Alice K. Flanagan - Wilma Rudolph: Athlete and Educator

When Rudolph was growing up, African-Americans and Caucasians seemed to live in two different worlds.

Source: AP/Wideworld.

Wilma often resented the fact that white people had so many modern conveniences in their homes and yet they hired people like her mother to clean their houses and serve them breakfast in bed. "The way my mother worked," Wilma said, "somebody should have been serving her coffee in bed on Saturday mornings. Instead, she did the serving."

Many black children in the South were raised to accept life as it was. Wilma wrote in her autobiography: "A lot of black kids were raised that way down South, accepting things that weren't right. The parents thought they were protecting the children from trouble or from pain. If you accepted it, didn't rebel against it, things would be easier for you, they figured."

Religion helped many black people deal with these inequalities. Having faith and hope strengthened them and kept them from becoming bitter. The Rudolph family was very religious. Wilma's mother and father were strict Baptists. Her father was the disciplinarian in the family and ruled with an iron hand. Wilma wrote: "When my father got home, everybody got quiet. He laid down laws like, 'No church on Sunday mornings, no nothing else.' He took a lot of pride in the fact that he had twenty-two kids, and not a single one of them was ever arrested for a crime, or picked up by the police for anything, or ever went to jail."

Wilma said that her father believed education was the most important thing in life. He expected Wilma and her siblings to work hard and behave at school. He always told his children: "If you get a whipping at school, the first thing you can expect when you get home is another one." He demanded that his children show respect for all adults, no matter who they were. If he heard that one of his children disobeyed an adult, he punished the child.

Wilma was six years old before she realized that she was different from other children. Because of her disability, Wilma could not join in their games. When she tried to play with them, some children called her a "cripple." Wilma's brothers and sisters tried to protect her from the teasing, but they could not always prevent it.

At the age of six, most children were attending school. Because of Wilma's condition, she could not go to school. Instead, a teacher came three times a week to Wilma's home to bring her schoolwork. Wilma often recalled those times. "I sat around the house a lot," she said, "while the other kids my age were in school. There really wasn't much to do but dream. I would tell myself, 'I don't know yet what the escape is going to be, but Wilma, it's not going to be like this forever.'" Wilma's curious nature made her wonder about the world outside Clarksville, Tennessee. Even at that early age, she daydreamed about adventures elsewhere.

Because Wilma's family had no health insurance, her mother used home remedies to care for her. She made mixtures to rub on Wilma's leg, but they did little to improve her condition. When Wilma was six, her mother began taking her to the Meharry Hospital in Nashville, a hospital for black people founded by two black doctors. Wilma went there twice a week for four years to get massages and whirlpool treatments. The four-hour treatments were painful. For the first few years, Wilma's mother or aunt took her on the Greyhound bus to the hospital in Nashville. It took about an hour to make the 50-mile (80-kilometer) journey. The long bus ride gave Wilma a chance to get out of Clarksville. It opened up a new world for herone full of possibilities.