By Frank Fitzpatrick for the Philadelphia Inquirer: Just a few blocks from the 13-year-old Franklin Field, where the young black man with the long stride had become one of Philadelphia's best-known athletes, a great crowd gathered outside his parents' house at 3323 Woodland Ave.
Later on that chilled December day in 1908, a long procession of horse-drawn carriages and a few motor cars headed west to Collingdale's Eden Cemetery, where John Baxter Taylor was mourned thoroughly, eulogized grandly, and buried at 26.
As the 117th Penn Relays are set to begin in earnest on Thursday, the story of Taylor, one of that event's earliest heroes, has been obscured by time. Though the annual competition is dominated now by black athletes from the United States, Jamaica, and elsewhere, this proud pioneer from Philadelphia is recalled only by the most ardent of the relay carnival's devotees.
Yet from a world where black citizens were pushed into the shadows, Taylor burst into bright focus. A graduate of Central High and the University of Pennsylvania and one of the nation's earliest black veterinarians, he would become the first African American to win an Olympic gold medal.
Hundreds more have followed, including Jesse Owens, 28 years later. Yet few African American Olympians had careers as groundbreaking, as widely admired, or as tragically brief as the gentlemanly Taylor's.
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