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Description of  The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero

In the tradition of The Boys in the Boat and Seabiscuit, a fascinating portrait of a groundbreaking but forgotten figurethe remarkable Major Taylor, the black man who broke racial barriers by becoming the worlds fastest and most famous bicyclist at the height of the Jim Crow era. In the 1890s, the nations promise of equality had failed spectacularly. While slavery had ended with the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws still separated blacks from whites, and the excesses of the Gilded Age created an elite upper class. Amidst this world arrived Major Taylor, a young black man who wanted to compete in the nations most popular and mostly white mans sport, cycling. Birdie Munger, a white cyclist who once was the worlds fastest man, declared that he could help turn the young black athlete into a champion. Twelve years before boxer Jack Johnson and fifty years before baseball player Jackie Robinson, Taylor faced racism at nearly every turnespecially by whites who feared he would disprove their stereotypes of blacks. In The Worlds Fastest Man, years in the writing, investigative journalist Michael Kranish reveals new information about Major Taylor based on a rare interview with his daughter and other never-before-uncovered details from Taylors life. Kranish shows how Taylor indeed became a world champion, traveled the world, was the toast of Paris, and was one of the most chronicled black men of his day. From a moment in time just before the arrival of the automobile when bicycles were king, the populace was booming with immigrants, and enormous societal changes were about to take place, The Worlds Fastest Man shines a light on a dramatic moment in American historythe gateway to the twentieth century.