Rita Liberti – författare

The winner of three gold medals in track at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Wilma Rudolph has been portrayed and remembered across a wide range of settings and sites over the past half-century. As an African American female born into poverty whose childhood disability left her temporarily unable to walk without the aid of a leg brace, Rudolph captured our attention then and continues to fascinate new generations of children and adults alike. The markers of Rudolph’s identity, joined with her athletic success, create a quintessential ragsto-riches tale, one repeatedly narrated over the decades.(Re)Presenting Wilma Rudolph explores the major episodes and sites of memory across the track legend’s life and death. Analyzing newspaper and magazine accounts, dozens of children’s books, and a television movie, among other materials, Liberti and Smith highlight the range of ways meaning was constructed around Rudolph and her accomplishments on the track. Rather than atraditional biography, this book unpacks the collective memories we create and share about the Olympian. A close reading of the stories that are remembered and circulated about Rudolph not only underscore the athlete’s agency but simultaneously minimize and even erase the ways in which racism and sexism impacted her life. The memorials honoring Rudolph tell us far more about the moment of their creation and the storytellers than they do about the track great.

Wilma Rudolph was born black in Jim Crow Tennessee. The twentieth of 22 children, she spent most of her childhood in bed suffering from whooping cough, scarlet fever, and pneumonia. She lost the use of her left leg due to polio and wore leg braces. With dedication and hard work, she became a gifted runner, earning a track and field scholarship to Tennessee State. In 1960, she became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games. Her underdog story made her into a media darling, and she was the subject of countless articles, a television movie, children’s books, biographies, and she even featured on a U.S. postage stamp. In this work, Smith and Liberti consider not only Rudolph’s achievements, but also the ways in which those achievements are interpreted and presented as historical fact. Theories of gender, race, class, and disability collide in the story of Wilma Rudolph, and Smith and Liberti examine this collision in an effort to more fully understand how history is shaped by the cultural concerns of the present. In doing so, the authors engage with the metanarratives which define the American experience and encourage more complex and nuanced interrogations of contemporary heroic legacy.