John Taylor (relay runner)

John Baxter Taylor Jr. was an American track and field athlete, born in Washington, D.C. on 3 November 1882 and died in Philadelphia on 2 December 1908. He was the first African American on a United States Olympic team and the first to win an Olympic gold medal, as the third-leg runner of the American medley relay team at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London. A University of Pennsylvania student and a member of the Irish American Athletic Club, he also reached the 400 metres final in 1908, and he died of typhoid fever less than five months after the Games.