JULY 2: PART 2

Above: Ruth White, center, in 1969

WOMEN’S FENCING champions tend to peak between the ages of thirty-five to forty-five, which made seventeen-year-old Ruth White’s victory at the United States Ladies Foil Champion on July 2, 1969, such a stunner. The youngest-eer winner of the title, as well as the first African American to win it, the Baltimore youth had taken up the so-called “sport of aristocrats” just four years earlier. “It takes 10 to 15 years experience to do what she did in four years,” her coach, Steve Bujnovszky, told Ebony magazine in 1970.

White’s fencing career began with a trip to a Baltimore YWCA at age thirteen. She’d intended to enroll in a modern dance or swimming program, but when both were filled she tried fencing “just for fun.” Four years later she won four national fencing titles, which coach Bujnovszky called “a miracle.”

White enrolled in New York University after completing high school and won two national collegiate titles.

First Week of July