page_title: Major Taylor
section_title: Marriage and family
hierarchical_section_title: Major Taylor / Marriage and family
caption_attribution_description: English: Major Taylor with his family
context_page_description: Marshall Walter "Major" Taylor was an American professional cyclist. He was born and raised in Indianapolis, where he worked in bicycle shops and began racing multiple distances in the track and road disciplines of cycling. As a teenager, he moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, with his trainer and had a successful amateur career, which included breaking track records.
  Taylor turned professional in 1896, at the age of 18, living in cities on the East Coast and participating in multiple track events including six-day races. He moved his focus to the sprint event in 1897, competing in a national racing circuit, winning many races and gaining popularity with the public. Between 1898 and 1899, he set numerous world records in race distances ranging from the quarter-mile to the two-mile.
  Taylor won the sprint event at the 1899 world track championships to become the first African American to achieve the level of cycling world champion and the second black athlete to win a world championship in any sport. He was also a national sprint champion in 1899 and 1900. He raced in the U.S., Europe and Australasia between 1901 and 1904, beating the world's best riders.
context_section_description: Morris was born on January 28, 1876, in Hudson, New York. Taylor married Daisy Victoria Morris in Ansonia, Connecticut, on March 21, 1902. Taylor met her around 1900 when she was living in Worcester, with her aunt and uncle.
  While in Australia in 1904, Taylor and his wife had their only child, a daughter that they named Rita Sydney in honor of Sydney, where she was born on May 11. When Taylor, his wife, and daughter were not traveling, they lived in a large home on Hobson Avenue in Worcester that Taylor had purchased in 1900.
  After his retirement from racing in 1910 and the failure of subsequent business ventures in the 1920s, Taylor and his wife became estranged. She left him in 1930 and moved to New York City. Around the same time Taylor left Worcester and moved to Chicago; he never saw his wife or daughter again.
  Taylor's daughter, who graduated from the Sargent School of Physical Culture in Boston in 1925 and the University of Chicago in 1936, taught physical education at Virginia State University. She died in 2005 at age 101; her survivors include a son, Dallas C. Brown Jr., and his five children. In 1984, Taylor's daughter donated an extensive scrapbook collection on her father to the University of Pittsburgh Archives.
caption: Taylor with his wife, Daisy, and daughter, Sydney, c. 1906–1907
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