The Girl Who Wasn't Supposed to Walk

As a child growing up in Clarksville, Tennessee, Wilma Rudolph wore a metal brace on her left leg. Born prematurely at just four and a half pounds — the twentieth of twenty-two children — she had survived polio, scarlet fever, and double pneumonia before her twelfth birthday. Doctors told her mother plainly: this girl will never walk normally. At age twelve, Wilma removed that brace and walked across the floor on her own.…