The "On Barney Ewell And The Race For Educational Equity! Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading a few interesting stories about Olympian Henry "Barney" Ewell.  The year is 1948 and Henry Norwood Ewell is 30 years old and in his first Olympics.  A bit too old for trying to compete against youngsters in their early 20s, but that's just how it was due to WWII.  In the archival footage from the London Games, he crosses the finish line in the 100-meter dash and throws up his arms in jubilation, leaping with joy.  But, his teammate Harrison Dillard, running in the outside lane and five years Ewell's junior, has edged him out by a whisker.  In the 200-meter race, Ewell loser to a teammate, Mel Patton, by a fraction of a fraction of a second.  Although the 4x100 meter relay team of Dillard, Patton, Ewell and Lorenzo Wright wins its race handily, the judges call foul, awarding the gold to the all-white British squad.  Ewell, one judge claims, passed the baton outside of the zone.  So...the team protests and sure enough, the judges reverse their decision, awarding the Americans gold.  The 1940 and 1944 games had both been canceled due to WWII.  Ewell would have been 22 and 26 instead of 30 years old.  As a runner, he would have been at the peak of his prowess.  The 1936 Olympics had taken place in Berlin, where the great Jesse Owens famously thwarted Adolf Hitler's hopes of showcasing white supremacy.  In '36, Ewell was still attending J.P. McCaskey High School, one of two Black students in the school's inaugural class.  That year "the Lancaster Flash," or "another Jesse Owens," as Ewell was then known, came close to qualifying for the Olympics.  In one heat he needed to place third.  He placed fourth, Owens placed first.  In 1938, he started at Penn State University and became a well-known sprinter.  He set world records before joining the U.S. Army in 1942.  And then, when the war was over, he finished his degree in Physical Education.  In the 1948 Olympics in London, since he was past the usual prime, his teammates dubbed him "grandpa."  He took it with grace, as a sign of respect.  A massive crowd greeted Ewell when he returned to Lancaster after the Olympics.  City merchants and residents banded together to buy Ewell and his family a house at 442 Rockland St.  But, shortly after Ewell returned, he was stripped of his amateur status.  The house given to Ewell, the Amateur Athletic union ruled, was too much.  Ewell was  thrown into poverty.  His family had moved north from Virginia, settling first in Harrisburg, where his father found work in a nearby steel mill. Eventually, the family moved to Lancaster, where Ewell's father took a job as a waiter at the Hamilton Club.  Norwood, as the future Olympian was first known, shined shoes outside on the street.  When he retired from running in 1952, his plan was to teach.  He had a college degree, after all.  Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, that separate is inherently unequal.  Unless "our children begin to learn together," Thurgood Marshall,  counsel for the Brown family wrote, "there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together and understand each other."  In the wake of the the ruling, an entire generation of Black teachers lost their jobs.  The first wave of integrated schools didn't have room for them, much less for Ewell, who never secured a job in his chosen profession.  He spent much of his working life at the pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert in Lititz, PA.  He would have been a great teacher!  He did spend some time informally coaching at McCaskey, his alma mater, and at Franklin & Marshall College.  In later years he developed diabetes, which led to circulation problems in his legs.  Some maintain the London kerfuffle over the 4x100 gold was an honest mistake.  Days after the race, Olympic officials surprised Ewell while he was eating a meal in the cafeteria.  There was no podium, no pomp - they simply handed him his gold medal.  Seems that the team was initially punished since they were black.  Next month marks the 70th anniversary of the Brown ruling that ironically deprived Ewell of a career in education.  Has anything changed from this time to now?  Have we removed the hurdles that were placed in his path?  

1984 photograph of Barney Ewell with some of his trophies.

Ewell was known for saying..."Why get worked up over something that never was?  Some things are worth your anger, and some aren't."  Ewell's old Rockland Street house in the Seventh Ward neighborhood has been demolished and was replaced by a parking lot.  Across the street stands Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School which is part of a school district that is chronically underfunded by the state.  It's a sign of how little progress we've made that we can name a school after a Civil Rights icon and then refuse to fully fund it, even after being ordered by the court to do so.  We can, likewise, name a public plaza in downtown Lancaster after a hometown hero, while simultaneously failing to house the impoverished people who congregate there.  "Time, as well as funding, is not always on the side of the fastest man in the world."  The current state of education funding in Pennsylvania isn't merely inequitable, it's downright unjust -- criminal even.  Ewell had it right when he told the young athletes he mentored at McCaskey.  Its in those very first moments that the race is lost or won.  It isn't right that so many get a head start while others struggle out of the blocks.  It isn't right that our legislators have yet to fix it.  But...should it be hopeless??  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.