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Wilma Rudolph was an American sprinter who overcame years of childhood paralysis from polio to become a world-record-holding Olympic champion and international sports icon at age 21. The first woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games, in 1960 she was proclaimed the fastest woman in the world.[1]
A daughter of Ed Rudolph and Blanche Pettus, she was born 23 June 1940 in St. Bethlehem, Tennessee.[2] "St. B" was its own community when Wilma was born, and has since been annexed into the city of Clarksville, Tennessee. Her fame and popularity made her presence at civil rights protests almost instantly effective in her Clarksville, which fully desegregated all public facilities in 1963.[1]
Wilma married William Ward in 1961;[3] they had no children and divorced about a year and a half later,[4] at around the same time that she graduated from Tennessee State University with a degree in elementary education in 1963. She retired from competition at the peak of her career and taught at Cobb Elementary School, where she attended as a child.[1]
In 1963 she married Robert Eldridge,[5] her high school sweetheart and the father of her first child, born in their senior year of high school.[1] They had three additional children.
Her autobiography, Wilma: The Story of Wilma Rudolph, was published in 1977.[1]
She was 54 when she died of cancer on 12 November 1994 in Nashville;[1] she was buried at Edgefield Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery in Clarksville, Montgomery County, Tennessee.[2]
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