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.”
“Running to Harvard” unveils the inspiring yet untold, true tale of Dolphus Stroud, an inspiring symbol of resilience and determination emerging from the pioneering Stroud family of Colorado and a hopeful Rocky Mountain community all dreaming of Olympic glory. The son of a father who was born and raised on a Texas slave plantation, Dolphus and his 10 siblings were trailblazers in science, academia, the arts, sports and public service.
Eight years before Jesse Owens’ Olympic performance at the Berlin Olympics, Dolphus Stroud, a Phi Beta Kappa Black scholar-athlete, triumphantly earned acceptance to Harvard and clinched victory in the Denver Rocky Mountain Marathon, securing his spot in the 1928 Olympic Trials at Harvard.
However, the darkness of racial prejudice cast a shadow over his achievements, depriving him of the funding needed to travel to Harvard Stadium for the 5K event. Undaunted, he embarked on a dangerous 2,000-mile journey from Colorado to Cambridge, at a time when lynching Black men was far too common. Twelve days later, he arrived at the bank of the Charles River, a mere six hours before the start of his race.
This poignant narrative not only sheds light on Dolphus’s remarkable journey but also weaves together the hopes, struggles, and dreams of his family and the Colorado community that dared to envision a more equitable America.
Brought to life by a talented production team, the Stroud family descendant Frank Shines dons the hat of the executive producer. Ralph Giordano navigates this narrative as the director, with Mike Pach adeptly assisting him, while Kyle Hanchett captures the saga’s every mood through his masterful cinematography.
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.
Kelley Dolphus Stroud was a scholar athlete at Colorado College. In 1928, he embarked across the country for a shot at the Olympics. Photo courtesy Frank Shines
Stroud didn’t have the money himself for a train ride. But he had the mental and physical fortitude.
His story “is the stuff of big dreams and the power of the human spirit,” reads the website Shines oversees, honoring the history of his prolific, pioneering family.
Roots of greatness
It’s a history found here and there — in the pages of certain books and yellowed archives, in the corners of the internet and the local museum. It’s a history beginning with Kimbal “K.D.” Stroud. He arrived to Colorado Springs in 1910 with his wife and the first of their 11 kids, including Dolphus.
ABOVE: The Stroud family pictured in 1929.
Facing hate, facing social and economic forces that sought to oppress the city’s early Black families, the Strouds rose above.
Dolphus is but one in a long line of family members who benefited from Kimbal Stroud’s example, passed down through generations — commandments on faith, education and hard work that could overcome poverty wrought by racism. The Strouds are a family of scholars, business executives, artists and scientists.
Of Jack Stroud, born 1913 in the Springs, who went on to help craft the formula that returned astronauts of the Apollo moon missions. Of his sister, Lu Lu Stroud Pollard, who was the first full-time Equal Opportunity officer for the Military Traffic Command in Washington, D.C.
ABOVE: Jack Stroud was among engineers who crafted the formula to return astronauts of the Apollo Moon missions.
LEFT: Lulu Stroud Pollard is credited for her historic preservation in Colorado Springs and was the first full-time equal opportunity officer for the Military Traffic Command in Washington, D.C.
Later came Carl Bourgeois, son of Kimbal’s youngest child. Bourgeois grew up poor in the cramped, family home on the Springs’ west side, going on to be the developer behind Denver’s Five Points neighborhood as we know it now.
And there’s Shines. He went from flying jets to advising business leaders and military brass around the world as an Ernst and Young consultant and IBM executive. Shines grew up on welfare in Oakland, Calif., eventually turning his fortunes on an Air Force Academy education in the late 1980s.
Little did he know then the history of his family in town. It was only after connecting with an aunt during those academy years.
“I just got out of survival training. I got awarded No. 1 in the whole class,” Shines recalled, also mentioning to his aunt some fitness accolades. “And she said, ‘Do you know where that comes from?'”
Dolphus Stroud was one of the 11 children of Kimbal and Lulu Magee Stroud, who came to Colorado Springs in 1910. Dolphus was among children who went on to great success in the face of discrimination. Photo courtesy Frank Shines
It came from Dolphus, and his equally competitive brother, Tandy, Shines’ grandfather. So began Shines’ deep dive into legacy, his continued focus today.
The documentary coincides with another project of Shines’: “RACE,” a jazz, R&B and gospel opera also chronicling Dolphus’ bold Olympic pursuit.
The under-production “Running to Harvard” is billed as “a film to help heal our nation.” It’s timely, Shines said, approaching an Olympic year and another contentious presidential election.
It’s “to say something positive,” Shines said from his home in Tampa, Fla.
“And another part of it is for the family. … If I go, will anyone ever remember the story if it doesn’t get told now?”
Scars of youth
The story starts with Kimbal Stroud, who was born on a slave plantation five years before the Emancipation Proclamation. His intellect and curiosity paved his way to Langston University in Oklahoma, where he worked under an attorney, achieved priesthood, wrote, taught and served as a delegate to the then-territory.
He voted against statehood. It came with segregation.
So the Strouds moved to a western city emerging in the safe, abolitionist vision of a Union general, William Jackson Palmer. The vision faded after Palmer’s death in 1909.
Kimbal Stroud arrived a year later to only find work shoveling coal. His kids would recall an opposite, vibrant scene at home: him reading the Bible and other books to them, his music, his lessons on school subjects before they were of school age.
“The siblings felt, Oh, it’s gonna be so fun once we get to school,” Shines said, “because their tests will be so much easier than dad’s.”
School would be hard in other ways — brutal.
A list of the Stroud family rules-to-follow, passed through generations, hints at the early experience in the Springs. Along with saying prayers, being nice, “learning all you can” and “understanding nature,” there’s the rule to “carry salt and pepper in case you are chased by bloodhounds.”
As Dolphus later wrote to a biographer: “The experience at Bristol School, the Colorado Springs High School and the general atmosphere of the town left emotional and temperamental scars upon the negroes of my generation.”
Dolphus wrote of carrying “a pocketful of rocks at all times” in case of “unprovoked attacks”; of being turned away from restaurants and theaters; of being “harassed” by police. He called it all “minor irritations.”
Dolphus persisted. He expected A’s on his report cards, and he got them. For one missing, he remembered a “curt” explanation from a teacher: “I don’t give A’s to colored kids.”
Nor were those kids allowed on the track team. Other kids laughed at Dolphus, Shines said, recounting a fateful moment:
“He told them, ‘One day, I’m going to the Olympics.’”
A journey against the odds
Dolphus had started at Colorado College by the Olympic year of 1928. He was intent on more A’s and coming through on the promise he told himself and anyone who doubted him. He would train on Pikes Peak.
The later magazine article by his daughter, Marilyn Casanave, told of him rising before dawn every Sunday to run up the mountain with a clock around his neck and a heavy pack on his back. He was reportedly found frozen, near death, beside the cog tracks once. He persisted — dashing up and down in what was said to be a record time on the peak.
This was in preparing for a 5,000-meter race in Denver that would punch his ticket to the U.S. Olympic Trials in Boston. Dolphus won.
He expected, like his accompanying Colorado College coach, to be awarded funds for travel.
“(T)heir euphoria was jolted when the officials informed them that no money could be provided,” according to Dolphus’ daughter, Juanita Martin, in a recollection maintained by the college. “They were convinced that color was a primary factor in the decision.”
Yet again, her father had “a penchant for turning obstacles into stepping stones,” she wrote.
Step by step, he’d make his way to Boston. He went with $10, a golf club as a walking stick and a 50-pound pack, according to Casanave’s article.
She wrote of the harsh, stinging sun over the plains, of Dolphus switching shoes only after a pair “disintegrated” and he tended to his blisters. He applied spit in the absence of water, which he said he saw in hallucinations.
ABOVE: The Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum displays prop shoes. They are similar to what Kelley Dolphus Stroud would’ve run in ahead of his Olympic dream in 1928. Courtesy of Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum
“I have to hike 30 to 50 miles daily,” read a note to his family back home. They would learn of him sleeping by a tombstone once, of a three-hour ordeal to be granted a shower at a YMCA.
Most drivers “decided to ignore the grime-covered black boy persistently jogging alongside,” Casanave wrote. Dolphus was said to hop horse-drawn buggies, only to find his jogging was faster.
He reportedly got more rides when his story hit the newspapers. Long rides were key to him getting to the race in time — just six hours before the starting gun, he recalled.
He later wrote in the third person: “Spectators were laughing and booing as he passed the grandstands.”
The journey had taken its toll. He was “staggering and experiencing flashes of light headedness,” he wrote. He finally collapsed.
“He had let his parents down,” he wrote. “He had failed the Rocky Mountain section of the nation as their representative, and he had failed black people everywhere. Such were his thoughts as he lay on the ground.”
Continuing a legacy
Such were the impossible expectations for himself, torturous.
And necessary, perhaps, to overcome the society against him and his people.
As Martin wrote: “My father — and all of the Strouds — found their subservient position in this society ludicrous and approached their survival with the necessary duplicity that Black people have, by necessity, adopted throughout our coming into contact with the western world.”
Dolphus went on to more success.
He taught political science at a Black college in Georgia. He continued his own education at the University of Mexico, where he wrote his thesis, in Spanish, on the history of African Americans. He managed a baseball team, the Black Giants. He started a moving and storage company in Portland, Ore., where he lived his later years. He died in 1975.
He died still thinking about that Olympic attempt, his daughter wrote. He cried at the memory.
“There was nothing more I could do,” he said. “I had given my best.”
And that should be celebrated, Shines believes.
He wants the world to know the story. But maybe more than the world, he wants his 14-year-old daughter to know.
“Part of me (doing the documentary) is making sure she has these stories,” Shines said.
Stories that must keep going — stories of a prolific, pioneering family.
“I’ve always reminded her of those things, reminded her that she’s got great talent and capabilities that come from the family,” Shines said. “But she always has to work hard. She has to work harder than most people. That’s just how life goes.”
A computer-generated rendering of Dolphus Stroud, the Colorado Springs man who in 1928 chased an Olympic dream across the country. Courtesy of Frank Shines
Carl Bourgeois, 71, looks over the city he grew up in from the top of the 10 acres at 944 N. Walnut St. in Colorado Springs. Bourgeois, a descendant of the pioneering Stroud family, died in 2022, leaving his legacy as the developer credited for saving Denver’s Five Points neighborhood.
