Alice Coachman

CTL-E-6886 · Person · other · 1923–2014

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07758 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6886.

Alice Coachman (1923–2014), born Alice Marie Coachman on November 9, 1923, in Albany, Georgia, was the American high jumper who became the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that Coachman, who attended Tuskegee Institute and Albany State, won the Amateur Athletic Union outdoor high-jump championship for nine consecutive years before the 1948 London Olympics, where she leaped 5 feet 6⅛ inches (1.68 m) on her first try in the high-jump final; her nearest rival, Britain's Dorothy Tyler, matched the height only on her second try, making Coachman the only American woman to win a gold medal at those Games. USA Track & Field states the first plainly — in 1948 she became the first Black woman, from any country, to win an Olympic gold medal — and records that she won 25 national titles in all, including 10 consecutive high-jump titles from 1939 to 1948, as Britannica's total of 25 AAU indoor and outdoor titles also reflects. Britannica notes the sequence within the 1948 Games: her teammate Audrey Patterson's bronze in the 200 metres made Patterson the first Black woman to win an Olympic medal, before Coachman's gold. She retired in 1948 and died on July 14, 2014, in Albany, Georgia.

The record

• Also known as: Alice Marie Coachman, Alice Coachman Davis

Notes

Sports Encyclopedia roster CTL-SPE-0164. Firsts disposition: 'First Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal (high jump, London 1948)' ASSERTED — supported by Encyclopaedia Britannica and USA Track & Field. The 25-national-titles figure is asserted only as attributed to those two sources on this record. The Patterson distinction is kept exact: Audrey Patterson was the first Black woman to win an Olympic medal (bronze, 1948); Coachman was the first to win gold. Curator's Judgment (DRAFT): Coachman waited out two cancelled Olympics and won her only Games at 24 going on 25, on her first attempt at the winning height, with a sore back — and remains, in 1948, the entire American women's gold-medal account. Albany, Georgia segregated her homecoming ceremony; the record does not have to segregate her achievement from that fact. Photo: CLEARED — Alice Coachman. 1948 urtea.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0 (file-level license as verified on Commons; the file is a newspaper-published 1948 image, flagged in the packet report).

Referenced by

• Tuskegee University — has alumnus → this record

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Alice Coachman.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Accessed 2026-11-03. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Coachman (build store)
• USA Track & Field. “Alice Coachman.” Athlete Bios, USA Track & Field. Accessed 2026-11-03. https://www.usatf.org/athlete-bios/alice-coachman (primary source · build store)
• U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum. “Alice Coachman.” U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Hall of Fame. Accessed 2026-11-03. https://usopm.org/Alice-Coachman/ (primary source · build store)

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Record CTL-E-6886 · Combined Graph record U-07758 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 3 sources · 1 mapped relationship.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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