DeHart Hubbard

Last weekend during BLINK, the Riverfront Transit Center was put to use to accommodate roughly one million attendees. Typically, this is closed to the public except on rare occasions such as this, so I took a photo of this plaque of William DeHart Hubbard.

DeHart Hubbard was the first African American to win an Olympic gold medal in a single event: the long jump. Named after Douglass School's former principal A. J. DeHart, he was born in Cincinnati and attended the aforementioned school and Walnut Hills High School in the city. His father was a chauffeur for a well to do newspaper publisher. His father's employer held a contest to see who could sell the most newspaper subscriptions, with the prize being a college scholarship. Not only did he win the scholarship, but also his achievements both on the track field and in the classroom caught the attention of Lon Barringer of the University of Michigan. Upon graduation, Barringer convinced Hubbard to attend the university.1n 1924, Hubbard ran in the Paris Olympics, where he won his gold medal. The following year, he set the world record in the long jump, and and in 1926, tied the world record in the 100 yd dash. He then represented the United States at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

After his Olympic career ended, he became a supervisor of the Department of Colored Work at the Cincinnati Public Recreation Commission and worked there until 1941. He was also a manager of Valley Homes, a public housing project in Cincinnati and also worked for the Federal Housing Authority in Cleveland, Ohio. He was also friends with fellow realtor Donald Spencer, husband of civil rights activist Marian Spencer. According to his niece Dana Hubbard Blackwell, he rarely talked about his Olympic medals and records. There is even a letter that Hubbard wrote to his mother in 1924 on record at the Cincinnati History Library and Archives at the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal.

In addition to his track and field, he was an avid bowler and served as president of the National Bowling Association in the 1950s. In 1934, he founded the Cincinnati Tigers (not to be confused with the 1981-82 minor league ice hockey team), a professional baseball team that joined the Negro American League in 1937. The Tigers used Cincinnati Reds hand-me down uniforms and played at the now defunct Crosley Field. Hubbard was elected to the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1957 and inducted posthumously in 1979.