Chris Dickerson, who as the first Black man to win the Mr. America contest shook up the musclebound world of bodybuilding and established himself as one of its elite competitors, died on Dec. 23 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 82.
The cause was heart failure, his friend Bill Neylon said.
“I would like for people to feel that if man is made in the image of God, then the human body is a thing of power and beauty,” Mr. Dickerson told The Daily Times of Mamaroneck, N.Y., in 1983.
His career changed what that “image of God” could look like in bodybuilding. Mr. Dickerson, who stood 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighed 190 pounds, was named Mr. America in 1970 and was one of the first Black men to win the Mr. Universe competition, in 1982.
He was also gay, which was known in bodybuilding circles but which he did not often publicly discuss at the height of his career. He later acknowledged that his sexual orientation, along with being Black, was a barrier.
His Mr. America win signified more than muscles.
Like Miss Americas, Mr. America was expected to represent “this unbelievable image of the most perfect, virile American person,” a figure most often expected to be white, Richard Cavaler, a bodybuilding contest promoter and administrator who booked Mr. Dickerson in the 1970s, said in a phone interview. Along with physiques, judges took into account the contestants’ interview skills and their potential to represent the sport favorably on a national level.
Black athletes had taken the competition’s Most Muscular title on multiple occasions: Arthur Harris did so in 1959, and Sergio Oliva of Cuba followed in 1965 and ’66. But the overall victory had never before gone to a nonwhite competitor.
That groundbreaking win was more important to him than even his Mr. Olympia title, Mr. Dickerson said. “I had to say a few words, being the first man of color to win the competition,” he said in an interview with The Bodybuilding Legends Show in 2015. “I didn’t want to make it a racial issue, but the fact was, it was.”
While competing, he stuck to the basics: an impressively sculptured physique and a quiet respect for the sport, his colleagues said. He was known for his grace in posing, informed by ballet lessons he had taken as a young man.
“He brought class and dignity and culture to bodybuilding,” Mr. Neylon said.
At the 1980 Mr. Olympia competition in Sydney, Australia, Mr. Dickerson placed second to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the future governor of California. Some attributed that result to favoritism. In a 2009 paper published in Iron Game History: The Journal of Physical Culture, Mr. Dickerson took note of the obstacles he had faced in bodybuilding. The promoter of the Mr. Olympia contest, he said, “was a real low life, a bigot, who had a real dislike for me — partly on racial grounds and partly for my sexual orientation.”
The paper’s author, John Fair, then a historian at Georgia College & State University, wrote: “Dickerson, who was short, Black and gay, was a diametrical opposite to the kind of image Arnold represented.”
Mr. Dickerson said he would have placed Mr. Schwarzenegger sixth in the 1980 competition. “I sort of felt he is a great champion and he’s not ready for this yet, and he was sweating — he was obviously up, he was nervous, he had a lot to lose,” Mr. Dickerson said in the Bodybuilding Legends interview.
But he added: “Arnold has a way about him that transcends his body. I have to give him credit.”
Controversy followed in the 1981 Mr. Olympia competition, when Franco Columbu came out of retirement to win despite an ostensibly poorer figure. Mr. Dickerson again placed second. Mr. Colombu’s win was “one of the worst decisions in bodybuilding,” Frank Zane, a three-time Mr. Olympia, said in an interview. But Mr. Dickerson persevered and won the title the following year.
He ended his career having won four major titles: Mr. Olympia, Mr. America, Mr. Universe and the Pro Mr. America.
