COACHMAN, ALICE (aka Alice Coachman Davis, 9 November 1923– 14 July 2014), American track and field athlete specializing in high jump and the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal. Born in Albany, Georgia, the fifth of ten children, Coachman grew up poor and was at first discouraged from participating in athletic training. Racial segregation and discrimination in the South restricted her to an all-Black school system, but also opened a space for her to participate in high school sports, as many school administrators of the era (who generally discouraged female participation in organized sports) made the racist assumption that most Black females were natural athletes, and therefore made the exception to encourage their training at historically Black colleges and universities and elite sports networks like the Amateur Athletic Union.
Prior to high school, Coachman trained by running shoeless along local roads and improvised her own equipment to practice jumping. She became a track and field star her first year at Madison High School in 1938. As a sophomore, she started competing nationally.
She was recruited by Cleveland Abbott, a renowned coach, to participate in a high school feeder program for the Tuskegee Institute Tigerettes. Coachman left Georgia for Tuskegee, Alabama, and thrived under Abbott’s training, claiming ten national championships in high jump from 1939 to 1948, alongside numerous other titles in other events. After graduating from Tuskegee with a degree in dressmaking, she returned to her hometown and enrolled in Albany State College to pursue a Bachelor of Science. She was at Albany when she was invited to compete in the 1948 summer Olympic Games in London, where she salvaged an underwhelming American performance and placed first in high jump, matching British athlete Dorothy Tyler’s leap of 5 feet 6.5 inches, but with fewer misses. The only American woman to place first in track and field that year, she received her gold medal from George VI.
Following her win, Coachman attracted the attention of political liberals. She was received at the White House by Harry Truman and also met the former first lady and Chairperson of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt. Although she returned to Albany as an Olympic medalist, ultimately, Coachman returned to a Jim Crow South. Nonetheless, Coachman’s track career solidified the Tuskegee Institute’s prominence in sports. She pioneered women athletes’ promotional relationships with companies such as Coca-Cola, and later became a teacher, mentor, and coach. Although racism and sexism deprived her of much of the mainstream and popular recognition that she deserved in the decades following her achievements, by the 1970s, she received greater acknowledgement and was inducted into the National Track & Field Hall of Fame and Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.