African American history on spinning wheels

By William Doyle-Marshall
There is a very strange pre-occupation with the exploits of post-slavery days and people of African heritage. The latest such endeavours to cross my path is a book that highlights the struggles of an African American cyclist Marshall “Major” Taylor believed to be that nation’s first black sports celebrity.
The presence of this book on the literary scene ironically coincides with the historic democratic turn recorded as Americans elected their first African American – Senator Barak Obama -- to run their affairs in the White House as President.
In “Major – a Black Athlete, a White era and the Fight to be the world’s fastest human being” produced by Crown Publishers of New York, Todd Balf tells a gripping story about the cyclist’s challenges at the hands of unconscionable colleagues who applied quite a few nasty tricks to defeat the cycling giant of his day. We are talking about a period between 1899 and 1904.
Louis Birdie Munger, inventor of the Birdie special bicycle; Bill Brady, a dreamer and promoter of events and Harry Sanger, manufacturer of the chainless wheel were among Taylor’s supporters.
Louis’ father Theodore Munger originally of Southern Ontario fled the chaos of wartime America, bringing his family back to his native Canada shortly after Louis' birth. They joined a rich and growing collection of exiles in southern Ontario, just across the Detroit River and the U.S. boundary. They included fugitive slaves, former British loyalists, displaced Native Americans and the most recent exiles, the Civil War runaways and conscientious objectors.
As a young boy Louis would have been exposed to one of the most dynamic eras in American ingenuity. The author captures the mood of the time: “In the time after the civil war the entrepreneurial urge to create was seemingly infinite. There was the telephone, incandescent light and Coca Cola. Among the successful, World's Fair bound items that passed across Munger's desk were those of Elijah McCoy, a famous inventor who lived in the area. McCoy was awarded 70 patents, his most famous being a lubricating mechanism that prevented steam engines from overheating. Anywhere but the oddly color-blind border region between Ontario and Michigan, McCoy would've stood out for another reason, too: he was black.”
For the first ten years of his life Louis (Birdie) Munger grew up in a tolerant, diverse and unusually democratic part of the world. A third of Colchester, One of Ontario's southernmost towns, consisted of black settlers. They'd come from Kentucky and points south, Colchester being the first cross-border stop on the Underground Railroad. In the distinctly egalitarian environs, the black settlers excelled, producing a slew of formidable achievers.
Floyd McFarland was Taylor’s lone and serious rival but being no match for the African Americana cyclist, he resorted to dishonest means and tactics like forming a new cycling body The American Racing Cyclist’s Union (ARCU) to break away from the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) in October 1898. Banning Taylor for life from entering major cycling events in the United States of America was a prime action of the new body. Naturally this impacted on Taylor’s ability to continue ruling the cycling world.
But this action resulted in economic hardship for cycling. Gates were down. Cynical spectators had begun to sense that the sport was tricked up and according to an article in the New York Herald, “the public has been so disgusted with these tactics that it is now no uncommon occurrence for a bicycle race to be ridden amid the vociferous jeers of an on looking and not too easily fooled crowd.”
Certainly racism imposed itself in the minds of challengers who vowed to do Taylor in even the champion felt the fire of dishonesty wherever he went. “He found the business of living in a white world exhausting,” the author wrote. Balf reports that in September 1897 Bearings magazine, alluding to Taylor’s August performances, noted, “the position of the negro is a trying one, for every rider is anxious to top him. Another publication, the Wheel wrote that ever since Taylor became prominent there had been reports of “efforts to ‘do’ him. That the white men who compete against him strain every nerve to beat the coon, as they term him, is an admitted fact. The Wheel has heard them so state.”
“Marshall Taylor, coming of age, followed the speeches and activities of both leaders (Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois). He felt the same conflicts as civil rights era athletes caught between the fiery, emotion-laden rhetoric of Malcolm X and the restrained pleas for non-violence of Martin Luther King. Jr. Taylor thought he embodied the Washington model – influence and progress through reasonable accommodation – but was beginning to understand Du Bois’ impatience.”
At a time in 1898 when the automobile speed record was 39 mph Taylor had set records on his bicycle at the rate of 46 mph. “For the first time the prominent black newspapers put him on page one, calling him the wonder of the 19th century. The white press pointed out that the gentleman rider was a lovely anomaly: a black man with well-developed white character traits. Finally, the sporting journalists marvelled not only that he had succeeded but that he had done so in wintry conditions.
“It has been a long theory that neither man nor beast could exert his full speed powers while the weather was cold …. Either this belief is fallacious, or the dusky whirlwind with the military title is an extraordinary individual,” Balf writes.