For two athletes who revolutionized their sport, shifted culture and changed the course of history, Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes are not spoken of nearly enough. In 1932, the duo became the first Black women to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team. And four years later, in ’36 at the Summer Games in Berlin, Pickett became the first Black woman to compete for the U.S. While hardly household names, Pickett and Stokes deserve credit for serving as pioneering forces in track and field and for progressing women’s sports forward well before the creation of Title IX.
Although their story is arguably under-told, there is one person who did a deep-dive into the American sprinters’ history: award-winning filmmaker Deborah Riley Draper directed Olympic Pride, American Prejudice, a 2016 documentary dedicated to telling the tale of the 18 Black athletes that represented the United States at the 1936 games. In 2020, Draper also authored a book by the same title.
AP
