Wyomia Tyus is a name I hadn’t heard before, and I should have. When you mention Olympic runners from the 1960s, it’s Wilma Rudolph’s name that is remembered.

            But Wyomia Tyus was an equally accomplished track and field sprinter. In 1964 and 1968, she won the 100-meter sprint in back-to-back Olympics. Only six runners can claim this feat.* At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Tyus she set a world record of 11.08 seconds in the 100-meter.

            So, let’s meet Wyomia.

Surviving the South

            Wyomia was raised on a dairy farm in Griffin, Georgia, the only girl of four children. The family suffered the degradations of the Jim Crow South.

            “I grew up with colored bathrooms, colored water fountains, all those kinds of things,” she said.**

            Wyomia had to take an hour-long bus ride to a segregated school each day, even though there was a white school within walking distance. She wasn’t allowed to play with the white girls in her neighborhood, and the nearest Black family lived a mile away.

            But Wyomia’s dad encouraged her ambition in sports. Yay for the dads! She played basketball with her brothers and began her track career as a high jumper in high school.

            In 1960, she was invited to a summer track clinic at Tennessee State University, where she transitioned to running sprints. She was coached by the famed Ed Temple, the university’s women’s track coach for 44 years and an Olympic women’s track coach. Wyomia credits Temple with every success she has enjoyed in her life.    

Calling out racism

            In addition to her athletic triumphs, Wyomia should also be remembered for her silent protest at the 1968 Olympics.

            Of course, what grabbed the headlines in that Olympics was the 200-meter medal ceremony. Gold medalist Tommie Smith and bronze medalist John Carlos raised black-gloved fists in a gesture of Black power. Smith and Carlos also wore black socks without shoes, to represent Black poverty. Along with them, silver medalist Peter Norman wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) badge.

            (My publisher, Norton Young Readers, has just published a fantastic book by Smith — Victory. Stand! — about the moment. It’s a National Book Award finalist. Good luck to all!)

            Two days before the men’s protest, Wyomia carried out her own protest. As she ran her event, she wore dark navy shorts instead of the team-issued white shorts.

            “I was not doing it for any type of glory or anything,” Tyus says. “It was just for me as a person, as a human being, and my feelings and what I thought about what was going on in the world, and how women — Black women especially — were treated.”

            It wasn’t that Wyomia was in on planning of the protests. The OPHR left out the Black female athletes.

            “No one came to us,” she recalled. “The whole movement started, and it was more like, ‘Well, this is what we say, and the women are going to follow.’”

            After the Olympics, Wyomia and teammate Edith McGuire, who came in second in the 100-meter, were feted with a parade in Atlanta, but the parade route only went through Black neighborhoods. The athletes’ protests, both quiet and flamboyant, apparently went unnoticed.

Repping the women

            Wyomia went on to coach high school track in California and was a founding member of the Women’s Sports Foundation, along with Billie Jean King, Donna de Varona and Suzy Chaffee. In 1985, she was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame, and in 2018, she published her memoir, Tigerbelle: The Wyomia Tyus Story.

            Having lived through the before-and-after times of Title IX, Wyomia sees its effects not only in the opportunity to play sports, but in the new voice it gives all overlooked female athletes.

            “It’s not that women weren’t speaking out in previous decades,” she says. “But now, women have a platform, and people are seeing them totally differently. I think Title IX has a lot to do with that, too.”

                                                __________________________

* The others are Carl Lewis, Gail Devers, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Usain Bolt and Elaine Thompson-Herah.

** Allison Torres Burtka “Wyomia Tyus: the original athlete activist hiding in plain sight,” The Guardian (December 23, 2021). All of Wyomia’s quotes come from this article.