The World’s Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America’s First Black Sports Hero Audiobook (Free)

In the tradition from the Boys in the Boat and Seabiscuit, a remarkable portrait of the groundbreaking but forgotten determine—the remarkable Major Taylor, the black man who broke racial barriers by becoming the world’s fastest and most famous bicyclist in the height of the Jim Crow era.

In the 1890s, the nation’s 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 from the Gilded Age produced about The World’s Fastest Guy: The Remarkable Life of Cyclist Main Taylor, America’s First Dark Sports Hero at the very top upper class. Amidst this globe arrived Main Taylor, a young black guy who wanted to compete in the country’s most well-known and mainly white man’s sport, cycling. Birdie Munger, a white cyclist who was previously the globe’s fastest guy, declared that he may help change the young dark athlete right into a champion.

Twelve years before boxer Jack Johnson and fifty years before baseball player Jackie Robinson, Taylor experienced racism at nearly every turn—especially by whites who feared he would disprove their stereotypes of blacks. In The World’s Fastest Man, years in the composing, investigative journalist Michael Kranish shows new information about Major Taylor predicated on a rare interview with his child and other never-before-uncovered details from Taylor’s lifestyle. Kranish shows how Taylor certainly became a global champion, traveled the world, was the toast of Paris, and was perhaps one of the most chronicled black guys of his day.

From a moment in time right before the arrival of the auto when bicycles had been ruler, the populace was booming with immigrants, and enormous societal changes had been about to happen, The Globe’s Fastest Man shines a light on the dramatic moment in American background—the gateway towards the twentieth century.