Dinner with Lee
Sure.
Swollen Members. Silversun Pickups. Rise Against. Millencolin.
It's a sweater!
Pushing Daisies. Rob and Big.
1892 -- Marshall "Major" Taylor wins his first race at age 13. 1894 -- The League of American Wheelmen, then governing body for the sport, bans blacks from amateur racing. 1896 -- Taylor unofficially breaks two world track records. His feat offends white sensibilities and he is banned from Indy's Capital City track. However, a racing board in New York, where the color line is opposed, agrees to register him as a pro. 1897 -- The "colored cyclone," as the newspapers call him, is forced to abandon the quest for sprint points champion when Southern race promoters refuse him entry. At one race, a competitor pulls Taylor from his bike and chokes him into unconsciousness. 1898 -- Taylor holds seven world records, including the 1-mile paced standing start (1:41.4). 1899 -- Taylor wins the world 1-mile championship in Montreal, defeating Boston rival Tom Butler. Taylor is the second black world champion athlete in any sport, after bantamweight boxer George Dixon's title fights in 1890-91 and precedes heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson by nine years. It would be nearly half a century before baseball's Jackie Robinson is integrated into the Brooklyn Dodgers. 1899 -- Taylor knocks the 1-mile record down to 1:19, reaching 45.46 mph on a track in Chicago. 1900 -- Thwarted in previous seasons by racism, Taylor is finally allowed to complete the national championship series and becomes American sprint champion. 1901 -- Taylor competes in Europe. He beats every European champion. 1902 -- Taylor's racing career makes him one of the wealthiest blacks in the country. 1920s -- Various debts and serious illness sap Taylor's fortune. 1932 -- Taylor dies in the charity ward of Cook County Hospital at age 53. He is buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. 1948 -- A group of former pro bike racers, with money donated by Schwinn Bicycle Company, has Taylor's remains exhumed and reburied in a more prominent part of Mount Glenwood Cemetery in Illinois with a bronze plaque that says: "World's champion bicycle racer who came up the hard way without hatred in his heart, an honest, courageous, and God-fearing, clean-living, gentlemanly athlete. A credit to his race who always gave out his best. Gone but not forgotten."