Bonnie St. John

CTL-E-6937 · Person · other · contemporary

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07809 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6937.

Bonnie St. John (born November 7, 1964, in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in San Diego, California) is an American former Paralympic alpine skier whose right leg was amputated below the knee at age five. At the Innsbruck 1984 Paralympic Winter Games she won three medals in Para alpine skiing — silver in the alpine combination and bronze medals in the slalom and giant slalom — becoming the first African-American woman to win a Paralympic or Olympic medal at a Winter Games. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1986 with a degree in government, won a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where she earned a master's degree in economics in 1990, and later served as a director for the National Economic Council in the Clinton White House before a career as an author and speaker.

Notes

Sports Encyclopedia roster CTL-SPE-0231. Firsts disposition: ASSERTED — 'first African-American woman to win a Paralympic or Olympic medal at a Winter Games (Innsbruck 1984: silver, alpine combination; bronze, slalom and giant slalom),' supported by two authoritative sources in this record (International Paralympic Committee and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum), with The HistoryMakers concurring. Harvard attendance VERIFIED on all three sources (A.B. government, magna cum laude, 1986) and wired as a has_alumnus edge from CTL-E-4210. Curator's Judgment (DRAFT): St. John medaled at a Winter Games before she could legally drink, then out-credentialed the institution that crowned her — Harvard, a Rhodes, the White House. The record holds both careers because she refused to choose between them. Photo: HELD — no depicting Commons file found (see visual asset basis).

Referenced by

• Harvard University — has alumnus → this record

Sources

• International Paralympic Committee. "First African-American woman to win a Winter Games medal: 'an incredible milestone'." February 17, 2023. Accessed 2026-11-03. (primary source · build store)
• U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum. "Bonnie St. John: first Black American to medal in the Winter Games." Accessed 2026-11-03. (primary source · build store)
• The HistoryMakers. "Bonnie St. John's Biography." Accessed 2026-11-03. (build store)

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Record CTL-E-6937 · Combined Graph record U-07809 · 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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