by Wyomia Tyus
That’s a demand that would have brought a lot of women in right there: have the men and women train for the Olympics in the same place. We never could understand why our Olympic Trials, our AAU championships, whatever, were never held together with the men. For what reason could that be? I mean, we were happy if there were twenty people in the stands for our Olympic Trials, but for the men, the stands were totally full. Why couldn’t we be together? Didn’t they want the women to be seen?
More thinking like that—more thinking about what would have brought more people into the movement—would have helped. When the movement started, its main goal was to make a better world for Black people. So what would have made the world better for Black people at the time? What did Black people need? They needed jobs and housing—same as now. Goals like that would have fit right into the things I was thinking about coming out of college. And I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. We were all going to have to get jobs after the Olympics; we were all going to need places to live. And we could have used our platform at the Olympics to move that forward, to bring more attention to it and gather forces behind it. If we had had those kinds of conversations, it would have made a difference for me. I probably would have spoken to reporters. I would have known what to say. And that would have been worth speaking about—those kind of things, which were already being said, but not by us, and here we had this platform, and we could be heard in a way others wouldn’t. That would have been something I’d have totally been on board for. If we had had those kind of conversations, I would have been able to think it through, figure out a way to make it fit with my life.
I also think that it’s always true that the more perspectives you have, the better your ideas are going to be—as long as everyone is on the same side. We had a perspective that was different from the Speed City crew. We were Black women, and they were Black men. We were in the East, and they were in the West—they were at San Jose State, and we were at Tennessee State. Like I said, Tommie Smith and Lee Evans grew up in California; they had a West Coast perspective. John Carlos was from New York, so he had a Northeastern perspective. But we were from the South, the Jim Crow South, and that’s a very different perspective.
Then there are all the individual differences. I look back at being on a team with just women, and we had so many strong, opinionated women, and also those who were very talkative and boisterous and felt like, “If I stand up, then that’s going to count.” And then you had the ones who didn’t talk, like me, who would sit and—after everybody had said whatever they needed to say—would say, “Well, I think we should look at it this way.” And I look at that, and I think maybe that’s what the movement needed. It needed someone who could do that—someone who could listen and reflect. There had to be some people involved who were like that. And it didn’t only have to be women; to me, Ralph Boston was one of those guys who is more quiet, more likely to think things through and say, “Well, have you looked at all these things?” And in ’68 the question that needed to be asked—and it needed to be answered by as many people as possible—was this: “Do you think people really want to give up all the time they’ve worked? Why would they do that? What would inspire them to do that?” There had to be a good reason. They would have to see a future, one they could fight for.
It wasn’t just the women who couldn’t see that future. There were a lot of guys who weren’t saying anything either. I guess sometimes people stay quiet if they feel like they’re not going to be heard. But we really needed to hear from everyone. And if all those perspectives had come together from the start, we might have had a clearer idea of where we needed to go. We might have accomplished more. And—who knows? We might not have gone to the Olympics. There might have been a boycott of the whole Olympic Games. There could have been. I could see that.
But what actually went down was that not enough of the people who were speaking were thinking about what was going to happen after the Olympics. What’s going to happen then if the athletes boycott? Who’s going to help them? Because no company is going to want them. And we have to work in order to survive in this world. You can look at what happened to Tommie and John. I mean, things are happening for them now. Right after ’68, they kind of vanished from the face of the earth. Nobody wanted to touch them at all. It was different for people like Harry Edwards. As Mr. Temple kept saying, “Edwards got his education. Nothing is going to stop him. He has a job.” A lot of people say that’s kind of Uncle Tom-ish, but I say that was Mr. Temple looking after his girls, because in saying that, he also said, “You have your own mind, you have your own thoughts, and you have to make your own decisions.” He never told us not to do something—just before you do it, think it through.
It makes me wonder what would have happened if it had been turned around the other way, if women had been the ones leading from the beginning. I always feel that women in movements have a better understanding of the fact that you are stronger with everybody. If it was our movement, a women’s movement, I can’t help thinking that we would have been more like, “Let’s make sure that we pull in as many people as we can and make them feel like they have a voice.” If we are all moving together, wanting the same thing, we’ll get it. For women—for Black women in particular—it’s just clear: you can’t go it alone. Not with everything we have to contend with. And I think also that we Tigerbelles understood very well what it meant to be a team, and what the benefits of teamwork were.
When I look at certain male athletes, it seems like that’s less obvious to them. You have a lot of them for whom it’s all about them—the individual: I’m better than this, and I can do all this. Me, me, me. But that’s not what Mr. Temple taught the Tigerbelles. He knew track was an individual sport, but he also knew what worked: you have to be a team. And you have to be a team not only out on the track. You have to be a team in life, here, now. One of Mr. Temple’s biggest things was that you had to find friends, friends who were not athletes, friends who were different from you. Because you are going to need help from all kinds of different people in the world.
That is what we were taught: the importance of mutual support. To me, that’s what ’68 should have been about. Not that I was able to express it then, and not that anybody asked me, but looking back, that’s how I feel, and I guess it’s good to spell it out because maybe someone can learn something when they read this book. I don’t take it personally that we weren’t included, just like I don’t take it personally that nobody made that big a deal of my winning the 100 meters back to back. I’m just happy that I got to be a pioneer. And I adhere to the idea that when you’re a pioneer you don’t necessarily get your day in the sun until the world is ready for you—but that doesn’t change the fact that you did what you did. I won those races, and I dedicated my medal to Tommie and John—to the movement. No one can change that.
I say to a lot of young girls—in fact, I’ll say it to anybody who asks: if you make history, there’s no way they can not put you in it. It may not be the way I want, but every time they talk about the 100 meters, they have to mention my name. Maybe softly. Maybe just once. But they have to. They can’t leave you out of history you’ve made. Somebody is going to find it and write about it and say something about it. If they want to talk about history and be taken seriously, they can’t lie. Would I like for it to be more? Now, at this age? If it happens, it happens. If not, oh well. But getting this story told is making me happier than ever. So it is happening. And to me that’s good enough.
Chapter 9.
Another Life to Live
When I came back home after winning in ’68, there was another parade in Griffin. At that point, everybody knew who I was, and they were always coming up—Black, white, whatever—saying how proud they were of me, so I got all of that. But as far as what people get in this day and time in terms of attention from the media, there’s no comparison. And I’m not even talking about money; I’m just talking about recognition from the press. The whole idea of a small-town person who went
and made good—even winning back-to-back gold medals—is a story that could be told and retold. But it was never played up; it was like nobody ever thought about it—not until a male runner did somewhat the same thing some twenty years later.
Nevertheless, I felt that I had done all I could to be recognized as a runner. I had gone to the Olympics twice and won three gold medals and done something that no one else in the world had ever done before. How much further can you go to get on top? I felt at that time, and I still do, that you can’t get any better than that. And Mr. Temple had told me just like he told all his girls: “If you can go out when you’re on top, that’s what you want to do: quit while you’re ahead.”
I was at that point in ’68—and a good thing too, because it was still the sixties, and there was no one out there saying, “Hey, I have a job for you where you can continue to train and go back to the Olympics.” Nothing like that was happening. No one ever said, “You can go another year—it would be great if you could win three times in a row.” Because I could have gone to the ’72 Olympics if I was in that frame of mind and track was still that important to me. And Mr. Temple had also told us we could come back and go to grad school. But I was through with school, and I was pretty much tired of running. I had always said to myself that when it gets to be a job, then it’s time for me to end my career. Having Mr. Temple say, “You have to get out there and work, have that eight-to-five”—and thinking he was correct in thinking like that—made me ready to retire as well. Not in a disappointed way. I knew that track was always going to be a part of my life, but it was not going to be my life. I had other things to do, another life to live. I mostly thought, I got to see what else the world has for me.
I had already accomplished my two goals; I was ready to move on and see what else I could conquer—or not conquer. What I wanted most was to leave Griffin. I thought, I’ve lived in Georgia, I’ve lived in Tennessee, I have not lived in California. I just want to see what California is all about. I didn’t need to travel; through running, I had traveled all over the world and seen a lot of things and learned a lot about myself and other people and what goes on in the world and in other cultures. I did all those things when I was really young, and it helped me to understand people, and I saw that as I got older. I appreciated it. But I was done. I just knew I was going to California, and that was it.
I didn’t have a car, or any money, and I wasn’t walking or taking the train, so I had to find a way to fly, which I did: I borrowed money from the bank, which to me said I was grown up, a college graduate, and taking on adult responsibilities. Matter of fact, the bank let me have the money just on my name. Five hundred bucks. That was one benefit I got from being an Olympian: I left Georgia in December, and I had just won the medals in October, which is probably why I got the loan on nothing but my good name—you have to have a good name to borrow money, and at that moment, my name was very good in Griffin.
My family knew I was going to leave. I always said that I wouldn’t stay in Griffin, that there was nothing there for me. My mom, of course, didn’t want me to go, but I told her, “I’ll be back! I’ll come back to visit. But I have to go. Griffin is not for me.” I couldn’t see a way for myself in Griffin, and I didn’t see too much change as far as how they treated people of color. I remember that when they integrated the town swimming pool, someone put cement in the water; that’s how much they didn’t want to share their pool with us. Of course, we got the last laugh because there was still a Black pool, and no one put any cement in that.
* * *
Getting to California was simple: I went to the bank, borrowed the money, and got on a plane. Getting a job once I arrived was more complicated. At first I thought I was going to work in Northern California at Foster City Parks and Recreation, but I ended up not taking that job and going to LA instead. LA was all I knew; I didn’t know Foster City, I didn’t know the Bay Area. So I went to LA, and I stayed with my roommate from college, Marcella Daniel—the one with the study skills. She was teaching at Bret Harte Junior High, and the assistant principal there went to Tennessee State, and his wife at that time used to be the manager of the track team at Tennessee State as well; I was well connected, and it wasn’t long before the assistant principal offered me a job. “We could make you a long-term sub,” he told me, “but you’ve got to enroll in school and get your teaching credential.”
So even though I was an Olympic gold medalist, I got my first job offer out of college the same way many other people do: I knew someone who knew someone. I couldn’t start right away, not until the following fall, because it was the middle of the school year. But at least I could look forward to future employment. I enrolled in school to get my credential and then all I had to do was support myself until it was time to start at Bret Harte.
My next job offer came out of name recognition: I got hired as an assistant research analyst for the Black Studies department at UCLA. They were creating a Black Studies library, and they had me looking up information and putting things in chronological order and making sure all the research got organized in the way they had decided to catalog it. It was nothing I had done before, so I think it’s fair to say that they hired me because of who I was. But once I was there, it was never about my Olympic resume or even anything I had learned at school; I was just a research assistant, cataloging research.
I had a feeling I wouldn’t be there long. Because I was thinking, I know I need work, but I need something to grow on too. You can keep me here for six, seven months, then I have to go. They were just starting to build the Black Studies center and the library, so it was a lot of research, and I could do that, and I knew I was going to grow from it and get something out of it. But I also knew that I was not going to be able to do it for a long period of time. There is only so much growth you can get from creating a card catalog.
It was pretty much the same thing in my next job at Universal Studios. That was when Universal was doing a lot in the Black community, sending people to meetings, listening, receiving suggestions on what they might do to benefit the community. You can’t just stand there and give out money; you’ve got to have some idea of what’s needed and wanted. And that was my job: to figure out what was needed and wanted. It was not so much that I was making the plan; the community had to come up with that. I could help tweak it and all, but that was about it. And once again I knew: I would not be doing that for the long term. I had to sit in that Black Tower[22] every day—on the eighteenth floor—whether there were meetings in the community or not. I would be sitting there, alone, in a big office with all these windows, trying to come up with ideas—about what, exactly, I don’t know. I don’t have that kind of creative mind; I need to have somebody to talk to. If someone came in and talked, or I could talk on the phone, that was fine, but otherwise I would just sit there and think, There’s no meeting in the community today, but I have to show up for work?
Maybe there was room for growth there—maybe too much room—but I couldn’t see it. And although they had hired me because they knew my name, once I was in the door, I was nobody special. Universal was giving money to the community, and I was doing the personal-appearance thing, which meant getting Universal’s name out in the community—not “I’m Wyomia Tyus, Olympic athlete,” but, “I’m here from Universal, and this is what they’re doing.” They never once encouraged me to play up the fact that I was an Olympic gold medalist. It was the same then as it is now: companies want to get as much as they can out of you for as little as possible. I didn’t find it degrading or anything; I just needed a job, and that was the job I got.
* * *
Meanwhile, Art was working for Puma in Berkeley, and around the same time I came out to California, Puma asked him to move to LA because that’s where all the runners were. He was still pursuing me, and his idea was that when he got to LA, we would move in together, get to know each other better, and figure out our relationship.
While I was running and the reporters would write stories abo
ut me, they would say Art was my fiancé, but that wasn’t true; we had never declared what we were because what we were doing was something that was just not done at that time: we were dating if we saw each other. I was in Nashville and he was in California, and that meant we saw each other at meets or when he surprised me and showed up at Tennessee State. That’s what that was. Art and I were not engaged, and I was not planning on marrying him. But for me, coming from my family, you didn’t move in with someone unless you were married. If we were going to move in together, which seemed like a good idea at the time, we would have to get married, and that’s how I ended up married to Art.
At first we lived in a tiny little bachelor apartment in Westwood, and then everything began to come together a little: Puma started to pay him, and I had my job, so we moved to a bigger place, still in Westwood but closer to UCLA. Art felt that people would be more liberal and more understanding of our relationship there. I didn’t know what was going on with that; I just knew that I didn’t want to be in a situation where I had to struggle to fit in, seeing that ours was a Black-white relationship. We’re still talking the sixties, early seventies, so we knew some extra understanding would be needed. Little did we know that some people are not all that accepting no matter how close to a university they live.