The story of American figure skating great Mabel Fairbanks is one part mystery, one part fairytale, three parts determination and all legendary. Years before athletes like Jackie Robinson and Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton broke racial barriers across the American professional sports leagues, a young Mabel Fairbanks was gliding her way to underground fame on the public ice rinks of New York City. After her athletic career was over, Fairbanks dedicated her life to the advancement of other athletes, particularly those of color, within the sport of figure skating. This is her story. 

Though known for her candor with reporters as it regarded figure skating, Fairbanks seldom spoke about the early years of her life, making some aspects of her youth, including her birth date, a mystery. Fairbanks is believed to have been born in 1916 in the Florida Everglades (prompting a manager to later nickname her the “Swanee Snow Bird”) to parents of African-American and Seminole descent. As a very young girl, Fairbanks was sent to New York City to live with an older brother. The reasoning for this move is much speculated about, with explanations ranging from poverty and abuse to abandonment and being orphaned.1With all of the mystery surrounding her early years, one thing is certain. It is this move to New York City that permanently changed the course of Mabel Fairbanks’s life.  

In Harlem, Fairbanks’s fairytale unfolds. After watching skaters in Central Park, a young Fairbanks purchased a one-dollar pair of skates at a pawn shop and began to teach herself the graceful movements of figure skating. Although often turned away from rinks because of her race, her raw talent soon attracted the attention of famed skater and coach Maribel Vinson. Impressed by Fairbanks’s skills, grace, and determination, Vinson began to give free lessons to the gifted, self-taught skater. Gliding on a pair of pawn shop blades, a poor young woman from Harlem quickly became one of America’s best amateur figure skaters. 

Fairbanks enjoyed a meteoric rise to public recognition, but her fairytale was short-lived. In the elite world of 1930s and 1940s figure skating, Fairbanks’s race made her talent, skill, and grace largely irrelevant at the competitive level. A1943 article in Time Magazine states that “experts rate her superior to most amateur whites and unquestionably the best skater of her race,” but also points out that “producers who may be impressed draw the color line.”2 Since skating clubs were unwilling to admit a member of color, Fairbanks was never able to compete at the national or international level. Instead, she spent her career displaying her skills on a portable rink in New York nightclubs and touring California, Mexico, and South America with the Rhythm on Ice show.3 By the 1950s, Fairbanks had hung up her skates. 

In the 1940s she moved to Los Angeles, travelled to Mexico with the Ice Capades, and finally broke into the famous Ice Follies shows. Yet again she would suffer discrimination, once being barred from a show by her heroine, Sonja Henie. Then she started appearing in ice shows in Las Vegas and was befriended by the "rat pack", the boozy hell-raising clique of Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. Other friends were actors Cary Grant and Zsa Zsa Gabor.  

As she grew older, Fairbanks turned increasingly to coaching, and is credited with helping the careers of US and world champions such as Scott Hamilton, Atoy Wilson, Tiffany Chin, and 1970s champions Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner, whom she put together as a skating pair. She also coached Kristi Yamaguchi, the 1992 Olympic gold medallist, in her early days, and also first paired the Japanese American with champion Rudy Galindo, a Hispanic. 

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/sisterthundershow/2014/02/22/the-brilliant-black-figure-skater-mabel-fairbanks