An overdue honor of Major proportions.

PositionSPORTS

Byline: Mark Conti

COLUMN: CYCLING

A three-time Tour de France winner, Olympians, national champions and world champions traveled thousands of miles to see it. Local officials, state legislators, three generations of relatives, an official from the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame, authors and students from local schools eagerly attended.

Cyclists from Minnesota, Tennessee, Indianapolis, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Boston and, of course, Central Massachusetts converged on Worcester last Wednesday for the unveiling of the Marshall Walter "Major" Taylor statue at the Worcester Public Library.

Rising 10 feet high and standing more than 12 feet wide, the two-sided sculpture wall stands as a monument to not just a world champion cyclist who made a home in Worcester at the turn of the 20th century, but a black man of courage who persevered with dignity in a white man's world, the era of Jim Crow segregation.

At its annual convention in Louisville, Ky., in 1894, the League of American Wheelmen, a national cycling organization, approved an amendment restricting membership to white cyclists. The measure passed, 127-54, with the Massachusetts delegation voting unanimously against it, according to Andrew Ritchie in his book, "Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer."

Not long removed from the Civil War and decades before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947, Major Taylor, known as the "Worcester Whirlwind," set seven world records and won the 1-mile world championship in Montreal in 1899. Taylor, also called the "Colored Cyclone," accomplished these feats amid racial bias and during the height of cycling, which was more popular than baseball as Americans filled velodromes and stadiums to watch sprints and six-day races. He overcame tactical hostility on the bike as well as threats and assaults from white riders.

During a 1-mile race in Taunton in September 1897, Taylor finished second to Tom Butler. The third-place finisher, William Becker, a white rider from Minneapolis, grabbed Taylor by the neck, threw him off his bike and choked him into unconsciousness. According to Ritchie's book, the crowd reacted strongly against Becker, who was not arrested by police and was later fined $50 by the League of American Wheelmen.

A crane put the granite and bluestone monument with bronze bas relief sculptures of Taylor in place at the south entrance of the library at Salem Street and Library Lane, but the...

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