RCK Member Brooks Clark introduced Aime Alley Card. Ms. Card is an editor at a literary magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is also the author of a book about the famous Tennessee State University women’s track team from the 1950s through the early 1980s entitled The Tigerbelles: Olympic Legends from Tennessee State, published in 2016. It is the story of the all Black women’s track team, which included the legendary Wilma Rudolph, who found Olympic glory at the 1960 games in Rome, and the coach of the team, Ed Temple, whose tenure as coach ran from 1952 to 1984.
Ms. Card’s grandfather played football at the University of Tennessee for General Neyland, and later coached the Vanderbilt track team. Her father ran on the Vanderbilt track team for her grandfather during the time that the Tigerbelles at Tennessee State were on top of the track world. Ms. Card first showed a video about the Tigerbelles track team that included interviews with one of the stars of the Tigerbelles team, Barbara Jones, and Coach Temple.
Temple began coaching the Tennessee State women’s track team at a very early age, in 1952. His breakthrough, of sorts, was when Mae Faggs, from New Jersey, went to Tennessee State. She was the leader of the team, became an Olympic medal winner, and according to Barbara Jones, she was the one who put the “fight” in all of the rest of the team. She emphasized that Coach Temple gave his athletes the confidence that they could accomplish things beyond their dreams.
Wilma Rudolph was from Clarksville, Tennessee, and had polio as a child. She wore a leg brace for several years. Coach Temple first noticed Rudolph when he refereed a high school basketball game in which she played. Rudolph first competed in the Olympic games in 1956 as a 16 year old, and won a bronze medal in a relay race. The 1956 Olympics were in Australia. Rudolph and several of her teammates had rarely been out of the segregated South and were pleasantly surprised that in Melbourne they could eat, practice, stay and play with their white teammates and opponents. Barbara Jones described Rudolph as a rather ordinary athlete until the late 1950s, when her teammates and Coach Temple worked with her to improve her rather awkward running style. The result was that in the 1960 Olympics she won three gold medals.
Ralph Boston, famous long jumper who lived and worked in Knoxville for several years, was at Tennessee State in the late 1950s. He won an Olympic gold medal in 1960. While he was the only male athlete from Tennessee State to be there, there were eight women from the Tigerbelles on the 1960 Olympic team.
Temple was a strict disciplinarian, and trained his athletes hard. At times they ran in weighted shoes, and ran sprints up hills. He conducted a boot camp for his athletes in the summer, and emphasized constant repetition, such as handoffs in relay races. But, in her work on the book, Ms. Card learned that all of his athletes respected and even loved him.
When asked what he hoped would be his legacy of his tenure as coach of the Tigerbelles, Temple noted that all of his forty Tigerbelles who became Olympians graduated from college, and went back to their communities in various leadership roles.