By Josh Hanna
Atlanta claimed him as a native son. Milwaukee honored him as Marquette’s finest. South Central Los Angeles celebrated him after his Olympic medals. But Ralph Metcalfe was a Chicagoan, from the day he arrived as a seven-year-old until the day he died a four-term U.S. Congressman. It just took time for the city to give him his proper due.
Ralph Metcalfe bests Jesse Owens in a race two years before the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where Owens won four gold medals.
The Metcalfes arrived on the South Side in May 1917 as part of what the Chicago Defender’s Robert S. Abbott branded the “Great Northern Drive.” They were but five of the 50,000 blacks who fled the Jim Crow South over a five-year period in search of a Promised Land. But they did not find it. The city’s worst race riots erupted in the summer of 1919, leaving dozens dead, hundreds injured, and thousands homeless.
While the family took in lodgers in their rented home on South Park (today’s Martin Luther King Drive) and his mother worked as a seamstress to supplement his father’s income from the Union Stock Yards, Ralph worked odd jobs from age seven. As a student at Doolittle Elementary, he served as a tailor’s errand boy then delivered groceries. Needing to arise by 3:30 a.m. every morning, he got to bed early. In 1933 he told the Milwaukee Journal, “It was usually still light outside as I went to bed, and more than once when I heard the kids playing outside, I wanted to cry.”
Just as Chicago began to eclipse New York as the capital of black athletics in the 1920s, young Ralph began to run. At first, he tried to keep pace with his older brother Clarence in preparation for half-mile races by running laps around the block at East 33rd Street. But the younger Metcalfe tired quickly. Competing at a nearby Douglas playground, he soon discovered that sprinting suited him better. In citywide meets he regularly won the 50- and 100-yard dashes as a seventh grader and eighth grader at Wendell Phillips Junior High School.
By the time he became a Tilden Tech Blue Devil he garnered national attention, running the 100-yard dash in under “even time,” or 10 seconds. It was more than enough to attract the attention of Con Jennings, the Marquette coach. Seeing the Catholic university’s outpouring of affection for Richard Moody, a fellow black track star from Peoria who had died recently, sealed the deal for Ralph.
The ‘Windy City Tornado’
The 1932 NCAA Track & Field Championships were a homecoming for the 22-year-old Metcalfe. Held at the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field, a mile’s walk from his first home on Vernon Avenue, the meet capped an undefeated sophomore season for the Marquette star. On that Saturday in June, in his first year of eligibility (freshman were ineligible), he won the 100-yard dash by two yards and the straightaway 220 by six, equaling or bettering the official world records (though neither time was ever ratified). The wins would mark the first of three consecutive NCAA double-sprint titles—one more than Jesse Owens would amass.
The 5-foot-11, 180-pound Metcalfe was the tallest, and most powerful athlete in the field—“Apollo” to at least one fawning scribe and “brawny” to U.S. Olympic officials. In an era before starting blocks, Ralph took longer to reach top speed from the footholds he dug in the cinder tracks. But once he got going, he was the world’s fastest closer. Owens himself claimed that Metcalfe’s “thunderclap finish” was the “greatest of any runner who ever lived.”
Named the meet’s outstanding performer, he became the presumptive favorite seven weeks before the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1932. Long nicknamed the “Marquette Marvel,” the black-owned Pittsburgh Courier now dubbed him the “Windy City Tornado”.
Ralph Metcalfe Day
After winning silver and bronze medals in the Los Angeles Olympics, both under controversial circumstances—the 100-meter photo finish and the 200-meter wrong starting position—newsmen and politicians lauded Metcalfe for his athleticism and fine sportsmanship.
Atlanta Mayor James Lee Key declared Sept. 23 “Ralph Metcalfe Day” — this, in a city that would have denied him the chance to ever compete against the world’s best sprinters. In calling for Atlanta’s residents to honor their hometown hero the mayor conceded, “if he had remained here, he probably would have been a rose ‘born to blush unseen, its fragrance wasted on the desert air.’” An exhibition race pitting Ralph against black runners from Clark University and Tuskegee (Georgians prohibited integrated races), sponsored by Booker T. Washington High School and set to be run in Ponce de León Park, home of the minor league baseball team the Atlanta Crackers, never materialized.
Metcalfe’s mother Marie, “unalterably opposed” to her son travelling to her former home to face the “indignities of being a Negro in the South”, had written twice to Marquette’s President, Father Magee. She urged him to cancel the planned trip and let Ralph focus on his studies. As if reminding Magee of her son’s greatness, she used stationery from Los Angeles, emblazoned with the Olympic rings and pictures of the Olympic Village.
As the Chicago Tribune later highlighted, he was a neglected athletic hero: “In the faraway corners of the world… the deeds of Ralph Metcalfe have been broadcast to the credit of his city. But upon returning from his grand and inspiring triumphs, the mayor, the governor, and the citizens have never seen fit to welcome him.”
Ralph Metcalfe and Eddie Tolan get together at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Only later, after he began his three-year reign as world’s fastest man, did proper attention arrive. In his autobiography, Jesse Owens wrote that Metcalfe was “the greatest sprinter of his day… the best. Me included.” The Buckeye Bullet wasn’t just being kind. In 1933, 1934 and 1935, Metcalfe beat Owens in the AAU Championships. He beat everyone in every race he contested from 40 yards to 200 meters. Not until 1936 would Jesse establish his superiority. Metcalfe’s long-sought gold medal came, at last, in the 1936 Berlin Olympic men’s 4×100-meter relay when he took the baton from Jesse himself. Reflecting on his own career, Owens later called Ralph (and 1932 double-gold medalist Eddie Tolan) his idols.
Author of Pemaquid Peninsula: A Midcoast Maine History, former Ancestry.com executive and member of the International Society of Olympic Historians, Josh Hanna is working on a book about the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. He can be reached at joshhanna71@gmail.com.
