Lillian Copeland

Early and personal life Copeland was born Lillian Drossin to Polish-Jewish immigrants in New York City. Her mother was from Grodno (now in Belarus). Her father died when she was young, and after her mother remarried they moved to Los Angeles, California, and changed their surnames to Copeland. She lived in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, and later in Pasadena, California, and attended Los Angeles High School, graduating in 1923.

She attended the University of Southern California, where she was a member of the Xi chapter of Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority and joined the track & field team in 1924. She had a role as a basketball player in the silent 1927 comedy film The Fair Co-Ed. One of the track & field events in which she competed, which is no longer contested, was the baseball throw, in which she was second in the nation in 1926. Two weeks later, at a competition in Brussels, Belgium, she set a new world record in the shot put. Nevertheless, Copeland qualified for the US 1932 Olympic team for the discus throw. Her plans to boycott the 1936 Olympic Games arose in 1933, just as the Nazi Party was obtaining more power. She was one of 24 former U.S. Olympic champions who petitioned the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1933 to move the Games from Germany. She accused International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Avery Brundage of "deliberately concealing the truth" about Hitler and Nazi Germany. In 1990 she was inducted into the Southern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

Later career Copeland joined the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department in 1936, and worked there until she retired in 1960. At the Sheriff's Department, she worked in the Lennox and Firestone Juvenile divisions. At the time of her death, she was one of only eight American women to have won an Olympic gold medal.