by Wyomia Tyus
That got printed in the paper, and I didn’t know about it until we got back, but my boyfriend did. Bob Hayes and I were just friends, though I guess Mr. Temple needed something to write about—I have no idea. When I got back to the States, everybody was teasing my boyfriend, saying, “That woman—she doesn’t want to be bothered with you!” Claude Humphrey, who later played football for the Atlanta Falcons, had classes with me, and he used to call me “Beep Beep,” like the Roadrunner. Every time he passed my boyfriend, he would say, “Beep Beep! She’s gone, buddy. You ain’t got nothing there anymore.”
And it wasn’t just him; everybody used to tease my boyfriend, all the time, and that was part of what eventually broke up our relationship. We pretty much broke up before I even finished school after he got a contract with the San Francisco 49ers.
“These football players,” Mr. Temple would say, “get these pro contracts, and they don’t do anything with their money but buy a new car and clothes. They don’t know how to save, they get the big head, and they think they’re better than everybody else. The girlfriend they had, they don’t want anymore the minute they see something better—something they think is better.”
Since I was dating a football player and everybody knew it, we had to have some fun with the situation. Before Edith retired, she and I were the team captains—captain and cocaptain—and for team meetings, we would sit up in the front. There we’d be, right in the first row, when Mr. Temple would start in on one of his anti–football player speeches. “Everybody knows how I feel about these guys,” he would say, “and you shouldn’t be dating them—not any of them.”
Edie would look at me, and we would both look back at the rest of the team with our eyebrows up, and say, “Who’s dating football players? Who would do that? Is anyone back there dating any football players?”
Mr. Temple always spoke his mind—didn’t care to whom or how he said it, and whatever else transpired, he didn’t want his girls to get stuck in a bad place. So he didn’t hold anything back. “You’re not going to school to get an education to support somebody who’s not going to do anything with their life,” he would say, “somebody who thinks football’s going to be their whole life—you need to think more of yourself.”
Mr. Temple knew about my boyfriend, but as Edith put it, “What’s he going to do? You’re doing good at school, you’re his best athlete—he can’t put you off the team!”
Because that was another thing he would say: “You’re going to get sent home if I see you ruining your life that way!”
And I would turn around and whisper, “Nobody wants to go home, do they? Don’t date football players!”
And of course the other girls knew about my relationship—everybody on campus knew. The place was just that small—when I was in school, there were less than five thousand students there. And Mr. Temple knew too, but there was nothing he could do. Edie and I still laugh about that.
* * *
Dating a football player, despite Mr. Temple’s objections, was just a part of my growth. Another part, a much more exciting part, was going to Africa. In the summer of 1966, the State Department sent us there—me, Edith, and Mr. Temple—to be Goodwill Ambassadors. We went over, believe it or not, to encourage African women to be involved in sports. That was pretty much the gist of our ambassadorship: to show that we were two women who had gone to the Olympics and won medals. Because women at that time, especially in Africa, were not encouraged to run or be a part of a team or anything like that. So we were over there doing that kind of goodwill. At least, that was our interpretation of what we were told.
The State Department had organized these types of ambassadorships for athletes before, but mainly for male athletes. Mal Whitfield, who won gold medals in the 800 meters and the 4x400 relay in the 1948 London Olympics, was there and had been there for years; he set up all of our tours and activities. For our ambassadorship, we went to East Africa—Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique. When we got to Kenya, we stayed in the city of Nairobi, and every morning they would come and get us, and we would go out to the countryside and put on running exhibitions, teaching whoever wanted to run, not just the women but the men as well. There weren’t that many women interested in running because they weren’t encouraged to do so, which was both why we were there and kind of a catch-22.
There were always interpreters, but in a lot of the places we went, the people, especially the young people, could speak English. Of course, there were always young men who wanted to run against us, and there was one guy who felt particularly strongly about it; Mr. Temple loved this story. We had just finished doing a clinic, and Mr. Temple was talking about how fast we were, and this one guy stood up and said, “No girl could beat me. No woman could ever beat me!” And he just kept talking and talking like that. Although it wasn’t really part of the clinic, we would sometimes run against people, and so of course we had to race him. The last thing he said before we started was, “If a girl beat me, I’d kill myself.” We don’t know if he’s dead, because after we beat him, the guy just ran off. We never saw nor heard anything else from him ever again.
When we weren’t running or teaching people to run, we would have conversations with the people in the villages. And once again my eating became an issue, because if you went to the villages, you got invited into their huts, and they would feed you. And Mr. Temple would say, “Well, don’t send Tyus in there. She’s not going to eat.” But he was wrong—part wrong, anyway; there was always something I could taste—not so much eat, but taste. They would invite us in for tea, and I don’t drink tea, but I learned to sip on it. I did a lot of things I wouldn’t normally do. It was very enjoyable, very educational, very enlightening. Life-changing. You grow up and see pictures and hear things about Africa, and you think, God, they do that? And when I was growing up, part of the story about Africa was Tarzan. I knew it was nothing like that, of course, but still, just to be able to be there, to be in a place that you hear things about, and you just never know what’s true, and then you see the people, especially in the cities, and you think: Gosh, they’re just like us.
There’s no difference when you think about it. It’s just that they’re black, pretty much all black. There were a lot of westernized Africans, people who dressed like us, as well as those in native dress—even in the city. To me, that was what Africa was all about, that mixture. Buildings and cars and men with big bundles of wood on their heads walking for miles, and women carrying the same kinds of loads but with their babies strapped onto them too. We saw a lot of that in the cities.
And then you go out into the countryside, into the different villages, and it’s just a whole different way of life; they were always cooking, there was always something going on. It gave me a big appreciation for people, for my people, for people who look like me; they don’t just live in America, and they don’t all do the same kinds of things I do or live the way I live, but if they want to, they can just go live in the city. Just like us. And that was something, just that, being able to be there and understand that and, through that understanding, improve on who I was as a person.
Now that I look back on it, I kind of take it for granted, yet I am sure that at the time it was a shocker for me—although many of the villages would remind me of my grandmother, my dad’s mother, because she and her son lived strictly on the land and by the land. They were people who ate red dirt, and they had that in Africa as well; you could buy dirt and eat it. So there were differences that were not that much of a difference because of my grandmother. I didn’t eat dirt myself, but I ate a lot of bread, a hard, crusty type of bread—I can’t say what kind it was—and the flatbread, injera; I tried that too. They would spread stuff on it and use it to pick up the food, like in a Moroccan place—or like you’re in a Black American family and you’re eating collard greens and you sop up the pot liquor with cornbread. We used to do that all the time. Because that was a big thing that my mom and my grandmother—both grandmothers, actually—would do: make
a big pot of greens or cabbage and take cornbread and soak it and pick up the greens. We would eat with our fingers, and my mom would say, “We are not eating with our fingers—that’s what forks and knives are for!” But it didn’t mean you had to give it up. You could still do it at midnight when nobody was looking. Or you could just go to Africa.
Sometimes we went into villages and the kids older than me had on nothing but what looked like a diaper or a half-dress, and they did a lot of dances for us and put on shows and greetings, which were great. I remember one time we got stuck in a village during a big downpour, and we all had to go into one hut. Everybody just crowded in, and of course they want you to feel comfortable, so they offer you food and you’re like, Okay, but the rain is coming down so hard you feel like it’s just going to flood you out, and you’re all tensed up, waiting for it to come. And then after a minute, it just stops. It reminded me of Georgia, where it just pours, and then it’s gone, and everybody’s back out and playing. Same thing. But with all the things that were the same and all the things that were different, I just had a good time.
“That’s what you’re here for,” Mr. Temple told me, “to have a good time and put on these clinics, and to let women know that they can run too. They too could be a part of the sports world.”
Our ambassadorship was supposed to last two months, but we only stayed for a month because the airlines were planning to go on strike, and Mr. Temple didn’t want us to get stuck there. “Tyus has to get back to go to school!” he told us. “We can’t stay.” But Edith and I were thinking, Well, we could just stay. If we’re supposed to be here for two months, maybe the strike will be over by then. But Mr. Temple said no; we had to get back.
In Kenya, serving as a Goodwill Ambassador. (Photo by Ed Temple.)
* * *
Another thing that contributed to my growth was learning about politics and the movements that were going on at that time. There was a lot of social unrest in America, and many of the students at Tennessee State knew people who were in the Civil Rights Movement. Stokely Carmichael came to our school and I went to listen to him, and as we were leaving the gym where he spoke, a lot of people were up in arms over who he was and all the things he had said. Some students and people who had come from off campus started rioting, and then someone called in the military—they brought in tanks. They brought tanks to campus. We were shocked. A dorm was being built at that time, and somebody fired a shot into that unoccupied building, and after that they shut us straight down—the whole campus. It was brutal.
Jefferson Boulevard runs through Nashville and right into Tennessee State, and there’s a central area of campus where Jefferson ends, and all that was shut down. We couldn’t go past a certain point unless we showed ID and had a reason for going there. You could always go in through the back parts if you knew the way, but you still had to face the military, walking around campus with guns, for a week or better.
One of the managers for the track team, Pam, was part of the movement; she was from Pennsylvania and she was always protesting. She was there when people started to riot and break things, and when the military began shooting into the air or doing whatever they did to disperse the crowd—she was a part of that crowd, and she ended up twisting her ankle very badly. Mr. Temple would tease her: “They started shooting, they knocked you down, and your buddies just ran off and left you. They didn’t even think nothing about you! You were hurt, and they just left you to get arrested!” They didn’t arrest her, fortunately. Still, Mr. Temple would say, “That’s Pam—my little rebel.”
He liked to tease us like that, but it wasn’t always funny; sometimes it was harsh. If you took it personally, though, you could never survive with him. So I would just laugh and think, Hmm, okay, and make up my own mind about Pam and what she did.
I was aware of what was going on in the movement, but I was not involved—because of Mr. Temple’s teasing, but also because my parents had made it clear to me that you should not want to be with anybody who doesn’t want you in their surroundings. They had taught us that you needed to know people in order to trust them, and if they didn’t want to know you, there was no way you could trust them. Why would you want to be integrated with people like that?
Also, pacifism was not my strong suit. Not even my brothers could hit me and get away with it. I could never be a marcher or a sit-inner because nobody could hit me, spit on me, or anything like that, without my reacting in kind. My parents and their folks had suffered a lot of violence, and they did not think we should allow ourselves to suffer anymore. If there had been any other way for me to be a part, I would have done it, but I didn’t see how I could fit in. I know there are people who can do that, and I take my hat off to them. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with their goals, and if I had the power to say something, or felt that I was in a position to say something, I would do it—as I did later, in ’68. But the nonviolent strategy did not work for me. I am not one to take a licking. That’s what it involved at that time, and I felt that there were people who were put on earth to do that—like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Although I never saw him speak, I of course had an appreciation for him and the things he said. When he was talking about going to the mountaintop and seeing the glory, he reminded me of the Baptist preachers in Griffin. You could tell that he felt something big was going to happen to him, but also that he wasn’t afraid because what he was doing was just much bigger than anything anybody could ever do to him.
It was like he was saying, “I’m not afraid of you. Whatever you do to me is going to help my cause.” He would lay his life down for a cause, for his people—and by “his people,” I feel he meant “all people.” It didn’t matter who believed in him and who didn’t. He believed he was put here especially to do what he was doing and for whatever happened to him to take place; he was basically saying, “I have put my life on the line, and I’m not stepping back.” Sometimes people will start something and then begin stepping back, but that was never him; he was more in the way of stepping forward, right up until the moment he was killed. I remember hearing that he had been shot as I was leaving the dining hall and not believing it, and then going to the TV in the lobby of the dorm and trying to see whatever news there was to see. Eventually there was a protest, but at first the campus just got very quiet, and that’s what I remember most: the quiet.
I have always admired Dr. King and the people who followed him, but I wasn’t one of them. In my mind, you have to know what your strengths are, what you can do, and what you can’t, so that when it’s time for you to play your part, you’re ready. I was never the one to be out front, and I knew that. Sometimes you can speak, you can say things, and I knew I would have my chance, but at that point, in ’65 and ’66, I was not going to be the one talking. That silence was still a part of who I was.
That said, I supported the goals of the movement, absolutely, and when Stokely Carmichael came, I enjoyed hearing him, especially the way he talked. For me, to hear people from other parts of the country talk was something in itself. I was used to people with a long, slow drawl, but Carmichael was able to speak very quickly about many different issues, like nothing I had heard before. He was so clear about how things should be—so clear on what was right. He reminded us that we were human beings, that we were no longer slaves, and that we had to be more active. I heard in his speaking too that there were those of us who were going to be on the front lines and those of us who were not, and you couldn’t hate your brother or sister because they weren’t with you yet. They needed support, and they probably needed more support than anybody else. That may not be exactly what he said, but that’s what I heard—that’s how he came to me.
So my involvement at that time was always to know what was going on and to know in my heart how I felt about it. I also knew that not everybody would agree all the time on how things were supposed to be; one person will say this, and another will say that, so no one person can speak for a whole group of people. That was another thing that Mr.
Temple taught us. You have to make your own decision about what each person says. Not everyone thinks this way. If something happens in a Black community, a lot of times people will say, “That’s just what Black people do,” and, “Why aren’t you with them?” But every Black person was not raised the same way—we haven’t all had the same experiences. You have to win people over in a lot of different ways. For Dr. King it was nonviolence, and a whole lot of people wanted to do things that way. But you also had a lot of people who said no. And I was one of those. “No, I can’t.” I had friends who went on the marches and sat at the counters and went to jail. That just wasn’t me.
One thing I eventually became involved in was the Olympic Project for Human Rights—eventually, because the people in the project and I kind of got off to a bumpy start. I was definitely aware of them and their plan to boycott the Olympics before I went to Mexico City in October of 1968. By that time, I was kind of dating my now ex-husband, Art Simburg, and he, Tommie Smith, John Carlos—we all called him Carlos—and Lee Evans were at San Jose State. Art was a journalism major there and one of the people who was instrumental in getting the whole “Speed City” thing started. He was a fanatic about all sports, not just running.