Marshall Walter "Major" Taylor (November 26, 1878 – June 21, 1932) was an American professional cyclist. He has been called "the first Black American global sports superstar."
He was born and raised in Indianapolis, where he worked in bicycle shops and began racing multiple distances in the track and road disciplines of cycling. As a teenager, he moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, with his employer/coach/mentor and continued his successful amateur career, which included breaking track records.
Taylor turned professional in 1896, at the age of 18, living in cities on the East Coast and participating in multiple track events including six-day races. He moved his focus to the sprint event in 1897, competing in a national racing circuit, winning many races and gaining popularity with the public. In 1898 and 1899, he set numerous world records in race distances ranging from the quarter-mile () to the two-mile ().
Taylor won the 1-mile sprint event at the 1899 world track championships to become the first Black American to achieve the level of world champion and the second Black athlete to win a world championship in any sport (following Canadian boxer George Dixon, 1890). Taylor was also a national sprint champion in 1899 and 1900. He raced in the U.S., Europe and Australia from 1901 to 1904, beating the world's best riders. After a -year hiatus, he made a comeback in 1907–1909, before retiring at age 32 to his home in Worcester in 1910.
Towards the end of his life Taylor faced severe financial difficulties. He spent the final two years of his life in Chicago, Illinois, where he died of a heart attack in 1932.
Throughout his career he challenged the racial prejudice he encountered on and off the track and became a pioneering role model for other athletes facing racial discrimination. Several cycling clubs, trails, and events in the U.S. have been named in his honor, as well as the Major Taylor Velodrome in Indianapolis and Major Taylor Boulevard in Worcester. Other tributes include memorials and historic markers in Worcester, Indianapolis, and at his gravesite in Chicago. He has also been memorialized in film, music and fashion.
alt=Major Taylor's Signature|thumb|Major Taylor's Signature
Early life
Marshall Walter Taylor was the son of Gilbert Taylor, a Civil War veteran, and Saphronia Kelter Taylor. His parents migrated from Louisville, Kentucky, and settled on a farm in Bucktown, Indiana, a rural area on the western edge of Indianapolis. He was one of eight children in a family of five girls and three boys. Around 1887, his father began working in Indianapolis as a coachman for a wealthy white family named Southard.
When Taylor was a child, he occasionally accompanied his father to work and soon became a close friend of the Southards' son, Daniel, Taylor, who remained in Indianapolis, returned to live at his parents' home and "was soon thrust into the real world." He received a 15-minute handicap (head start) in the road race because of his young age. Taylor subsequently traveled to Peoria, Illinois, to compete in another meet, finishing in third place in the under-16 age category.
Major Taylor encountered racial prejudice throughout his racing career from some of his competitors. In addition, some local track owners feared that other cyclists would refuse to compete if Taylor was present for a bicycle race and banned him from their tracks. In 1893, for example, after the 15-year-old Taylor beat a one-mile amateur track record, he was "hooted" and then barred from the track.]]
In 1895, Taylor and Munger relocated from Indianapolis to Worcester which, at that time, was a center of the U.S. bicycle industry and included half-a-dozen factories and thirty bicycle shops. Munger, who was Taylor's employer, lifelong friend, and mentor, had decided to move his bicycle manufacturing business to the state of Massachusetts, which was also a more tolerant area of the country.
Munger and business partner Charles Boyd established the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company with factories in Worcester and Middletown, Connecticut. For Taylor, who continued to work for Munger as a bicycle mechanic and messenger between the company's two factory locations,
In 1896, Taylor entered numerous races in the Northeastern states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut. After winning a ten-mile road race in Worcester, Taylor competed in the Irvington–Millburn race in New Jersey, also known as the Derby of the East. Within half a mile () of the finish line, someone startled Taylor by tossing ice water into his face and he finished in 23rd place. Taylor's first major East Coast race was in a League of American Wheelmen (LAW) one-mile contest in New Haven, Connecticut, where he started in last place but won the event. In August 1896, Taylor made a trip to Indianapolis, where he set an unofficial new track record of 2:11 for a distance of one mile at the Capital City velodrome, beating Walter Sanger's official track record of 2:19 . (Taylor was not allowed to compete with Sanger, a professional racer, in a head-to-head contest because he was still an amateur.) Taylor's final amateur race took place on November 26, 1896, in the 25-mile Tatum Handicap at Jamaica, New York. Taylor finished the race in 14th place.
Professional career
1896: First races
thumb|[[Madison Square Garden (1890)|Madison Square Garden II (pictured in 1908) in New York City, the venue of Taylor's first professional race in 1896]]
Taylor turned professional in 1896, at the age of eighteen, and soon emerged as the "most formidable racer in America."
From December 6–12, 1896, Taylor participated as one of 28 competitors in the six-day event. Although Taylor had just become a professional, he had achieved enough notoriety, possibly because of his stunning win on December 5, to be listed among the "American contestants" that also included A.A. Hansen (the Minneapolis "rainmaker") and Teddy Goodman. In addition, many "experts from abroad" participated in the meet such as Switzerland's Albert Schock, Germany's Frank J. Waller, Frank Forster, and Ed von Hoeg, and Canada's Burns W. Pierce. Several countries, including Scotland, Wales, France, England, and Denmark, were represented in the event.]]
Taylor initially raced for Munger's Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company. After the company went into receivership in 1897 he joined other racing teams. 1897 was the first full year in which Taylor competed on the professional racing circuit. Early in the season, at the Bostonian Cycle Club's "Blue Ribbon Meet" on May 19, 1897, Taylor rode a Comet bicycle to win first place in the one-mile open professional race. On June 26, he won a quarter-mile () race at the track at Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. Taylor also beat Eddie Bald in a one-mile race in Reading, Pennsylvania, but finished fourth in the prestigious LAW convention in Philadelphia.
As a professional racer, Taylor continued to experience racial prejudice as a black cyclist in a white-dominated sport.
On July 17 at Philadelphia, Taylor won his biggest victories of the season: first place in the one-mile championship and second place in the one-mile handicap races. On August 27, in a head-to-head race with Jimmy Michael of Wales, Taylor set a new world record of 1:41 for a one-mile paced match and beat the Welsh racer to the finish by .
Taylor was among several top cyclists who could claim the national championship in 1898; however, scoring variations and the formation of a new cycling league that year "clouded" his claim to the title.
During 1898–99, at the peak of his cycling career, Taylor established seven world records; the quarter-mile, the one-third-mile (), the half-mile, the two-thirds-mile (), the three-quarters-mile (), the one-mile, and the two-mile () distances. His one-mile world record of 1:41 from a standing start stood for 28 years.
1899: World sprint champion
thumb|left|Taylor became the first [[Black American to win a world championship in any sport at the 1899 track world championships at the Vélodrome de Queen's Park in Montreal, Canada.]]
At the 1899 world championships in Montreal, Canada, Major Taylor won the one-mile sprint, to become the first African American to win a world championship in cycling. He was the second black athlete, after Canadian bantamweight boxer George Dixon of Boston, to win a world championship in any sport. Taylor won the one-mile world championship sprint in a close finish a few feet ahead of Frenchman Courbe d'Outrelon and American Tom Butler. In addition, Taylor placed second in the two-mile championship sprint at Montreal behind Charles McCarthy and won the half-mile championship race.
thumb|Trophy presented to Major Taylor at Parc des Princes, Paris on May 27, 1901, in the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites Collection
Taylor was popular among the European race fans and news reporters: "Everywhere he went he was mobbed, talked about, or written up." In 1901, Taylor won 18 of the 24 European races he entered, notching up 42 victories when the individual heats are counted. A highlight of Taylor's European tour in 1901 was the two match races with French champion Edmond Jacquelin at the Parc des Princes in Paris, the winner in each decided over the best of three heats. Jacquelin won the first match, on May 16, two heats to nil, a wheel length sealing the win in the first heat, two lengths the gap in the second. Taylor triumphed in the second match, on May 27, two heats to nil, four lengths his margin of victory in the first heat, three the gap in the second. During his world tour in 1903, Taylor earned prize money estimated at $35,000 ($ in 2015 chained dollars).
1907–1910: Later years
thumb|Taylor and [[Léon Hourlier at a standstill during a race at Paris' Vélodrome Buffalo in 1909]]
Following a collapse from the mental and physical strain of professional competition, Taylor took a -year hiatus from cycling between 1904 and 1906, before returning to race in France. He set two world records in Paris in 1907 for the half-mile standing start at 0:42 and the quarter-mile standing start at 0:25 . Taylor also returned to Europe for the racing season in 1908 and in 1909. He finally broke his long-standing decision to avoid Sunday races in 1909 when he was nearing the end of his racing career.
Taylor's last professional race took place on October 10, 1909, in Roanne, France, in a match race against French world champion Charles Dupré. Taylor won the race, but he did not return to Europe for the 1910 season and retired from competitive cycling.
Taylor was still breaking records in 1908, but his age was starting to "creep up on him." and took up various business ventures.
Nearly 20 years after his retirement, Taylor wrote and self-published his autobiography, The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World: The Story of a Colored Boy's Indomitable Courage and Success Against Great Odds: An Autobiography (1928).