Wyomia Tyus, Hidden Figure.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: EDGE OF SPORTS - Essay

February is Black History Month and 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, a sacred year for the activist athlete.

That means remembering John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists on the podium at that year's Mexico City Olympics. It was a time when Muhammad Ali, arguably the world's greatest athlete, sat stripped of his title for refusing to fight in the war in Vietnam, saying, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong."

Yet often written out of this history is the role of black women. That's why it's important to remember the remarkable legacy of Wyomia Tyus.

A resident of Georgia, Tyus was the first person in history, male or female, to win track and field's glamour event--the 100-meter dash--in consecutive Olympics. She did so first in 1964 at the Tokyo games and then in Mexico City in 1968. Tyus then demonstrated uncommon valor by dedicating her win in the women's 4x100m sprint relay to Carlos and Smith.

She took this chance and dared to offer solidarity, even though the movement of Carlos and Smith, the Olympic Project for Human Rights, made no effort to organize female athletes. Decades later she said, "It appalled me that the men simply took us for granted. They assumed we had no minds of our own and that we'd do whatever we were told."

Tyus is part of another hidden history as well. She attended the historically black college Tennessee State University, where she was one of the celebrated Tigerbelles, a program that won thirty-four national championships in forty-four years. The school's legendary coach Ed Temple, in this time before Title IX, trained forty black female Olympians, who won a combined twenty-three Olympic medals, thirteen of them gold.

I met Wyomia Tyus several years ago, interviewing her in front of a crowd of people who barely knew who she was. By the end of the event, the people in that audience were aware that they were in the presence of greatness. It wasn't just the medals. It's a story of navigating the Jim Crow south as a black woman. This is someone who grew up in Georgia, in an area where her family couldn't vote and where, now, a beautiful, publicly funded recreation center bears her name.

Afterward, I asked Wyomia why she never wrote a book...