“Those were 8-millimeter films my father took when I was a kid in 1962,” Edwin Moses recounted the other day. “That’s footage of the Moses family.”
It shows the early life that helped build the foundation for one of the most remarkable athletes the world has ever known and one of this city’s all-time favorite sons.
On Saturday, the world premiere of “Moses — 13 Steps,” a documentary about the great hurdler’s life on and off the track, will close the annual Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival.
Before this gala event at his alma mater in Atlanta, Moses said there were sneak peek showings of the documentary — which is co-produced by Morgan Freeman and includes heartfelt insights from fellow Morehouse alums like Samuel L. Jackson and Spike Lee; fellow Olympians like Michael Johnson, Tommie Smith and Donna De Varona, as well as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson; Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute Lonnie G. Bunch III; and his son, Julian Moses, a former collegiate and pro volleyball player — at LeBron James’s UNINTERUPTED Film Festival in Los Angeles in July and the Paris Olympics’ OLY House Film Festival in August.
At both events, “13 Steps” won the top feature film award.
It was at those showings and during talks with Morehouse students that Moses noticed one facet of his story especially resonating with people.
Certainly, they were in awe of his dominance in the 400-meter hurdles: his three Olympic medals, four world records and especially his stunning unbeaten streak of 122 consecutive races over a span of 9 years, 9 months and 9 days.
And they were equally impressed by the way his status continued to grow after he retired from competition and became involved in both the ridding of drug-aided athletes from competition and using sports as a tool for positive change around the world.
He’s Emeritus Chair of the United States Anti-Doping Agency and once headed the education committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
And as the chairman of the Laureus World Sports Academy, he led an association of sporting legends in projects that have included addressing homelessness in the United States, the orphan crisis in Peru, the deadly threat of the abandoned land mines of war in Cambodia, discrimination in Germany and shelter for Ukrainian mothers and children displaced after the invasion of their nation by Russia.
Yet, while Moses’ audiences may have previously known about his globe-trotting Good Samaritan efforts, they weren’t expecting the revelations that came with the story of his West Dayton roots.
“When I’ve talked to young men at Morehouse, I describe a Black American life in the ‘60s where everyone had a mother and a father,” he said. “I talk about the West Dayton I knew with flowerpots on the steps, people walking dogs in the neighborhood, yards and hedges trimmed. You were going to church; there was emphasis on school; and there was a protective family life.
“I describe a pre-dystopian African American family existence. A lot of these young people don’t know what it used to be like. And they had no idea that it was embedded in the film.
“That’s what makes this story different. It’s not an inner-city-ghetto, mother-only, rags-to-riches story.
“It’s a story about academics and leadership and a strong foundation.”
The architects of all that were his parents, Irving and Gladys Moses.
His dad was a Tuskegee Airman, a Kentucky State football player and a longtime educator with the Dayton Public Schools.
He made sure his boys could pass muster, so by the time Edwin was 10 he could iron his own shirts, cook breakfast and shine his shoes to military standards.
His mom was a three-sport athlete at Kentucky State and a longtime supervisor of instruction at DPS.
She required her sons to read 10 books every summer and do volunteer work at Head Start. Edwin also had a newspaper route.
Moses enthusiastically embraced the academic challenges because it was there – not in athletics – where he initially excelled. He was cut from the basketball team at Fairview High and early on would finish at the back of the pack at track events.
“I think my junior year in high school I was 5-foot-7 and 117 pounds,” he said. “I literally was Steve Urkel. I was the nerdy guy with big glasses and a slide rule in his pocket who took all the science and math courses.”
When it came to sports, he told Paramount Global’s Melissa Potter in a presentation at the Cannes Cam Diversity Collective on the eve of the Olympic Games in Paris last month that, early in high school, he was the skinny guy who got sand kicked in his face.
That’s what happened on those old sandy and cinder-covered tracks when you were a skinny young kid trailing the bigger, stronger runners.
His biggest track achievement in high school didn’t come until the spring of 1973, his senior year, when he won the 110-meter hurdles at the Dayton Relays in sold-out Welcome Stadium.
That victory came late in his high school career and couldn’t bolster his thin athletic resume
“I wasn’t good enough to get any of the big schools like Ohio State or even junior colleges interested in me in track and field,” he said.
He was able to get a full academic scholarship to Morehouse College, which he went to sight unseen, though he did know some of its history and prestige:
“In fourth grade I read a book about the Rev. Martin Luther King and knew that was his school.”
Both of his parents were products of HBCUs and, like they had, he found a place that nurtured him both as a student and, surprisingly, as an athlete.
“In three years, I went from being unrecruitable to breaking the world record and becoming an Olympic champion, and that’s coming from a school that didn’t even have a track,” he told Potter.
“It really doesn’t make any sense when I look back at it now. It goes beyond what is normal, customary or possible.
“It shows the power of a young Black kid in the right space — despite having nothing and under the social conditions of the time – going to the top and staying there regardless of what anybody said.
“That’s what this is about.”
Magic at Morehouse
It’s appropriate that the documentary is being officially unveiled at Morehouse. That’s where the magic truly happened for Moses.
“I’m totally convinced none of this would have happened if I’d gone to a bigger school like UCLA or Ohio State,” he said. “I would not have been paid attention to and I wouldn’t have been challenged like I was to come up with my own solutions.
“We didn’t have a track so we found places we could train and develop. We jumped fences. We ran where we could.
“At Morehouse I was in an environment where I could do academics and sports at the same time. They talk about HBCUs offering a protective shell around kids of color, and it’s true.”
While he focused on physics and engineering, he said there were other teammates with similar academic workloads: “We all loved the sport of track and field, and we loved the camaraderie.
“Like Sam Jackson says in the film, ‘Everyone (at Morehouse) is cheering for everyone else.’”
In college, Moses grew to 6-foot-2, thanks to long legs that required a 37-inch inseam. That served him well in the 400-meter hurdles. Adding science and math calculation to his long stride, he was able to take 13 steps between hurdles rather than the typical 14.
Even so, little was expected of him when he toed the line at the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976. Most people focused on his look — the cutdown Afro, dark glasses, leather thong necklace — not his lightly adorned track resume.
But he not only won, he set the Olympic record at 47.64 seconds.
He was denied a chance at Olympic gold in 1980 when the United States boycotted the Moscow Games, but he was back atop the podium at the Los Angeles Games in 1984.
During his career — which includes a bronze medal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics — he was on the cover of magazines like Sports Illustrated, Newsweek and Jet; featured on the Wheaties Box; awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, named SI’s Sportsman of the Year and enshrined in the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
When he returned to Dayton after the ‘84 Olympics, he was met with adoration.
He rode in the back of a convertible in a parade through downtown Dayton surrounded by 1,000 schoolchildren waving American flags as crowds along the route cheered and chanted his name.
‘I need to tell this story’
Over the years, Moses thought about making a film and had started work on a book. But as he put it, “I just never pulled the trigger.”
Then came a fall down the stairs in 2017 that he said left him with a traumatic brain injury.
“I had a couple of inches of blood on the brain,” he told Potter. “It completely paralyzed me. I was in the hospital, the neurological ward, for a couple of weeks and had to learn to walk all over again. It took five years for my brain to clear itself up.
“And I thought, ‘I can’t wait around. I need to tell this story now.’”
The documentary is produced by Leopold Hoesch of Broadview Pictures and is directed by Michael Wech. Lori McCreary is a co-producers.
In April 2023, the German film crew came along with Moses — who lives in Atlanta — when he talked to athletes and handed out medals at Edwin Moses Relays (formerly the Dayton Relays) at Welcome Stadium located on Edwin C. Moses Boulevard.
He took the crew to see his old Kimberly Circle neighborhood and had them meet his old coach, John Maxwell. While here, he spoke to students at Dunbar and Ponitz high schools, as well as Wogaman Elementary.
Jim Crutcher, the Ponitz track coach who competed for Colonel White in the 1970s, stressed the message Moses was delivering:
“Edwin Moses has a real story. He was a young man who took his mathematical skills, applied them to track and became a world record holder. That’s something young kids can look at and use. They can see how everyday school skills can be used to improve and become the best in the world.”
Last fall, Moses returned to Dayton again for the 50-year reunion of his 1973 Fairview High class.
“We must have had 150 people, but they didn’t recognize me,” he laughed. “They remembered me as an impish kid who looked like Urkel.”
So much has happened since then and yet it all comes back to here.
As the movie points out — sometimes with flickering 8mm images — this is where it all began.
This is where the foundation was built.
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