She said back then in the mid-1950s, her aunt was a housekeeper for a wealthy family in Palm Beach, Florida, which was a world away from her own life in Boll Weevil Hill, a poor, dirt road area of Bloomingdale, Georgia outside of Savannah.
When the daughter of those Palm Beach folks discarded some of her clothes, Lucinda’s aunt retrieved them and sent them and a small suitcase to her niece.
She knew Lucinda had an almost unheard of offer back then for a young black girl who otherwise would be stymied by the racism, sexism and poverty of the times. She had been offered a grant-in-aid/scholarship to attend Tennessee State University in Nashville and run track.
Only a few places were making such offers to girls of color back then, and Lucinda’s opportunity had everyone excited.
Some 100 people — her Boll Weevil neighbors, kids from school and many of her relatives — showed up at the Savannah bus station to see her off.
Her mom, Willie Mae Williams — who, like her dad, David, was a custodian at a nearby white school that Lucinda was not allowed to attend in those segregated times — prepped her for the trip.
“My mom tied my money in a little handkerchief and put it in my private area,” Lucinda said quietly. “And she packed me a box lunch — fried chicken and pound cake — for the ride.”
Although the crowd was all poor, working folks, many people pressed a quarter, fifty cents and sometimes a dollar or two into Lucinda’s hand to help her on her journey.
“Those people who had been around me saw something special, something God-given in me and they wanted me to take advantage of it,” she said.
As the bus pulled out, the crowd cheered and Lucinda understood.
“I knew everything I did from that day on would represent that community,” she once explained to me. “I knew I had to be somebody those people could be proud of.”
And she had the means to do it. Not just those powerful legs, but the sturdy lessons that came from her folks. Although neither of them had gone to school further than the fifth grade, they had taught her not to be defined by others.
At Tennessee State she became part of the famed Tigerbelles track team put together by Coach Ed Temple. From 1954 to 1960, 40 of them would end up Olympians, 26 would win medals and all 40 would graduate.
Lucinda competed in two Olympics, the 1956 Games in Melbourne, Australia and the 1960 Games in Rome, where her 4x100 relay team won gold.
Having secretly married Floyd Adams, an ROTC instructor at the school just before Rome, Lucinda — once back home and graduated — followed him to Dayton and his new job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
For 36 ½ years after that she was part of the Dayton Public Schools system, first as a teacher at Meadowdale and Roosevelt High Schools and then as a DPS administrator in charge of girls’ health and physical education.
Along the way she became part of the U.S. Olympic Education Program and traveled all over the country speaking and helping schools set up curriculums using the Olympics as a teaching tool.
She is enshrined on the Dayton Walk of Fame, and of the 50-plus Olympians associated with the Miami Valley, she may well be my all-time favorite.
A few days shy of 77 and living in Florida now, she has kept her home in Dayton and, in fact, will return here in a few days. Eventually she’ll go on to Canton to see her daughter Kim — the former Chaminade Julienne star — who is now an attorney.
When we spoke by phone Saturday, she said she had watched Friday night’s Opening Ceremonies of the Rio Games on TV until almost 1 a.m. She took part in two of those herself and knew what many of the current American athletes were experiencing:
“Nothing compares to putting on the USA uniform and marching into that stadium. That’s why every day now I still wake up and thank the Lord. To come from the means I did and not know your destiny and to have it end up like it did, I was very lucky.
Stunning in Rome
As a young girl Lucinda went to Antioch Elementary, the black school that was out in the country some 12 miles away. When she’d get back home from school, she sometimes went with her parents to their janitor jobs at Bloomingdale Elementary.
She’d help empty wastebaskets and pick out the stubs of pencils the white kids had thrown away. The next day she’d share them with her own classmates.
While she had the tools to make her mark in the classroom, she was especially good at it once she got outside.
She was a tomboy and ended up the only girl on the junior high boys track team. Coach Joe Turner then nurtured her into a formidable high school runner who especially stood out during the prep competitions at the Tuskegee Relays.
That’s where Temple, the Tennessee State coach, first saw her and finally made the offer to become a Tigerbelle.
Although the name was fancy, the women’s facilities were not. They ran on a potholed cinder track next to the agriculture department’s pig pens. Yet from such inauspicious surroundings came glorious results.
As a college freshman, Lucinda — along with five other Tigerbelles — made the U.S. Olympic team that competed in Melbourne.
For Lucinda it meant her first plane ride, her first international competition, and it was a bit unsettling.
She still has the letter she wrote home to her mom saying she was homesick and not sure this was what she wanted.
Lucinda finished back in the pack in the 200-meter final there and after that vowed to keep her focus and never again falter like that.
And that’s just what has happened.
She and the Tigerbelles began representing the U.S all over the world, including Russia, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Germany and England.
Yet when she and her teammates did get back to the States — because of segregation’s Jim Crow laws and attitudes in the South and sometimes up north — they didn’t always find “home sweet home.”
“We’d travel around the country and we couldn’t stop many places,” Lucinda has said. “We had to go to the bathroom in the bushes along the road and sometimes we slept in the car.
“I remember once we went into a restaurant in Baltimore. The owner chased us out, saying, “I don’t serve n——— here!’
“Stuff like that, I didn’t let it get me down. I made it motivate me.”
At the 1959 Pan Am Games in Chicago, she won three gold medals that included victories in the 100 and 200 meters over trumpeted Tennessee State teammate Wilma Rudolph, one of the greatest track legends ever.
By the time the 1960 Rome Olympics rolled around, the Tigerbelles were ready. Rudolph won the 100 and 200 and she joined Barbara Jones, Martha Hudson and Lucinda to put on a stunning show in the 4x100 relay. They set a world record one night and won gold the next.
It was at the Rome Games that Lucinda also got to know a young, loquacious boxer named Cassius Clay.
“I’d tease him and say, ‘Fool, go someplace and sit down!’ ” she laughed. “He was always talking about being ‘the greatest.’ Well, bless his heart, six weeks later he was beating everybody up. He showed he really was the greatest. He really was something.”
And so was she.
‘A real gold medal’
She’s come full circle now.
She lives in West Palm Beach, where her late aunt — the one who was the rich folks’ housekeeper — had lived too.
“When I was growing up, every summer my mom and dad would send me down here to stay with my aunt and uncle,” Lucinda said. “They didn’t have any kids and years later when they died they left their property and assets with me.”
After Lucinda’s husband died and she retired from the Dayton Public Schools, she moved to Florida. She first lived in her aunt’s house and now lives in a nearby senior community.
She still goes out and speaks to civic groups and schools and sometimes — especially when the audience is kids — she brings along her gold medal.
“I take it out of the case and let them put their hands on it,” she said. “That way when they see athletes stand on the podium with one around their necks they can say, ‘I had a real gold medal in my hands.’
“But I try to stress that while I’m proud of it and I certainly treasure it, I do not worship it. I tell them it’s just a material thing. The thing that means the most is the person and them being the best at whatever they do, whether they are an athlete or not.
“I tell them that the real gold is inside you.”
After all, along with the fried chicken and pound cake, that’s the staple she packed up and brought with her on that bus ride out of Boll Weevil Hill so long ago.
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