While attending Morgan College in 1915, Robert Earl Johnson would stretch his legs by chasing the trolleys that rattled through the streets of West Baltimore. Running as a sport was new to him, but it stirred something in the competitive Johnson. He entered road races and blossomed into a national champion, a two-time Olympian and a dual medalist in the 1924 Summer Games in Paris.
A century ago, on a sweltering July day that turned many of the world’s top distance runners into French toast, Johnson placed third in the grueling 10,000-meter cross country event, capturing the bronze medal for the U.S. (as well as a silver in team cross country) to earn acclaim as the greatest American distance runner of the era.
How demanding was that race? Of the 39 athletes who started, only 15 finished.
“Twenty-four fell far back along the route, where many lay as dead men, face down under the blazing sun,” The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Grantland Rice wrote. “The cross-country route looked like the war area, with dead scattered as from machine-gun fire. There has never been, in the history of track athletics, such terrific strain thrown upon the last limit of human endurance.”
One by one, the remaining runners, including Johnson, wobbled toward the finish, the New York Daily News reported:
“Exhausted by their efforts, and with their lungs crying for air, the athletes plunged into the immense bake oven within the steaming walls of [the Olympic] stadium, where the air was stifling and the temperature nearly 100 degrees. One after another, [many of] the runners dropped in their tracks. Some tottered over to the grass; some lay on the cinders where they fell.”
The race was won by the acclaimed Paavo Nurmi, of Finland, one of a record five gold medals the “Flying Finn” captured in the ’24 Games. Fellow countryman Ville Ritola took the silver, and the indefatigable Johnson — at 33, one of the oldest entrants — staggered home third, egged on by the cheering crowd.
It was the high point in the career of the Morgan College (now Morgan State University) grad who, nine years earlier, had run his first race, on a dare from a classmate. A native of Woodstock, Virginia, Johnson starred as a halfback in football and third baseman in baseball for the Bears before entering a local run during the spring of his junior year. The event? The second annual 5-mile Baltimore Afro-American Marathon through Druid Hill Park and surrounding neighborhoods.
“May 15 dawned a beautiful day, but I was suffering with stage fright,” Johnson later recalled.
The jitters didn’t show. Before a crowd of 5,000, he won the race in 33 minutes, 23 seconds, shearing one minute off the previous year’s best time.
His lead was such, the Afro-American newspaper reported, that “he was able to stop for a brief moment [and] take a siesta on the Provident Hospital steps. But as the form of his closest contestant came around the corner, he broke into a swift run and ran across the finishing line a full minute ahead of his nearest competitor, amid the cheers of the great crowd that had assembled.”
Buoyed by victory, Johnson kept running — and winning — local races. In 1916, still wearing his college colors, he defended his title in the Afro race, trimming 55 seconds off his earlier time. As reward for his success, Johnson, the son of a barber, received a free shave, haircut, massage and shampoo at Earnest Hitchens’ Tonsorial Parlor on Druid Hill Avenue.
He began winning bigger races around the country, including several national Amateur Athletic Union championships, all reported by The Afro, which, unabashedly, dubbed Johnson “Our Earl.” In hindsight, the runner said, there was no great secret to his achievement:
“I trained my own way. But when I started [a race], I was gone, that’s all.”
In 1920, he qualified for the Olympic team but failed to make the finals of the 10,000-meter run in Antwerp, Belgium. Undeterred, he stepped up training and, four years later, carved his niche in five-ring history. On his return from the Games, in August 1924, Johnson met with followers at Druid Hill Park where he was “surrounded by admiring youngsters who asked every question imaginable,” The Afro reported.
He settled in Pittsburgh, worked a white-collar job in a steel mill and mentored aspiring young runners. Johnson died in 1965 at age 74, having proved himself no end.
“I have been on two Olympic teams and I have won numerous prizes in national competition. This takes its toll, so I am satisfied,” he told The Afro in 1925. “On the other hand, I enjoy a good race. … Maybe, in 1928, I will come out for the Olympics of that year. Ha! It would be funny to see the old man Johnson licking some [of] the kids that year.”
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