Chapter 3
ALL THAT REMAINED OF A BLACK DESPERADO
On July 7, 1893, fifty miles south of Taylor’s hometown state of Indiana near the Western Kentucky town of Bardwell, a husband and wife finished their breakfast while browsing an advertisement that invited locals to an event in town. Excited about attending, they told their coachman to prepare the horse and carriage for the ride into town.
When they arrived in Bardwell around ten o’clock that morning, a long line of horses, carriages, and bicycles already filled both sides of the street in the small, normally sedate town. Numerous trains coming from the north continued to drop off spectators throughout the morning. Near Cairo, Illinois, the steamboat The Three States, having been hastily chartered, steamed south down the Mississippi River with another five hundred people onboard. By ten-thirty the carriages had backed up to the city limits and the clamor from the throng rose. By eleven o’clock well over one thousand people hovered outside the local rail station waiting for a special train to arrive. When the train finally sighed into town, the local sheriff struggled to hold back the animated crowd. Once the railcar door flung open, a bound and handcuffed black man stumbled out of the train and into the onrushing crowd. In concert with the crowd, the couple began calling for a burning. Just then, the black man spoke, momentarily silencing the crowd.
“My name is C. J. Miller, of Springfield Illinois . . . I am here among you, a stranger; am looked on by you as the most brutal man that ever stood on God’s green earth. I am standing here, an innocent man, among men excited, and who do not propose to let the law take its course. I have committed no crime . . . I am not guilty.”
Working his way up to the front of the crowd, the husband yelled for someone to prepare the fire pit. His wife joined in, followed by their two children. Soon the entire orgy of spectators, joining in the chant, lunged at Miller, trying to separate him from the deputies. Of the more than one thousand men, women, and children in the crowd, only two were reluctant to drop the gauntlet on Miller just yet. One was the sheriff. The other was the father of two girls who were recently slain.
On a clammy afternoon two days before the heavily advertised event, sisters Mary and Ruby Ray, ages twelve and sixteen, had gone with their dog to pick berries near their family’s farm north of Bardwell. When the family dog returned home alone and in an agitated state, the girl’s mother became alarmed. A search of the area by police and neighbors discovered Mary and Ruby lying near each other, their throats slashed with a razor.
People with their bloodhounds came from miles to help find the “hell-fiend” responsible for the slaying. The trail went cold until the next morning when a report arrived from Bird’s Point, near Sikeston, Missouri. Officials there believed a young black man they had arrested for freeriding on a freight train might be the Bardwell murderer. When the abducted girls’ father and the county sheriff went to interrogate the man, they were disconcerted to discover that he was very dark, not mulatto, as witnesses had described. The sheriff then made the ill-fated decision to bring Miller, whose guilt seemed improbable, back to Bardwell where the bloodthirsty mob stood waiting.
Meanwhile back at the rail station, the crowd had nearly overtaken the deputies when John Ray, the father of the slain girls, arrived. At first Ray, who appeared uneasy about disappointing the people who had traveled so far, tried to delay their calls for “justice.” But after seeing the intensity of the crowd, he changed tactics. “This is the man who killed my daughters,” he told them, “but let us keep quiet and at the proper time burn him.” He went on to say that the authorities would take Miller to jail, and promised the teaming crowd that they would complete their investigation by three o’clock that afternoon. As the police nervously telegraphed Springfield to corroborate Miller’s alibi, trains continued dropping people off outside their station.
When the appointed hour arrived and no verdict had been rendered, the crowd became unruly, demanding that they stick with the 3:00 deadline. At 3:30, Ray emerged. Clearly trying to balance his own misgivings with the inevitability of violence, he announced that he was still not convinced Miller was the culprit who had murdered his daughters. Therefore, he reasoned, a burning would be inappropriate. His next words did not, however, disappoint some of the people there. “Under the circumstance,” he continued, “a hanging would be acceptable.”
The mob would not be denied. They rushed forward and seized Miller, stripping the clothes from his body and placing a heavy log chain around his neck. He was dragged through the streets to a crude platform of old barrel staves and other kindling. With one end of the chain around his neck and the other attached to a telegraph pole, he was raised several feet from the ground and let to fall. Though the first fall broke his neck, his body was repeatedly raised and lowered while the crowd peppered him with gunfire. Miller’s corpse hung high above the street for two hours and was repeatedly photographed by the newsmen who placed the ads to draw the large crowd. Miller’s toes and fingers were cut off, then his riddled corpse was lowered onto the waiting pyre and set ablaze.
Another couple, unaware of the event, trotted into town the next day. Noticing a miasma of particles floating in the air and settling in the trees, they asked a local man what it was and where it came from. “They were all that remained of a notorious character who lived by crime,” they were told, “a black desperado who had murdered two white girls.”
No one ever produced evidence definitively placing Miller at the scene of the crime or even in the state of Kentucky on the day of the murders. The murdered girls’ father—the only one who seemed troubled by what had occurred—tried to have the case reopened after he found evidence that the guilty person was a white man living in Missouri. No crowd large or small was interested and the case was never officially reopened. “In Kentucky this Christmas,” read one editorial later that year, “the favorite decoration of trees is strangled Negroes.”
During the latter third of the 1800s, graphic stories like C. J. Miller’s were as common in the South as falling snow in the North. It was, by some accounts, among the harshest era for blacks in America. Writing in the 1890s, Ida Wells, one of the first antilynching advocates (whose letters Major Taylor would keep in his scrapbook), estimated that ten thousand negroes had been killed at the hands of whites since 1865. Author Dorothy Sterling, who had combed through thousands of documents and oral histories, cited twenty thousand as the number killed by the Ku Klux Klan over just a four-year period. In the 1890s, the back-to-Africa leader Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, eschewing numerical estimates, noted that enough black people had been lynched in America that the victims would “reach a mile high if laid one upon the other.”
Raised in the relative serenity of the Southard estate, Major Taylor’s adolescent eyes had been largely unexposed to the extreme racism taking place just miles from the Indiana borders. But there was no escaping its hideous grip entirely. Occasionally, he and Daniel had wandered into the local YMCA to play and exercise. But because blacks were not allowed to join the Y, Taylor was forced to watch from the gallery while his white friends played down below. Disgusted, Daniel had appealed to his parents who enjoyed a position of prominence in the community. Their appeals had fallen on deaf ears. “It was there,” Taylor remembered, “that I was first introduced to that dreadful monster prejudice, which became my bitterest foe from that very same day . . .”
In states like Indiana, exclusionary policies like those at the Y replaced lynching as a means of control. Blacks were often separated on trains, trolleys, restaurants, and restrooms. Miscegenation was illegal until the 1960s and schools remained segregated until 1949. Indiana also gave rise to a breed of “regulators” called the White Caps. Influenced by the original Ku Klux Klan, these White Cappers wore masks and bed sheets to intimidate, and disciplined their subjects with castration or painful floggings. They meted out punishment without trial against alleged adulterers, drunkards, petty thieves, or any others they so decided. They justified their acts by comparing them to something even worse. “Why kill out the race by lynching,” asked the Herald & Advertise, “when subordinancy through fear of the lash will stop it all?” Supreme Court Justice Simeon E. Baldwin promoted legalizing floggings and castration as a “humanitarian policy” that would save lives and spare society the shame of lynching.
Apart from the physical horror of lynchings, castrations, and floggings, perhaps the greatest legacy arising from the period was the sheer degradation of the human spirit. The steady weakening of one’s confidence and assertiveness and the vast outlay of time and energy spent thwarting the forces of iniquity happened at the expense of personal advancement. As innocuous as nonviolent racial policies may have appeared, it was their compounded effect over days, months, and years that caused all but the strongest people to succumb. Blacks were effectively put in their place and asked to heal. “How my poor little heart would ache,” Taylor wrote of the incident at the Y, “to think that I was denied the opportunity to exercise and develop my muscles in the same manner as they, and for really no reason that I was responsible for.”
The economic depression that began in 1893 further exacerbated the plight of blacks. Its tragedy enveloped the entire country. Competition for jobs and even basics like food became fierce. Desperate whites often took their anger out on blacks. A black man who was sexually, physically, intellectually, or economically threatening became a sacrificial scapegoat.
Successful athletes became especially vulnerable. Black jockeys who had long dominated horse racing were already feeling the pressure. They would soon be pushed overseas or out of the sport altogether, never to return. On the equine backstretch, it was all about owner and horse. The black men piloting the winning thoroughbreds in one Kentucky Derby after another were often viewed as diminutive extensions of the animals they rode. Major League Baseball gave up on its fleeting toleration of blacks and wouldn’t revisit the issue until the Jackie Robinson era a half-century later.
In the halls of the League of American Wheelmen—bike racing’s governing body—influential forces were already gathering, hoping to prevent African American infiltration into “their” sport. Down in Louisville, a particularly militant man named Colonel Watts tried etching exclusionary language into racings bylaws. It would have disallowed blacks from racing on Kentucky tracks and, if he got his way, national ones as well. After failing to get a majority vote against blacks in ’92 and ’93, Watts, who was running for mayor with a slogan of “no discrimination against wheelmen,” returned in 1894 with a grand new scheme. At the league’s annual convention held on his home turf—usually festive affairs attracting large delegations from all over the country—instead of selling the virtues of his beautiful city to visiting dignitaries or addressing pressing financial matters, he used his pulpit to further his racial aims.
To sway his visitors, he had concocted a fantastical plan. With the aid of a case of Kentucky Wild Turkey Whiskey, Watts had bribed a rather myopic leader of a local black cycling club into signing a letter stating that his club no longer wanted to be part of the league. Some hoodwinked delegates felt relieved; if blacks didn’t want to be a part of the League of American Wheelmen, they would feel less remorse voting against them. A few Northeastern states, sensing mischief by the Southern leader, objected. But in a secret vote, inserting the words “whites only” gained 127 votes against 54, only to be blocked by the Massachusetts delegation.
Soon afterward, a heated debate spilled out into the nation’s newspapers, sometimes alongside articles or advertisements of a lynching. A civil war of words continued between Northern and Southern states. But since few elite black cyclists were pounding down their doors, many delegates took the same tack that national politicians used when faced with issues they didn’t want to address: wait for the problem to come to them and when it does, shovel it into the hands of individual states to handle.
As 1894 melded into 1895, the issue remained open, controversial, and ambiguous. In New York, the lords of American racing crossed their fingers, hoping no talented black rider would come along and press the issue.
June 30, 1895, dawned cloudy and muggy. Major Taylor secreted himself behind a stand of oak trees, staring nervously at a field of riders as they prepared for a road race. A wealthy realtor, railroad magnate, and cycling enthusiast named George Catterson was sponsoring the annual seventy-five-mile race from Indianapolis to Matthews, Indiana. Though short-distance track racing was his forte, Taylor was attracted to the significant prizes and high-caliber competition slated for the distance event. Catterson was familiar with Taylor and wanted him to compete in the race, but Taylor had already been taking heat from some locals for having the cheek to compete against whites. Foretelling racial tension, Catterson—probably with Munger’s blessing—decided to keep Taylor’s entry secret. Had the other riders known, Catterson reasoned, few if any would have competed.
Seventy-five miles northeast in the finishing town of Matthews, Indiana, a solid wall of rain had formed and was driving right for Indianapolis. At the starting line, the first few droplets began falling. Thousands of racing fans holding umbrellas choked off Massachusetts Avenue, peering up at the ominous skies and questioning whether they could get the race in.
Shortly after the crack of the pistol with the field in full flight, Taylor emerged from behind the tree line. He mounted a bike he had borrowed from Munger and began plowing a lonely furrow through the back of the field. He raced up to the peloton (in racing parlance, peloton means main pack of riders) and began feeding off their vacuum. His stealth tactic only worked for so long. When his white rivals finally spotted his dark form stealing in behind them, a steady barrage of racial epithets, attempts to knock him down, and threats of violence followed. Taylor was stuck in a cloud of angry riders, draping over him like a parka. He soldiered on, enduring the same brand of threats that would dog him for the next fifteen years. The intimidation grew nastier as the peloton wended down a serpentine patch of road, thinly inhabited. On one side of the road were weeping willows, on the other, a cemetery. “The thought ran through my mind,” Taylor later recalled, “that this would make an ideal spot for my competitors to carry out their dire threats.”
At the halfway point, Taylor had finally had enough. Fearing for his safety, he rose out of his saddle and mashed on his pedals, trying to separate himself from the pack. Suddenly the dark, threatening skies opened in a fury, dumping buckets of rain on the riders and the unpaved clay roads below. Before long, the earth beneath them softened, coagulated, and turned into mud pie. When they neared the town of Muncie, three-quarters of the way in, the sludge was flinging up into the riders’ eyes, drenching their uniforms, and clinging to their tires, spokes, and rims. Taylor, sloshing along in the slop, took the lead. Riders tried desperately to shepherd in behind him, but one by one they began peeling off, succumbing to fatigue, saturation, or mechanical failure. Taylor began thriving on the elements as though the mud was flowing up in a lyrical slow motion. Like a spray of gold dust, it was transfiguring him from a gentle young boy into a streaking cheetah.
Somewhere near the outskirts of Matthews, Taylor craned his neck back, waiting for his rivals to counterattack. No one was there. At the finish, with prizes in hand, promoter Catterson looked on as a solitary figure pedaling for the line materialized from under the dark skies, his body soaked through and through. It was Taylor, the only rider to even finish the race.
It was just a local race on an inclement afternoon, but those who braved the rainstorm that day witnessed the embryonic stages of an athlete with an indomitable will to win and an unusual capacity to either ignore all obstacles or to feed off them. Despite the pouring rain, they saw an intense fire burning in him.
Waterlogged and rubber-legged, Taylor quickly tucked the first-place prize into his pocket—a deed to a lot in the center of Matthews—sped home, and gave it to his stunned mother. Saphronia was proud of his ambition to race and the free lot was nice, but the danger of riding among those white folks made her cautious. “She made me promise I would never ride a road race of that length again,” he remembered.
The words Jim Crow—the name of the infamous laws that symbolized lynching and race separation in America—still send shivers down some people’s spines. In one form or another, the Jim Crow era was responsible for keeping blacks and whites apart and often hostile toward one another from the 1830s to the 1960s. In line with the segregationist mentality of the time and the hostility directed toward them, black cyclists, like black ballplayers, talked of forming a separate league similar to the League of American Wheelmen. Names were bandied about—The Colored Men’s Protective Association, the Afro-American Racing Union, and the Afro-American Cyclists, to name a few. They would never become as well organized or have the caliber of riders as the League of American Wheelmen, but they did provide a safe sanctuary where blacks could compete against one another.
After enduring the enmity of his white rivals during the Indianapolis-Matthews race, Taylor decided to join the See-Saw Cycling Club, a local organization consisting of one hundred black men. On July 4, 1895, less than a week after the Matthews race, the all-black club sponsored a ten-mile road race. The winner was to receive a personal trainer and an all-expenses-paid trip to the Black National Championships in Chicago. Taylor was already considered among the best overall local riders, so winning the ten-mile race in Indianapolis against a field of thirty-three local black men came fairly easy to him.
A few weeks later, Taylor’s free train ride clattered northwest to Chicago where the competition would prove to be more formidable. In 1895, there were few places in America more bike crazy than the Windy City. On any given day, there was almost always a bike race, bike parade, or bike show of some type clogging up the streets. New bike tracks were being erected in alarming numbers, making it a place and a time of bliss for dedicated wheelmen. Legions of riders rode in testosterone-laden wolf packs by day, then gathered in dense, loud cliques by night, committing to games of ten cent poker and rounds of ale at one of the myriad local cycling clubs. When Taylor arrived, the best black riders from all over the country were already there, surrounded by thousands of cheering black men and women, most of them hovering around one man.
Not long afterward, Taylor first saw the massive physique of Henry F. Stewart. Dubbed the “St. Louis Flyer,” Stewart, who had been racing since 1887, was the undisputed king of black bike racing. Everywhere he went, blacks idolized him. With broad shoulders, gargantuan tree-trunk thighs, and only somewhat smaller tree-trunk arms, his imposing figure could have passed as a bodybuilder’s. Some even described him as a “brick shit-house.” Unlike Zimmerman, Stewart appeared to be somewhat of a misanthrope who had little time for aspiring young riders. He had more of a boxer’s mentality, using intimidation tactics against his rivals to scare them half out of their wits before races even began. And it usually worked.
But with patient schooling, Munger had trained Taylor well. Rarely the strongest rider in his day, Munger had to rely on cunning and superior strategy to win races. He transferred his vast pool of knowledge, teaching Taylor to feed off his rivals’ aggressiveness when they were strong and prey on their weaknesses when they weren’t. As the heavy race favorite, Stewart started from scratch (the scratchman starts from the rearmost position). Because of his recent victories, Taylor was also placed on scratch. Regrettably, someone introduced Taylor to Stewart. Twelve years his senior, Stewart, cocky and high on himself, stared Taylor’s reedy body up and down with his cold, resolute eyes. He smirked and then stalked off. Taylor, a few months shy of seventeen, winced nervously. “It was the first time in my life that I had experienced such a reaction,” he said of the meeting. Stewart’s next move converted Taylor’s disposition from fright to one of anger. He walked over to the racing officials and, within earshot of Taylor, suggested they move Taylor to the limit (or front) position. “He looks as though he’s going to need it,” Stewart bellowed for all to hear.
At the starting line, Stewart peeled off his bright purple bathrobe—a common garment worn by cyclists before a race at the time—exposing his muscular frame and further intimidating his weary rivals. Given his prerace antics, Stewart had no choice but to affirm his supremacy by leading the pack. Aggressively, he did just that, setting a gut-wrenching pace right from the start—the kind of pace better suited to two miles, not ten. Taylor slowly moved up through the pack, positioning himself right behind Stewart, whose large body formed a perfect wedge from the blowing wind. It was well into the race before Stewart finally realized, much to his surprise, that he wasn’t going to shake Taylor from his rear wheel easily. But by then it was too late; he had wrung himself to exhaustion while Taylor had been husbanding his energy. He could only watch as the young upstart from Indianapolis stormed by him at a blistering pace right before the finish line. Taylor crossed it ten lengths ahead, the new Colored Champion of America. His accomplishment went virtually unnoticed by the nation’s press.
After defeating Stewart during that summer of 1895, Taylor kept finding the winner’s circle, including at three blacks-only events in Kentucky.
At Munger’s behest, he also began coaching other would-be cyclists. During his era, nearly every high school and college featured cycling as a centerpiece of its athletic curriculum. In search of valuable publicity, manufacturers tripped over one another in their zeal to infiltrate schools with their products. Their strategy was elementary: help youths get a few wins under their belts while simultaneously thrilling them so much with their shiny new models that they would charge home, bat their eyes at their parents, and leave them no choice but to clean out their bank accounts.
Munger had two secret weapons. He assembled a superlight custom bicycle and sent Taylor, who was becoming known around town, to various high schools to train their students. Munger added further sizzle by offering a free Birdie Special bicycle with a silver emblem featuring an owl on the front—thus the name Birdie—for any student who could whip Taylor in a race. It was a strong incentive. As a percentage of the average person’s annual income—about 30 percent—custom bicycles were exceedingly expensive at the time. Being intimately aware of Taylor’s fledgling speed, however, Munger probably wasn’t too concerned about any run on his bank account.
The high schools were singular places for a black man to be, but the nascent young stars apparently took well to Taylor’s tutelage. He espoused the virtues of Munger bicycles, trained the poor kids half to death, and listened gaily as they tried every kind of bribery they could think of to get their hooks on a free custom bike. Surely Munger dropped by on occasion, so he could peer out over the track rail and laugh as the high schoolers tried in vain to catch Taylor. Throughout the training process, Taylor’s own form continued to blossom.
As summer waned, Taylor’s name had been appearing in local papers more often than certain people in certain entrenched circles cared to see. Most of the attention had centered on his road-racing victories, but as time rolled on it became obvious to him, and to Munger, that his greatest strength was in the faster, more explosive sport of track racing. So Taylor began haunting Indianapolis racetracks during his spare time, trying to talk his way into races, once again testing the racial divide.
The timing of his partial conversion was good and bad. Cities were overwhelmed with road races, and enough horsemen had voiced their contempt that some cities began regulating their frequency. Unfortunately for Taylor, there were no blacks-only racetracks to speak of. His development was effectively in the hands of track owners and local riders, virtually all of them white. Some days he was able to use the track for training purposes while on others he met stiff resistance.
Occasionally, he would test his speed against proven local white riders. Because of his color, he couldn’t compete head to head against them, so he would wait until they had finished, then quickly rip around the track, often unofficially besting their times. These were bold moves that few if any blacks dared try at the time. But for Taylor, it was just the beginning of a lifetime filled with nonconformity and the fearless rejection of stale traditions. These incidents would prove to be seminal moments for Taylor and Munger. While living in the cloistered environment of the Southard home or toiling in Hearsey’s shop, he had experienced little of “that dreaded monster prejudice.” But now that he emerged into the broader world and had shown promise in the nation’s fastest growing sport, he found himself entering a new life dynamic. Faced with angry riders, some track owners began barring him from their tracks. His world was getting squeezed—an agonizing reality for a young man whose life’s passion was bike racing.
Less ambitious men may have quit right then and there, retreating to the relative safety of factory life or the simplicity of farm life. But Major Taylor was wired differently. “Down in my heart,” he noted, “I felt that if I could get an even break, I could make good as a sprinter on the bicycle tracks of the country.” But for a black man living in 1890s America, getting an even break came as often as snowfall in summer.
The vibrant colors of summer gave way to the variegated hues of autumn. Because of his racing successes, Taylor gained confidence daily.
He was also becoming more inconspicuous at Munger’s factory and home. When Taylor was nowhere to be found one morning, Munger threw a leg over his bicycle and set out in search of his protégé. He rolled through an Indianapolis that, like other cities, was scarred by the depression. He finally halted at one of the worst of the local tracks—nothing but a rundown old horse track, probably one of the only tracks that Taylor hadn’t been kicked off of yet. Sure enough, there was Taylor, zigging and zagging around the oval at breakneck speed. With the track nearly deserted, Munger leaned his bike against the grandstand, gnawed on a strip of buffalo jerky, and watched Taylor uncoil.
Sensing that Taylor had good legs that day, he instructed him to ride an unpaced mile flat out. Taylor nodded. Bending over the track rail, Munger reached into his pocket and fished out his stopwatch. Like a flat rock skimming across a glassy pond, Taylor skipped around the track, his small, jockey-like frame showing remarkable power and grace, all things moving forward. As Taylor crossed the mile marker, beads of sweat rolling down his forehead, Munger snapped his thumb down on his stopwatch and then looked up. His face was a picture of sheer joy. Taylor had spun off an unpaced mile in 2:09. The record was 2:07. This blackbird could fly! “I can ride a wheel almost as fast as some of the cracks,” he would tell Munger, the words bounding out his mouth.
Adrenaline coursing through his veins, Birdie Munger was fully conscious of the fact. A veteran racetracker, he knew two seconds to be an eternity in short-distance track racing, but considering Taylor’s age, Munger believed he was looking in the eyes of greatness. It was obvious, he told himself, that Taylor had to be driven to the next level. But two questions loomed large for him: where, and against what odds?
On the backstretch, secrets were hard to keep. Locally, at least, word of young Taylor’s precocity spread through the bike-racing grapevine. Indianapolis reporters had chronicled his results; under their breath, local wheelmen whispered his name during training rides and at meets. On occasion, they were whispers of awe and wonderment at how someone his age and of such slight build could achieve that kind of speed. But more often than not, they were sardonic and degrading. When Taylor was a horse tender, porter, and bike-shop duster, locals had paid less attention to him. Then, like his brethren, he was residing in his proper place of subservience, that place where man lingers in a steady state of habitual invisibility.
Now, the Indianapolis air had suddenly become cold, inhospitable, and outwardly hostile. And not just toward him. For the crime of trying to help get an African American out from under the shadow of obscurity and insignificance, Munger also took heat, even among his business partners and friends.
Restless and uneasy, Munger began seeking greener grass, further prosperity, and greater freedom for himself and his young friend. He ambled up to a large map of America that hung from his factory wall. He looked at its open frontier, the vast Pacific to the West, the mighty Atlantic to the East, and everything in between. He marveled at its sheer breath and its seemingly endless possibilities. He surely debated, meditated, and brooded before finally jamming a pin in the center of Massachusetts. With little to lose except closeness to his family, Taylor nodded his head. They rounded up their belongings, bought red-eye train tickets for the East, and braced themselves for the great unknown.
On a fall day in 1895, Munger walked through his Indianapolis factory for the last time. A cadre of friends and associates came to see him off. They gathered around in silent attention, tipping back a round of beers and staring quizzically at him. One of them broke the silence, asking why on God’s earth he was leaving a good thing behind—Indianapolis was the third largest manufacturer of bicycles—to partner up “with that little darkey.” Munger stood up, leveled his back, and raised his head defiantly. “Someday,” he declared with an edge to his foghorn voice, “he will return to this city as Champion Bicycle Rider of America.” Given the sheer number of cyclists vying to be champion of America—virtually all of them white—it was a proclamation astounding for its boldness. His friends shook their heads, turned their backs, and walked away.
At Indy’s Union Station, Taylor hugged his parents, then loaded his belongings—nothing more than a bag full of tattered clothes, a well-traveled bicycle, and a copy of the Scriptures. Evening fell. Gilbert and Saphronia, who couldn’t bear the idea of parting with him, tried concealing their trepidation as they said their good-byes and handed him over to Munger, his surrogate father. As the train ground forward, Taylor peered out the window and watched his mother’s dark face blurring in the distance. Frightened and empty, Saphronia watched her son steam headlong into the cruel Jim Crow era flat broke amid a wrenching depression. He was not yet seventeen, but his childhood had just ended.