Ralph Boston

The illustrious Olympic career of Ralph Boston stretched from 1960 to 1969, during which time he became a world-record holder and a winner of the Olympic gold, silver, and bronze medals.

Boston was born the youngest of ten children in Laurel, Mississippi, on 9 May 1939. One of his earliest memories is of riding a mule-pulled wagon across the railroad tracks with his father, Peter Boston, from his all-Black neighborhood of Queensburg and into the white community. It was then that he first noticed a stark contrast: the streets, the housing, the parks, and other facilities in white neighborhoods were far superior to those in Queensburg.

As a Black child growing up in the Jim Crow South, Boston knew hard work at a young age. He rose early with his father to work in the fields before attending class at Oak Park Vocational School. When he was not working or studying, Boston enjoyed swimming in a creek outside Laurel, and after the city opened the Blacks-only Oak Park Pool, he became a lifeguard at the facility.

A track and field star in both his junior and senior high school years, Ralph Boston was virtually a one-man track team, winning or placing in hurdling, throwing, sprinting, and jumping events as Oak Park continued its run of high school track championships. He set a national high school record in the 180-yard hurdles and excelled as the school’s starting quarterback in football and their star forward in basketball. Boston was an elite quarterback and led the Oak Park Dragons to the Negro state football championship. As a senior, he received scholarship offers to play football, but followed the advice of his mother, Eulalia, and his track coach, Joseph Frye, to pursue a career in track and field. In later interviews, he gave credit for his successes to the dedicated teachers at Oak Park, who also provided him with a solid academic foundation despite the lack of access to adequate educational resources and facilities.

Upon graduating from Oak Park in 1957, Boston attended the all-Black Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he majored in biochemistry. As an athlete, he participated in the long jump, high and low hurdles, the high jump, and the triple jump. He qualified for the 1960 Summer Olympic Games in Rome and won the gold medal by breaking the twenty-five-year-old long jump record—previously held by Black Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens—with a long jump of 8.21 meters (26 feet, 11.25 inches). In 1964 Boston won the silver medal for the long jump at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. At twenty-nine, he won a bronze, finishing behind Bob Beamon at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. This achievement was more special to him than any other, as his mother would see him long jump for the first time.

During his Olympic career, Ralph Boston worked with young athletes at Tennessee State as an assistant track coach. He retired from competition in 1969 and joined ESPN as a sportscaster before becoming part owner of the Knoxville television station WKXT-TV. He was honored by the Helms Athletic Foundation in 1963, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame in 1973, the United States Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1975, and in 1976 was the first Black athlete inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. In 1985 Ralph Boston was inducted into the Olympic Hall of Fame.