07/24/2025
DeHart Hubbard: In Spite of Handicaps
In 1927, Ralph Bullock, the Secretary of Boys’ Work of the National Council of the YMCA published a collection of eighteen biographical essays about inspirational Black leaders then alive in the United States. Cincinnatian DeHart Hubbard, the youngest of these heroes, was not yet twenty-five years old. Hubbard was at the time the most recent Olympic gold medalist in the broad jump (now called the long jump) for his performance in the 1924 games in Paris, and the world-record holder at 25 feet 10 7/8 inches achieved during his last college track meet in 1925. When Hubbard found his way into the book, called “In Spite of Handicaps,” he was also (briefly) the Junior Secretary of the segregated Ninth Street YMCA in downtown Cincinnati.
The book cultivated a target audience of Black boys connected to programs in the “Y.” Naturally and appropriately, the essay traced Hubbard back to his humble beginnings. Bullock reported that DeHart Hubbard entered Frederick Douglass Public School – still segregated in Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills neighborhood – in 1909, at the age of six. At the age of ten he entered his first track meet at the school. “Although a seventy-five pounder, he entered the ninety-five-pound class. He was beaten. He came back again and was beaten again.” It was two years, the biographer noted, before he won this first victory. He quoted the young champion to draw the moral: “That was a long time to wait – but it was worth it.”
The story continued the pathos. At the primarily white Walnut Hills High School DeHart would run and jump for the school; by the end of his freshman year he was the best broad jumper at more than 17 feet. At the end of his sophomore year he entered his first serious high school track meet – an invitational event at the University of Cincinnati. He managed to qualify for the finals wearing ordinary gym shoes. A “grad” found him a pair of spiked track shoes. Properly shod, “he became the sensation of the meet, winning the one-hundred-yard dash in ten and four-fifths seconds, the broad jump at twenty feet six inches, and the hop, step, and jump at forty-three feet.”
The little essay about Hubbard, who was still basking in the glow of Olympic victory and his world record, captures a moment in the history of Black sports. Hubbard was the only person in Bullock’s book owing to athletic prowess. Moreover, his successes were all cast as individual efforts by a boy with nothing but native talent on his side.
Yet Bullock appropriately intermixed Hubbard’s ascendency that of two other African American athletes a few years older. The YMCA boys’ secretary told of “Sol” Butler, a Black twelve-letter man at University of Dubuque in Iowa, who won both the 100-yard dash and the broad jump at the Penn Relays in 1919. He enlisted in the army in time to compete in the 1919 Inter-Allied games in Paris, a military competition offered as a sort of make-up contest for the 1916 Olympics, cancelled owing to World War I. Butler won the gold in the broad jump at the 1919 games and was favored at the 1920 Olympics until he suffered an injury in his first jump.
The other Black broad jumper, “Ned” Gourdin, a high school star in Cambridge, Massachusetts was recruited by Harvard. There he became the first American (of any color) to jump more than 25 feet. After graduating from the college he enrolled in the university’s law school. In 1924 he got his degree in law and a few weeks later won the silver medal at the Paris Olympics where Hubbard won the gold. For the purposes of the book “In Spite of all Odds,” it seemed that all these athletes somehow did it on their own.
It was Dehart Hubbard himself who told a more complicated story of this Black dominance in track in general, and especially the broad jump. In the spring of 1924 – a few months before the Olympics – Hubbard wrote an article in tribute to Hunter Johnston, a Black athletic trainer at the University of Pittsburgh. Employed as a strength and conditioning coach for the football team, Johnson also ran a program called Scholastics of Pittsburgh where he developed young Black track athletes. Johnson also allowed promising Black high school students to practice in Pittsburgh. His Scholastics included both Hubbard, and several years earlier, Sol Butler. That is to say, with all due respect to the YMCA biography, Hubbard in fact benefitted from a strong tradition of race-conscious coaching.
- Geoff Sutton
