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Forgotten Foremothers: Alice Coachman and Audrey “Mickey” Patterson

Kathryn S. Gardiner | Published on 8/8/2024

Forgotten Foremothers

Profiles of lesser-known heroines in the fight for women’s rights

Alice Coachman and
Audrey “Mickey” Patterson

In June of 1939, London won the bid to host the 1944 Summer Olympics. Just months later, on September 1st, Germany invaded Poland, sparking the international conflict that would come to be known as World War II. The 1940 Summer Olympics were canceled, then the 1940 Winter Olympics. As the global conflict continued to escalate, the 1944 Summer and Winter Olympics followed, becoming only the fourth and fifth Olympics to be canceled due to war.

All around the war-torn globe, athletes who’d been training and preparing, some for decades, had their dreams put on hold once again.

Alice Coachman was born on Nov. 9, 1923, in Albany, Georgia, to Fred and Evelyn Coachman, the fifth of their ten children. Dad Fred was a veteran of World War I. A cherished family story tells of his survival through an ambush in France by hiding in a mule carcass. “The mule’s belly, literally, split open from German guns,” reported Mike DeArmond for The Kansas City Star in 1996, enabling Fred “to crawl inside the animal rather than to stand alone and be shot.” When looking for survivors, the German troops only saw a dead mule and left, allowing Fred to return home safely to Evelyn and their growing family. “If it had not be for that mule, I wouldn’t be here!” Alice said.

In his 1996 article, Mike paints a picture of Alice’s youth: “From inside the house, over the cacophony of her five brothers and four sisters, Alice heard the beat of Count Basie and Duke Ellington emanating from the radio someone had given her father as a partial reward for plastering a wall.” Inspired by Shirley Temple, Alice wanted to be a dancer for a time. Then, listening to the radio, she thought maybe she’d want to be a musician.

Mickey on the podium to receive her 3rd place bronze medal at Wembley Stadium.
Photo courtesy Bettman/Getty Images

In this boisterous, crowded household, young Alice wanted to stand out. “I wanted to be somebody. I’d just sit on the porch and watch all the girls going by, looking nice,” she told The Kansas City Star. “I wanted some nice things, too.” Her father’s stunning survival during the war had also given her a feeling of destiny. Surely this little southern girl was meant for something more.

When not in school, Alice, from as young as age 10, worked picking peaches, cotton, and beans to supplement her family’s income. The family later relocated to Tuskegee, Alabama. Her parents wanted her ladylike, but Alice felt more inclined to running and jumping the farm fences. She played softball, ran races against the neighborhood boys, and liked dancing.

As a young Black girl in the United States South in the early 1930s, Alice wasn’t welcome much of anywhere when it came to sports. Most leagues only accepted white children. Those that allowed Black children, only accepted boys. So, the roads and fence posts became Alice’s training grounds. She often ran and jumped barefoot. “You had to run up and down the red roads and the dirt roads. You went out there in the fields,” she told The Kansas City Star, “where there was a lot of grass and no track. No nothing.”

"I didn't have any girls for playmates because they were ladylike, and I didn't have no competition to help me jump over the bar, I didn't have no competition to make me run fast, and I didn't have no competition to hit the baseball or softball. So I was really a boy in the sight of the other boys I was playing with,” Alice told NPR in 2004. “And when I look back, maybe if I hadn't played with them, I wouldn't have been as good as I am. That was my competition right there."

While her parents wanted a daintier daughter, others saw Alice’s incredible athletic talent. A teacher at her elementary school and her aunt Carrie Spry encouraged her. With this extra support, 15-year-old Alice started high school and immediately joined the track team. By age 16, she’d earned a scholarship to the Tuskegee Preparatory School and access to proper athletic equipment. She joined the nationally ranked Tuskegee Tigerebelles. This was not a free ride, however, as The Telegraph noted, “the ‘working’ scholarship she was given meant that she had to clean the gym and the swimming pool, sew football uniforms and maintain the tennis courts,” while attending classes and training with the track team.

Just the same, when she was finally allowed to compete, Alice racked up the wins, the first coming before she’d even started classes. “As a senior at Tuskegee Institute High School, she won the [Amateur Athletic Union] nationals in the high jump and the 50-meter dash,” reported Lisa A. Ennis for the New Georgia Encyclopedia. “During her college career at Tuskegee, she won national championships in the 50-meter dash, the 100-meter dash, the 400-meter relay, and the high jump. She also played on the Tuskegee women’s basketball team, which won three championships. She was the only African American on each of the five All-American teams to which she was named.”

Women from the 1948 Team USA with President Harry S. Truman.
From left to right: Emma Reed, Theresa Manuel, Audrey Patterson, President Truman,
Nell Jackson, Alice Coachman, and Mabel Walker. Photo by Bill Chaplis, AP Photo

By 1940 and the time for the Summer Olympics, Alice was in peak form. She was ready, but the spreading war canceled all Olympics events in 1940, then again in 1944. Alice kept competing in national events. “In ’44 I was really ready. I was voted five times on the All-American team,” she told The Kansas City Star. For 10 years in a row, she’d won the national championships in the high jump. In 1946, she graduated from Tuskegee with a degree in dressmaking.

Then, with the world at something resembling peace and 1948 Summer Olympics back on, Alice, now 25, qualified and made her way to London. She was just one of 12 women on Team USA, and of those, she was one of 9 Black women. Her fellow history-makers were Mabel Walker, Lillian Young, Nell Jackson, Mae Faggs, Cynthia Robinson, Theresa Manuel, Emma Reed, and Audrey “Mickey” Patterson.

Audrey Patterson was born Sept. 27, 1926, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her parents, Lionel and Josephine Patterson, didn’t support their daughter’s athletic tendencies, if only because they thought she’d have more interest in music. Audrey, called “Mickey” throughout her life, did it all.

“By the time she was halfway through high school at Gilbert Academy [a New Orleans preparatory school for African American students], she was an accomplished dancer, sang contralto, and performed in the band,” wrote Marty Mule for Shreveport, Louisiana’s The Times in 2000. “She played on the girls basketball team, and her track abilities developed beyond anyone’s expectations.”

Alice, in first place, at the medal ceremony held at Wembley Stadium.
Photo courtesy Bettman/Getty Images

It was a 1944 Gilbert Academy visit from athlete Jesse Owens that pulled Mickey’s focus fully to her track and field pursuits. Jesse had competed at the controversial 1936 Olympics held in Berlin, Germany during Adolf Hiter’s reign. He won four gold medals and “single-handedly,” as ESPN’s Larry Schwartz put it, “crushed Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy.” Mickey, then 18 years old, listened to the 31-year-old Olympian assert that, “There is a boy or girl in this audience who will go to the Olympics.” To Mickey it felt as if he was talking directly to her.

She was unbeatable at Gilbert Academy. That unbeaten streak continued throughout her stint at historically Black college Wiley University (called Wiley College in Mickey’s time) in Texas. Her coach called her the “female Jesse Owens.” Mickey transferred to Tennessee State and remained unbeaten there, too, and set records in the National AAU Women’s Indoor Track and Field Championships.

Then, time came for the 1948 Olympic trials. Circumstances seemed to be working against Mickey. As Marty wrote for The Times, “The morning of the qualifying heats, she burned her leg with an iron. Despite the injury, she won the 200-meter race. Then she retired to the women’s dressing room, and she accidentally was locked in and was unable to report for the finals. Coach Tom Harris began to search for her and located his weeping star just in time.” True to her nature, Mickey wiped her tears, joined the line up, and won the heat. (Fellow Olympian Mabel Walker beat Mickey in one heat, giving Mickey her first second-place rank since high school.)

Sometimes called “The Austerity Games,” the 1948 London Olympics represented a recently war-torn nation rising to the challenge of hosting an international event. The 1936 Olympics were the first to be broadcast on television. “Twenty-five television viewing rooms were set up in the Greater Berlin area,” according to the official Olympics website, “allowing the locals to follow the Games free of charge.” But it was the 1948 games that were first available on household televisions for those few who had them.

While Mickey had faced injury during qualifying, injury threatened to halt Alice’s official Olympic competition. “I hadn’t ever had any aches and pains at all concerning track and field, but then my back starting hurting about three or four months before,” she told The Kansas City Star.

Mickey’s events came first. In the 200-meter, she raced against Netherlands’ Fanny Blankers-Koen, 30-year-old mother of two and the breakout star of the Games who the media dubbed “The Flying Housewife.” Fanny finished at 24.400 seconds. Mickey, in a tight third-place position, finished at 25.200. She had officially won the Bronze medal, making her the first Black woman from Team USA to ever medal at the Olympics.

“When I learned that I had placed, it was the greatest feeling that you could possibly have. ‘This is it,’ I thought. Never in my life could I feel so happy,” she said. “I try to be humble, like a good Christian, but when I see my name (as an Olympic medalist), I just crinkle all over. Please forgive me, God.”

Just days later came Alice’s events. Her pain had only increased. “I didn’t want to let my country down, or my family and school,” she told The Telegraph in 2014. “Everyone was pushing me.” Fortunately, just that morning, her doctor cleared her to participate in the high jump.

As she told The Kansas City Star in 1996, the massive stadium seemed to fall almost silent. “If you miss, you know, the crowd goes ‘Ahhhh.’ They hope to make you go over this bar,” she said. “When you miss you can hear this sigh.”

With her back pain, Alice only had one jump in her, but one jump is all she needed. She broke the Olympic record for high jump at 1.68 meters (approximately 5’ 6”). Great Britain’s Dorothy Tyler managed the exact same height—but only on her second jump. By having nailed it in her first, Alice took the gold in the Women’s High Jump event, following Mickey as only the second-ever Black woman from Team USA to win a medal, and the first ever to win gold.

In the medal ceremony at Wembley Stadium, King George VI of England presented the gold to her. She told NPR later, “I saw it on the board, ‘A. Coachman, U.S.A., Number One.’ I went on, stood up there, and they started playing the national anthem. It was wonderful to hear.”

Returning as national heroes, Alice and Mickey met President Truman, along with several of the other groundbreaking Black women of Team USA. A caravan of media followed Alice from New York City all the way back to Albany, Ga. Alice would go on to be spokesperson for Coca-Cola, becoming the first Black woman to endorse an international company. She appeared on billboards with Jesse Owens.

But the United States they’d returned to was still a segregated one.

At the welcome-home celebration, dubbed “Alice Coachman Day,” the auditorium crowd was separated by race. White fans sent her gifts in secret, not wanting their neighbors to know they’d given a present to a Black woman. The mayor himself left the stage without shaking her hand.

“To come back home to your own country, your own state and your own city, and you can't get a handshake from the mayor?” Alice told NPR. “Wasn't a good feeling.”

Things were worse for Mickey. Her hometown of New Orleans didn’t claim her at all. Newspapers wrongly identified her as being from Tennessee, and even when the error was corrected, there was no celebration, no party for the city’s history-making daughter. It was left to her family to organize an event. Mayor deLesseps Story Morrison, notable for his commitment to segregation, ignored the family’s invite and instead sent a telegram telling Mickey that she was “a credit to [her] race.”

Like Jesse Owens before them, Alice and Mickey learned that sports achievements couldn’t cross some divides. "When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn't ride in the front of the bus," Jesse had said of his experience in 1936. "I had to go to the back door. I couldn't live where I wanted. I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either."

Mickey told Essence Magazine in 1984, “At the time I competed, we were still sitting at the back of the bus and eating at separate lunch counters. Just imagine what it was like for me.” Despite now being a medal-winning Olympic athlete, Mickey was barred from training in the whites-only City Park. (Loyola New Orleans basketball coach “Big Jim” McCafferty later invited her to train on the Loyola University grounds.)

“I think I’ll always be a little hurt about the way New Orleans treated me,” Mickey said. “The little that was done was almost an afterthought. It was heartbreaking, really.”

Alice all but retired from competitive sports after the 1948 Olympics. She married and had two children. Mickey didn’t qualify for the 1952 Olympics and turned her attention to coaching in 1965. She also married, relocated to San Diego, Calif., and become the mother of four children.

Both Alice and Mickey started athletic clubs, providing for children like the ones they’d once been. The Alice Coachman Track and Field Foundation helped fund “kids [so they] could go to a training camp where they could get good training,” Alice told The Kansas City Star. “I never had any money, but somebody helped me and I wanted to help others.”

Of her athletic club, Mickey’s Missiles, Mickey told the San Diego Tribune in 1988, “What they’ve got here is (coaching) by world-class athletes, and I am that. I have an impeccable record for developing athletes, physically, mentally, and spiritually.”

“A coach is a doctor, a banker, a sister, a brother, a mother, a counselor,” Alice said. “Everything. How does this child feel? They go to a track meet and everybody else has got a dollar or two to spend for a drink, and they’ve got none? This is why my pocketbook stays empty. Because I remember what happened to me.”

Over the following decades, Alice was inducted into several Halls of Fame, including the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame and the United States Olympic Hall of Fame. She was honored at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Ga. The Alice Coachman Elementary School opened its doors in Atlanta in 1999 and still bears her name.

A finish-line photo in 1975 revealed that Mickey’s placement had been incorrect; she’d actually come in fourth; but, according to her family, she never learned of this change to her record. Just the same, she was inducted into the Greater New Orleans Sports Hall of Fame and the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in the late 1970s. The Times noted that, “Mickey’s Missiles, a girls’ team for athletes of all ages, [won] five state championships in 10 years and develop[ed] several champions, among them, her daughter Cynthia.” Mickey died on Aug. 23, 1996, just shy of her 70th birthday.

At the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, sprinter Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals for Team USA. “Go anyplace and people will tell you Wilma Rudolph was the first Black woman to win a medal—it’s not true,” Alice told The Birmingham News in 1997. “She came on the scene 12 years later. But she was on television.”

Alice died on July 14, 2014, at age 90. She knew well the significance of not only her participation at the Olympics, but her success there. In an interview with The New York Times in 1996, she said, "I made a difference among the Blacks, being one of the leaders. If I had gone to the games and failed, there wouldn't be anyone to follow in my footsteps. It encouraged the rest of the women to work harder and fight harder.”

Sources:

The Kansas City Star: May 19, 1996 Page 1, Page 2

The Telegraph: July 15, 2014

The New York Times: July 15, 2014

USA Track and Field: Alice Coachman

New Georgia Encyclopedia: Alice Coachman

National Women’s History Museum: Alice Coachman

The Times Leader: Aug. 25, 1996

The Times: June 14, 2000

Black Sportswoman: Audrey Patterson: An athlete to know

Verite News: This week in history: Audrey Patterson-Tyler, the first Black woman in the U.S. to win an Olympic medal, is born

Wikipedia: Alice Coachman, Audrey “Mickey” Patterson, Gilbert Academy, Jesse Owens, Wiley University, Jim McCafferty