Racism and 2,000 miles on foot could not stop this Colorado Springs man from an Olympic dream

Toward the end of his life in 1975, Kelley Dolphus Stroud reflected on the fierce persistence of his youth. These were memories recounted by his daughter, Marilyn Casanave, in a magazine article.

“When I was young, I thought that I could do anything,” Stroud told her.

Casanave wrote that the man “would smile and chuckle, then grow sad.”

This was at the memory of an Olympic dream — “a time,” Stroud said, “when all my efforts and energies were not enough.”

They were more than enough to a proud relative today.

Frank Shines has been busy producing a documentary called “Running to Harvard.” It chronicles “the true, untold story of a 2,000-mile journey from Colorado to Cambridge for the 1928 Olympics.”

That year, Shines’ great uncle from Colorado Springs walked, jogged and hitched rides clear across the country to make a U.S. Olympic Trials race, for the games to be held later that year in Amsterdam. The journey by foot was the only option for the Black man who had earned a spot at the Harvard trials but had been denied the all-expenses-paid trip afforded to white counterparts.

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