Biography wilma rudolph kids
Wilma rudolph children!
Wilma Rudolph overcame long odds to become one of the world's best-known athletes.
Biography wilma rudolph kids
How and why she did what she did are as amazing as her accomplishments.
She was born on June 23, 1940, in Bethlehem, Tennessee. She was born premature, or early, and so she was a weak baby. She was born into a large family (the 20th of 22 children), in a time when African-Americans weren't at the top of the list to get help at America's finest hospitals.
She had many diseases as a child, including polio, scarlet fever, and pneumonia; one result of this was that her left leg was partially deformed.
She wouldn't give up, however, and was determined to be like any other child.
Biography wilma rudolph kids names
She wore braces to help herself walk. Her family gave her daily massages on her leg and also drove her to physical therapy sessions. All of these things put together led to the astonishing development of Wilma's taking off the braces entirely when she was 9.