09/25/2026
George Poage finished thirty yards behind the winner, and that race still made history. On August 31, 1904, in St. Louis, the 23-year-old hurdler became the first African American to win an Olympic medal. The organizers of those Games would not let Black fans sit with white ones. So how did the country he ran for manage to forget him?
He ran that final against just three other men, on Francis Field at Washington University. The hurdles stood two and a half feet tall, six inches lower than the usual height for the race.
The winner hit the eighth hurdle so hard he nearly fell, then held on by two yards. George Poage came home third, and the next day he took a second bronze in the 200-meter hurdles.
It was a small Games, with only twelve nations and just 62 athletes from outside North America. For a Black runner, the harder question was whether to show up at all.
Black leaders had urged Black athletes to stay away from those Games in protest. Poage entered four events. He also ran the 60 meters and the 400 meters, with no medal in either.
The program that summer also carried a set of races under the heading Anthropological Days. The entries were sorted by group, with separate races for Africans, Filipinos, Sioux and others.
His two bronze medals came out of that same Olympic program.
Poage's road to that program started in a small Wisconsin city. Back in 1884, his family moved north from Hannibal, Missouri, where he was born on November 6, 1880. His father and mother had both been born into slavery, and each had received freedom papers.
In Wisconsin his father worked as a coachman for a wealthy lumber family. He died of tuberculosis in 1888, and the family was left with little to live on.
After that, the boy's mother kept the family going by cooking and keeping house for rich families in town. Her son stayed in school, and in June 1899 he graduated second in a class of 25 at La Crosse High School. He gave the salutatory address, and he titled it "A Civil Phase of the Race Problem."
He was eighteen years old, speaking to the assembly, and that was the subject he chose.
You may have read that he was the school's first Black graduate. He was the third, after a young woman in 1887 and his own older sister in 1897.
That fall he went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. No Black athlete had run for the school before him. In 1902 the track coach left town and put him in charge of the team.
The newspapers had their own names for him. They called him the "colored wonder" and "the crack colored sprinter of the Wisconsin team."
He had a coach's trust and a newspaper's nickname, and only one of them used his name.
His senior thesis studied the economic condition of Black people in Georgia from 1860 to 1900. When he graduated in 1903, the caption under his yearbook photo borrowed a line from Homer: "Of matchless swiftness; but of silent pace."
The university did not want to let him go. "It will seriously cripple Wisconsin on the track were George Poage to leave," the Janesville Daily Gazette wrote on June 25, 1903.
He stayed for graduate classes in history, and the athletic department hired him as a trainer for the football team. In June 1904 he won conference titles in the 440-yard dash and the 220-yard hurdles. He was the first Black athlete to take an individual title at that meet.
When his Olympic races were over, Poage did not go home. He stayed in the same city and served a year as a school principal. Then he joined Charles Sumner High School, the first high school for Black students west of the Mississippi.
At Sumner he headed the English department. He taught composition, literature and Latin, helped coach the teams, and ran debate and theater.
Kids at Sumner had an Olympic medalist grading their compositions.
His years at Sumner ran until the spring of 1914, when rumors went around about three unmarried men on the faculty. Poage was one of them.
A committee of parents, school board members and civic leaders filed complaints against the three. The city's Argus newspaper reported that "it is said the committee made a very strong case."
The same report said "a startling condition of affairs was disclosed." Nobody ever made public what that condition was.
Poage wrote a letter of resignation and left.
The other two men fought the charges. According to a 2024 account by Wisconsin writer Michail Takach, they won a settlement and got their jobs back.
Ten years in that building, and Poage gave it back in one letter.
He never taught in a school again. Where he went next is not settled. One former student remembered a farm in Minnesota, but no land record of it has been found.
By 1920 he had moved to Chicago, where he spent four years working in a restaurant. In 1924 the post office hired him as a clerk.
He stayed nearly thirty years, until he retired in the 1950s. The University of Wisconsin's own history of him gives the reason. In the Jim Crow years, the post office was the best employer many Black Chicagoans could find.
He had a history degree and a decade of teaching at Sumner, and he spent the rest of his working life as a clerk.
Poage died of pneumonia in Chicago on April 11, 1962. He was 81, not the 82 that many accounts give.
They buried him in Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois. For more than fifty years, nothing on the grave said who he was.
That silence broke in August 2016, when the historian writing Poage's biography was talking with his great-nephew, the Reverend Lawrence Jenkins. Jenkins leaned over and told him, "Of course, you know my great-uncle was gay."
"Our George Coleman Poage had to hide his intellect and his academic accomplishments as much as he had to hide his sexual orientation," Jenkins said. "The racist society in which he lived had no room for either."
Two things he had to hide, and the country only ever asked about his speed.
Jenkins had one more thing to say about his great-uncle. "The miracle of his survival under those conditions is what stands out to me," he said.
According to Takach, a headstone now stands over the grave in Blue Island. It carries Poage's graduation photograph and the line from his yearbook, "Of matchless swiftness, but of silent pace."
Swift was his to earn. Silent is the half the rest of us can still do something about.
