint champion.

Cycling was then one of the most popular sports in the world, and Taylor became an international star, racing across America, Europe and Australia. He was nicknamed the Worcester Whirlwind and the Black Cyclone, and was almost certainly the first Black athlete to have a commercial sponsor and to compete on an integrated professional team, all while facing closed doors, hostility and open prejudice with dignity.

Taylor retired at the age of 32 in 1910. Failed business ventures and illness left him destitute, and he died in Chicago on 21 June 1932. He wrote an autobiography, The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World, and today a boulevard in Worcester carries his name and a statue of him stands at the Worcester Public Library.