Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  The bright light hovering over Taylor during his four-month European excursion was, for much of the balance of the 1901 racing season, replaced with shades of darkness. The doctor’s letter that Buckner had dropped off at race headquarters was met with complete mistrust. Chairman Batchelder, a rummy, intemperate man who one reporter said could not “shake hands without a look of agony on his face,” tossed it aside, then told Buckner to tell Taylor that he had to appear at every race “sick or not.” Failure to comply, he said, would result in a $100 fine for each and every race that he missed. “Tell him he must ride at once,” he frothed in Buckner’s ear, “or he will be blacklisted.” As they had many times before, Taylor’s allies in the press counterattacked. One reporter reminded Batchelder and his readers that when Zimmerman returned from overseas in a similar condition a few years before, no one dared question the returning superstar. Another writer warned of a potential backlash from racegoers. “Public sympathy seems to be with the rider and not the National Cycling Association, which is troubling the colored rider. If the facts of the case have been correctly reported,” he continued, “Taylor will certainly have the sympathy of the sporting public.”

  When Buckner delivered Batchelder’s peremptory demands, Taylor became irate. “You can put this down,” he wailed to a reporter while rolling over on his pillowed couch. “Batch has got about all the fines he’ll ever get from me!” He then decided to strike back with the sporting currency everyone knew he had. Knowing that his mere presence more than doubled attendance, Taylor petrified the nation’s track owners by threatening to quit American racing altogether. A slew of panicked track owners, probably led by Brady, contacted Batchelder and asked him to tone down his rhetoric a few notches. But by extending his stay in France, Taylor had indeed broken his agreement with the NCA. His contract was ironclad and unambiguous, and therefore a penalty of some sort was in order. But during the summer of 1901, Batchelder seemed to blame him for everything save the stock market meltdown and President McKinley’s assassination. “Taylor,” he blurted out, “was just being arrogant and pigheaded.” A real champion, Batchelder told the Brooklyn Eagle, “has got to put up with such things.” A heated spat between the king of cycling and cycling’s boss continued to play out in the press.

  After returning from his exhibition ride, Taylor felt so ill he did not leave his house for more than a week. His doctor checked up on him every day. But the pressure to race nonetheless kept building. In mid-July, he was summoned to appear before Batchelder at the Hotel Hueblein in Hartford to try to bridge their differences. Taylor was introduced to an ecstatic and welcoming crowd at the Hartford Velodrome, no doubt reminding Batchelder of his transcendent hold on sports fans the world over. Taylor sat in the stands alongside his fans and watched the races before their meeting.

  The hearing after the scheduled races carried on until one-thirty in the morning. With all the pressure on Batchelder from fans and track owners and Taylor’s desire to join the race circuit already in progress, a compromise was agreed on. Reluctantly, Taylor paid a reduced fine of a couple hundred dollars. He then wired Brady, telling him he was prepared to join the circuit in Syracuse, New York.

  Trouble awaited him there, and at nearly every other turn.

  On the soft summer day of August 1, 1901, Taylor’s train rolled west out of Worcester and into Syracuse. A streetcar dropped him off at the Vanderbilt, the same hotel where he had stayed several times before. Having a few letters that he wanted to dispatch, Taylor went straight to a writing table in the hotel lobby and drew up a chair. The minute he sat down, a bellhop began walking toward him. After all the attention he had received in Europe, Taylor probably thought he was just another autograph-seeker. Far from it. The bellhop walked right up and told him to get the hell out of the Vanderbilt Hotel.

  “You have the alternative of being kicked out or walking out quietly,” he was told. Puzzled and confused, Taylor ignored him and kept on writing. Soon afterward, the hotel clerk walked over and joined the bellhop in excoriating him.

  “What are you doing there at that desk? Get out of here,” he yelled.

  “I guess you don’t know who I am,” replied Taylor. “I’ve stopped here several times before and if you will let me explain, perhaps you will be more friendly.”

  The clerk wasn’t interested in his explanation. “Get out of here or you will be kicked out!” he hollered, his voice echoing throughout the lobby.

  Still on an emotional high from his triumphant European trip where hoteliers greeted him like royalty, Taylor was shocked and frozen by the demand. The clerk then latched onto his chair and pulled it out from under him. Taylor tumbled to the ground, looking up in horror at the two angry men.

  “Now, get the hell out of here,” the clerk repeated.

  Taylor, a committed pacifist, shook his head in disbelief as he walked out onto the street a dejected man. Eventually he hopped aboard a streetcar and jumped off at the Yates Hotel. There, after looking him up and down, an apathetic clerk then offered up a room at what was clearly an inflated price. What’s more, he was told he would have to “take his meals in his room,” presumably to spare everyone the indignities of dining with a black man. Taylor was on to him. Reading through the clerk’s malevolent intent, he refused the offer and stormed out onto the streets again.

  He found a park bench and stooped over, heartsick. “In all my travels over this country and Europe,” he told a reporter, “I have never been hurt more personally.”

  Dusk was falling over Syracuse and Taylor still hadn’t found a place to lay his head. Then he recalled a few riders saying they were staying at the St. Cloud Hotel farther away from the track. He jumped in a horse-cab, got out at the steps of the St. Cloud, and walked up to the receptionist. Once again a clerk combed his eyes over Taylor’s black face. Just then one of his rivals noticed him and started chatting with him. Seeing this, the clerk finally offered him a room. Before retiring into a dark night of the soul, Taylor told the other riders of his odyssey. In a rare moment of harmony, most of them joined him in his outrage.

  But Taylor’s rage lingered. He eventually cabled his attorney Sam Packard and told him to prepare a discrimination lawsuit against the Vanderbilt Hotel for $10,000. Given that much of Taylor’s time was spent training and racing, this bold act, very rare for blacks at the time, was one of the principal ways he could use his international clout to stand up for his race. The nation took notice. Word of his pending lawsuit was splashed in several major newspapers, certainly causing much discussion among blacks and whites. Win or lose, it sent a strong message that such indecent and illegal acts would no longer be tolerated without a fierce fight.

  By the time Taylor was healthy enough to join the race circuit, Frank Kramer, the young Indiana powerhouse Taylor beat out for the championship in 1900, already had a thirty-point lead in the standings. Racing fans began calling for match races between the “Black Whirlwind” and the “White Flyer.” Brady tried filling the void, challenging Kramer—or any rider who felt he was up to the test—into a match race with Taylor. As he had done back in 1898, Brady hung out lucrative purses, but no one immediately came forward.

  Meanwhile, Taylor jumped headfirst into the circuit races. Sizable crowds continued to congregate wherever his name was on the race card. At the Buffalo Exposition in August, more than thirty thousand fans watched him—despite a thirty-yard handicap—defeat Iver Lawson, an up-and-coming star in the two-mile race. With the grandstand filled to bursting, hundreds stood in the aisles and upper railings. As Taylor’s train sped out of Buffalo, a train carrying the last breath of President McKinley before his assassination sighed into Buffalo—shot dead by an Iver Johnson handgun—made by the same company that sponsored Taylor. Before long, Taylor—a staunch Republican—and the rest of the nation went into mourning.

  Major’s reappearance into the all-white American peloton was not a proud chapter in the annals of American sports. Perhaps jealous of his immense overseas success, Taylor
’s rivals pocketed, elbowed, walled, stymied, and ganged up on him with an intensity not seen since his early days as a professional. At several races, a cabal of ignoble riders agreed in advance how they were going to “trim the nigger” and split the purse in the end. Several riders who openly admitted to receiving money from Kramer said that they liked Taylor, but the money was simply too hard to turn down. “Many times,” claimed Taylor, “the toss of a coin would decide which one would bring me down.”

  Brady and other track promoters, who heavily advertised his appearances, became agitated with their antics. “None of the track owners,” wrote one reporter, “were satisfied with the way Kramer had acted and did not believe the riders had given him a fair shake.” On two occasions, riders nudged him headfirst into track railings, causing injuries that temporarily removed him from competition, setting him further behind Kramer. When Iver Lawson dumped him on another occasion, Taylor, who was already walking with a “perceptible limp” from previous spills, had to be escorted to his locker by the police. This had all been prophesized by several reporters before he left France. “When he gets back to the United States,” wrote the Daily News, “there will be many a knife whetted for the Major’s scalp this year.”

  Amid the bitterness, Taylor somehow hung in there, took his licks, and on the rare occasions he was left alone, continued his winning ways. But after coming off the high of Europe to the “whetted knives” of his American rivals, life weighed heavily on him. Increasingly, he was finding that the colors of the world around him were fading to black and white. It was him versus the world. He searched for answers.

  This search—and his isolation from his fellow wheelmen—drove him even closer to God. He grew so disgusted with his rivals' race tactics and their continual stream of foul language that he often rented a room far away from his competitors in search of solitude. Before and after every race, Taylor curled up by himself in the corner of the locker room. There, sequestered with his New Testament open wide, his lips could be seen moving up and down in silent prayer. For every instance of myopia displayed by his rivals, he searched for light, strength, and guidance in its words. It had become the currency with which he expressed his views of the world. After one race at Madison Square Garden in the presence of an East Coast reporter, some of his rivals chided him for his deep religious beliefs, using their customary invectives. Taylor waved his well-worn Bible at them, imparting words that stood in stark contrast to theirs.

  Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen . . . Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ forgave you.

  August gave way to September. Taylor posited a gallant fight and was set to tie Kramer in the standings when his toe clip broke as he veered down the homestretch of a handicap race in Hartford. “Just hard luck,” wrote the Daily News. Because of his illness, injuries, and late start, Taylor competed in only twenty-three of the thirty-seven circuit races that summer. Frank Kramer therefore became the sprint champion of America, winning by a close margin over Taylor, who took second.

  But given the adverse circumstances Taylor had competed under, some reporters questioned whether Kramer deserved the crown. This question was echoed by Brady and other track owners. “The track promoters,” wrote the Hartford Times, “do not believe that the man lives that can defeat Taylor in an honest match race with only one other man on the track beside himself.”

  Brady’s offers for a match race still hung out there. As the season progressed, he continued a full-court press, ratcheting up intense pressure on Kramer to prove his superiority. When he involved the press, it became too much for Kramer to walk away from. Finally, a match race between the 1900 and 1901 American champions was arranged for September 27 at Madison Square Garden. After all he had been through, Taylor really wanted to win this race. “There was ill will between Kramer and myself,” he admitted. Kramer concurred. “It is the one ambition of Kramer’s life to trim the colored man,” wrote the Trenton Times. “He has never forgotten the beatings Taylor gave him in the days gone by.”

  The night of September 27 rolled into New York with pitch blackness. Horses and streetcars dropped off thousands and thousands of fans along Madison Avenue. Inside the Garden, people could feel the tension.

  As Taylor eyed Kramer’s big ski-slope of a jaw at the starting line, “he had blood in his eyes,” recalled Robert Coquelle.

  Kramer broke rapidly, immediately taking the lead. After the first of ten laps, Taylor rode up to Kramer’s rear wheel, drafting in behind his rigid form. For several laps, he clung to his rear wheel, limpid-like. For a while, the two men drew even. The battle persisted: an eighth, a quarter, a half.

  Several times before on that steep garden oval with thousands of New Yorkers watching, Taylor’s pedals and legs had spun out over the wooden track, pushing his tires deep into the thin pine slats, carrying him forward at more than forty miles per hour. Rarely had he wanted victory more than he did that night. Venting months of frustration, Taylor crouched down over his machine and pounced forward with all the grace and force of a black panther. With every revolution, some 1,800 watts of energy—enough to light a bank of light bulbs—pushed down through his crank, bottom bracket, and wheels, propelling him forward at record speed. Kramer and Taylor, two of the fastest men in the world, leaned together into the forty-five degree turns, hummed through the straightaways and tore past the howling throng.

  Brady was a nervous wreck. In his red satin booth along the track, he could holler at Taylor to take the lead. With one lap to go, as though he could hear his command, Taylor, flashing back to all the cruel treatment he’d received throughout the year, bore down as never before. Kramer, realizing his reputation as sprint champion was more or less at stake, looked to his side and watched in horror as Taylor ripped alongside him, then past him: a wheel, two wheels, a full-length. Watching Kramer’s form disintegrate from under his arm, Taylor knew he had broken him. “Whenever his knees began to wobble,” Taylor remembered, “I knew he was in trouble.”

  Down the homestretch, America’s new champion stretched out in supreme effort. But there was nothing he could do other than watch Taylor’s lead continue to widen: a length and a half, two lengths.

  Taylor sat up and rode over the tape riding proud and hard.

  New York racegoers, always diehard Taylor fans, shook the rafters in voracious applause. “The spectators were obliged to admit,” Coquelle added, “that the real champion was not the one to hold the title.”

  Brady scanned the screaming fans. All the harsh treatment directed at Taylor, he and other track owners reasoned, was sure to drive him overseas and away from the American tracks possibly for good. With the world’s best drawing card spending much of his time thousands of miles away, Brady knew his days of seeing Taylor race were coming to a close.

  Taylor would miss the man who had done so much for him and his favorite sport. “My good friend,” Taylor wrote years later, “William Brady, the present theatrical producer in New York, stood ready to make good his offers . . .” Late that September night, one of Taylor’s staunchest supporters said his good-byes and slipped out of the old Garden.

  One man’s loss was another man’s gain. A few months later, in December 1901, the French tandem of Breyer and Coquelle knocked on Taylor’s door again. Given the praise heaped on Taylor the year before, their visit was inevitable. European sports fans, Breyer told a New York reporter, “demanded the presence of Major Taylor and, as a result, I made this trip to America to get his signature to a contract for another tour of Europe.” Following such a regrettable American season, little arm-twisting was needed this time. On the spot, Taylor signed a contract guaranteeing him $5,000 plus purses. There was no need for them to even discuss Sunday racing: Taylor made sure the contract excluded Sun
days.

  Taylor did have one more demand. Hoping to steer clear of the miserable weather of the previous spring, he insisted on a shorter two-month stint, starting in mid-May instead of in the cold of April. They agreed. Breyer was downright giddy. “I consider Major Taylor the greatest racer and drawing card of them all. I am delighted to sign him up again and I will set sail for Europe one of the happiest men in the world.”

  There was one pressing matter that needed Taylor’s attention before embarking on that second journey across the pond. On a windswept day in mid-March, he and Daisy were positively elated as they hopped aboard a northbound train. Hand in hand, they jumped off in the charming, clock-making town of Ansonia, Connecticut, where they were wed at a private ceremony at Reverend Taylor’s home on Grove Street. By that time, Major had made a bundle of money and, considering Daisy’s fine taste in clothes, he undoubtedly put some of it to good use, bedecking her in the finest Victorian wedding gown. In the quiet of Ansonia, far from the usual crush of reporters, Daisy and Major Taylor shared their special day with their friends, relatives, and pastor.

  Major’s nomadic occupation allowed for little time to celebrate. At New York’s Grand Central Station a few days later, he said his good-byes to his new bride and several hundred fans, including W. E. B. Du Bois, the famous black leader, before shoving off on the fabulous Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. For two months, May and June 1902, Taylor rumbled across the European continent. As he had the previous season, he dominated his European rivals, often before sold-out crowds, while adding to his growing wealth in city after city.

  Fred Johnson, the bike manufacturer Taylor still had a contract with and one of the greatest beneficiaries of his success, had stopped by Paris to promote the bicycle ridden by “the world’s fastest man.” Johnson’s agents in Europe and America were told to query customers about why they chose his models. Their overwhelming response: “We want the kind Major Taylor rides.” For ongoing bragging rights, Johnson also made certain his agents received cablegrams within one hour of every Taylor win.