Arthur Wharton

Arthur Wharton was a Gold Coast-born athlete, born in 1865 to a Grenadian father and a Fante mother from what is now Ghana, who moved to England as a young man and became recognized as the world's first black professional association football goalkeeper, playing for clubs including Darlington, Preston North End and Rotherham Town from the late 1880s into the 1890s. Before turning to football professionally he was also a champion sprinter, and in 1886 he became the first officially recorded athlete to run 100 yards in ten seconds, a mark that stood as the amateur record for years afterward. Despite his pioneering achievements, Wharton's career and life after football were marked by hardship, and he worked as a colliery haulage hand in the years before his death in 1930, buried in an unmarked grave. His significance as the first black professional footballer went largely unrecognized for decades until football historians rediscovered his story in the late twentieth century, and he has since been honored with memorials and inducted into English football's National Football Museum Hall of Fame.