The title of the picture book is When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball. It runs to just 33 pages, contains illustrations on just about each one, and tells the uplifting story of how the future world’s fastest woman grew up, overcoming polio, poverty and prejudice in segregated Tennessee in the 1940s.
An uplifting yarn, you could see it inspiring a child of primary school age who is battling some sort of adversity. Or, at the very least, helping kids remember a somewhat forgotten icon who changed female athletics forever when she won gold in the 100m, 200m and 4 x100m at the Rome Olympics in 1960.
On the form demanding that When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball be removed from circulation in the Prosper Independent School District outside Dallas, a parent complained that “It opines prejudice based on race”.
The book had been brought to the person’s attention when their child, as part of a classroom reading assignment, was asked to write a few sentences about how “Ms Rudolph’s life might be different today than it was in the 1940s”.
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Welcome to America in the 21st century where there are ongoing and sustained attempts to ban books containing references to the more uncomfortable aspects of the nation’s history.
In Century City, Florida, Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher (surely a first), also asked the authorities to review When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball under the local “Request for the Reconsideration of Educational Media” provision.
She claimed the book contained “race-baiting” and reiterated the Texan complaint about it “opining prejudice based on race”. She also reckoned the work “trashes and puts down those who are not black” and is guilty of “white-shaming”. Because it tells how Rudolph grew up during an era of whites-only water fountains and black people being forced to sit at the back of buses.
“Vicki Baggett said she challenged the book because she believed it violated the Stop WOKE Act legislation pushed by Governor Ron DeSantis and signed into law in April 2022,” wrote Judd Legum in an article about Baggett’s attempts to have 150 books banned.
“The legislation prohibits instructing students that they ‘must feel guilt, anguish ... because of actions in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.’”
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According to PEN America, 1,648 different books were banned by school districts between July 2021 and June 2022. At the behest of parents riled up by bloviating talkshow hosts and social media hysteria, titles were taken off classroom and library shelves across 32 states and four million students were affected.
Part of an organised and well-funded nationwide initiative by conservatives, the campaign pressures school boards to remove from circulation any publications that touch on LGBTQ+ issues, segregation, slavery, civil rights, and all manner of other perceived hot topics.
Witness Maus, Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel about the Holocaust, somehow falling foul of these self-declared censors.
“My biography gives facts, not opinions,” wrote Mark Wealand, author of When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball.
“In other words, it tells truths, specifically that many white people in the United States acted with prejudice, sometimes extreme, against other people solely because of their skin colour. ‘Wilma’ was just one of many books with facts that some wanted removed. Also on the list was All American Boys, Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely’s story of a black child killed by police, and White Bird, RJ Palacio’s book about a Jewish teen living in France after the Nazis seized power.”
The Rudolph book mentions her mother working as a maid and a cook for wealthy white folk and how, as a young child, she wondered why they had so much luxury while her family had so little.
Just another detail in her remarkable life. Born two months premature, the 20th of 22 children, she endured double pneumonia, scarlet fever and chickenpox before a bout with polio left her with a crooked leg, a foot turned inward and years wearing clunky metal braces. The girl who doctors worried might never walk properly became an athletic star, first in basketball then on the track.
Not long after taking bronze at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 as a 16-year-old high school student, she had her first child, Yolanda, raised by her sister in Missouri so Randolph could continue her college education and train for Rome.
When she returned to Clarksville in triumph with three golds, having had a global impact that made her an even bigger star at those Olympics than Muhammad Ali, she took a stand, refusing to participate in any local celebration unless it was fully integrated.
Just three years after her homecoming parade and victory banquet were the town’s first-ever non-segregated events, she participated in a protest at one of its remaining whites-only drive-in restaurants.
By then, she had hung up her spikes and embarked on a peripatetic professional career that included stints as a teacher, a track coach, and the United States goodwill ambassador to French West Africa.
Although none of the various attempts to ban the book about her have yet succeeded, imagine a country where people were actively trying to prevent children reading about this extraordinary character. Imagine? We don’t have to.
