You may know Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics - but that isn't the full
story. The star athlete's career saw him take on segregation, break records, and stand up to
one of the world's most-evil dictators. This is the crazy real-life story of Jesse Owens.
Jesse Owens was born James Cleveland Owens on September 12th,
1913, in Oakville, Alabama. Owens was the grandson of slaves and the son of sharecroppers.
His parents rented land from a white landholder, receiving part of the profit of crops grown.
Jesse, then known as J.C., was the youngest of 10 children,
all of whom worked alongside their parents in the cotton fields. He was a frail kid,
but his parents couldn't afford a doctor. TIME magazine reported that when he was five,
his mom had to cut a tumor out of his chest using a knife sterilized over a flame.
Despite these difficulties, the family had fun together, and his parents always
put food on the table. When he was around nine, the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio,
in search of more employment opportunities and an escape from the racist violence common in Alabama.
In Cleveland, one of his teachers couldn't understand his Southern pronunciation of "J.C."
and called him Jesse instead. It was a name that stuck.
Since he was a kid, Jesse Owens always loved running, writing in his autobiography that
"[At that time] I wasn't very good at it, but I loved it because it
was something you could do all by yourself, all under your own power."
At Fairmont Junior High School, Owens came to the attention of Charles Riley,
the school's track coach, who became his first mentor and an additional father figure:
Owens called him Pop. As reported in The Telegraph, the pair trained early
in the mornings since Owens worked numerous after-school jobs to help support his family.
Owens set junior-high records in sprinting, high jump, and long jump, before enrolling in East
Technical High School at 17. In his senior year, he tied the 100-yard world record and set a new
world record for the 220-yard dash. He tried out for the 1932 US Olympic team but didn't make it.
Meanwhile, his home life had hit a rough patch. His father and brothers were out of work,
and his girlfriend, Ruth, gave birth to their daughter Gloria Shirley on August 8th,
1932, when she was 16 and Owens was 18. Ruth and Jesse married in 1935,
and they would stay together until his death in 1980.
Jesse Owens' record-breaking high school career earned him offers from numerous colleges,
and he eventually chose Ohio State. He wasn’t given a full ride,
but was able to work various part-time jobs to help fund his degree. The 2016 film Race, which
chronicles Owens’s rise to stardom, shows how each commitment introduced a new balance to strike.
"You need to figure out a way to feed and put clothes on my baby girl.
Or else fit your practices in around me.”
Owens trained under coach Larry Snyder — one of the few college coaches at that
time who included African-American athletes on his teams. The two worked hard together.
"You ever pick cotton? The way it cuts you, when you… when you get it off the bolt?"
"Yes, sir, I can work."
Owens was eventually named the first Black captain of the school's athletic team,
and nicknamed the Buckeye Bullet.
Despite his star status, Owens still faced racism. He was barred from living in the men's dorm
and had to stay in a boarding house with the school's other Black students.
When the track team traveled, Owens and his fellow Black athletes weren't allowed into
whites-only facilities with their teammates. Even the showers at Ohio State were segregated.
"Now where do you boys think you’re goin'?"
"Just usin’ the showers."
"Not until we’re through, you’re not."
In 2001, Ohio State named the 10,000-seat Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium after their famous alumnus:
it houses the university's track teams, among other sports.
For Jesse Owens, there was a personal moment better than winning four Olympic
gold medals and shattering the racist ideology of a dictator. In his autobiography I Have Changed,
Owens wrote that his finest day was May 25th, 1935: a 45-minute window in which he broke
three world records at the Big Ten Track and Field Championships, all with a back injury.
As Sports Illustrated reported, at 3:15 PM on that day, Owens tied the world record for the
100-yard dash. By 4 PM, he had broken the world records for the long jump,
the 220-yard dash, and the 220-yard low hurdles.
This pre-Olympic year significantly advanced Owens’s athletics career.
In 1935, he competed in 42 events — including three at the Olympic trials — and won them all.
But, the reason Jesse Owens's fame isn't limited to college sports is, of course,
his success at the 1936 Olympics. And they weren't just any Olympics. After being awarded the honor
of hosting the Games in 1931, Berlin and then all of Germany had come under the control of Adolf
Hitler's Nazi Party in 1933. There was talk of a full US boycott of the Berlin Olympics,
to protest the Nazis’ human-rights abuses – and some American-Jewish athletes
actually refused to attend. Eventually though, 312 athletes, among them Owens,
traveled to represent the US in Berlin, as recounted by History.
Nazi racial propaganda was already making waves
well before the American Olympic athletes came to the German capital:
"The Nazi-controlled newspapers matter-of-factly mentioned that the United States team would be
helped in the competition by members of the ‘Black Legion.' I was one of the 'Black Legionnaires.'"
Germany ultimately won the most medals — they had the most athletes — but the
American team dominated in track and field, and Owens was the star.
Tying the 100-meter world record, he set records in the 200-meter race and the long jump.
He won his fourth gold medal as part of the 100-meter relay team,
helping set a record that stood for 20 years. His long-jump record would stand until 1960.
Hitler had hoped to use the Olympics to validate the Nazis’ genocidal racial ideology. Owens and
his fellow Black athletes were resounding proof that the German chancellor was wrong.
Focusing on doing well in his events during the Games,
Owens took stock of Hitler’s policies in earnest after the Games concluded.
"Until it was all over. Then I began to realize
the… how repulsive some of the things that were going on had happened."
Jesse Owens came away from the Olympics with more than just four gold medals, global name
recognition, and the satisfaction of humiliating the Nazis. He also formed an unlikely friendship.
Blue-eyed, blond-haired German long jumper Luz Long was Owens's main competition in
that event at the Olympics. Though Owens was the world record holder in the long jump,
he fouled his first two attempts during Olympic qualifying.
"....makes his second attempt to qualify."
According to Owens, Long advised him to move his mark back. Owens took the advice,
qualified, and went on to win the final that afternoon.
Long took silver but congratulated him warmly, right in front of Hitler. Owens wrote in 1960,
"You can melt down all the gold medals and cups I have received, and they wouldn't
come close to outshining the 24-carat friendship I felt for Luz at that moment."
Though NPR reported that Owens apparently didn’t meet Long until
after the event was over, the two men developed a real friendship,
exchanging letters until World War II broke out in 1939. Long was recruited into the
German army in 1941 and on July 14th, 1943, was killed by US troops in Sicily. However,
Owens started to write to Long's son Kai, and the two struck up their own friendship.
Other African-American athletes excelled in Berlin.
The 18 Black athletes on the US team won 14 medals, including eight golds.
John Woodruff came from behind to win gold in the 800 meter.
Archie Williams won the 400 meter and later trained Tuskegee Airmen. Cornelius Johnson
broke the Olympic record to win gold in the high jump, while teammate David Albritton took silver.
Hurdler Tidye Pickett became the first African-American woman to compete in the
Olympics. Owens actually beat two of his Black teammates to win two of his medals.
Mack Robinson took silver in the 200 meter: you may recognize him as Jackie Robinson's brother.
And Ralph Metcalfe — who had beaten Owens in the 1932 Olympic qualifiers — took silver
in the 100 meter. He joined Owens in the record-breaking 100-meter relay,
later serving in the House of Representatives.
Despite these strides in racial integration, there was still racism on the US team. Louise
Stokes was dropped from the 100-meter relay for a white runner. And Marty Glickman and
Sam Stoller — the only Jewish members of the track team — were replaced with
Owens and Metcalfe at the last minute, despite running faster than another team member did.
"Marty, Sam - I'm sorry, but we gotta cut you."
ESPN later reported a rumor that the Nazis pressured US officials to make the switch.
Allegedly, Hitler was so infuriated by Jesse Owens's victories that he refused to shake the
athlete's hand. The Nazi leader was actually reprimanded for only congratulating German
gold medal-winners, eventually deciding not to meet any athletes at all. But one world
leader who specifically snubbed Owens was US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Back in the US,
Owens and his Black teammates faced rampant racism, including from their own President.
Unlike some of their white teammates, none of the African-American Olympians received congratulatory
telegrams from Roosevelt, and none were invited to the White House. According to the Telegraph,
at a reception held in his honor at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Owens and his mother had to use the
freight elevator. The scene was reenacted, this time with Owens and his wife, in the film Race:
"I'm sorry, sir, but your friends will have to use the service entrance."
ESPN reported that Owens later said,
"I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler,
but I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either."
In September 2016, relatives of the athletes were invited to the White
House to meet President Barack Obama, as a retrospective attempt to make amends.
Want to run and jump like Jesse Owens? You probably can't — he
was a once-in-a-generation athlete — but you can borrow his techniques.
Owens combined natural talent with a unique running style he learned from his first coach,
Charles Riley, who was inspired by racehorses. The Telegraph quoted Owens describing it as:
"I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible.
From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up."
At Ohio State, Larry Snyder improved on a different part of his technique.
Owens's weakest point during his races was his start, which Snyder felt was too
slow. So Snyder had Owens practice taking off from tight crouches. And for the long jump,
Snyder taught Owens to move his legs in mid-air to gain extra precious inches.
"I'll tell you this: your start’s no good. Your rhythm's off. And your posture’s lousy."
You might not be able to hit Jesse Owens's speed or distances, but you could eat like
him. At the 1936 Olympics, Owens reported eating lots of eggs and milk during training,
and carrots, spinach, ice cream, more eggs, and tea right before competing.
His achievements in Berlin didn't translate into wealth for Owens. The day after he won
his fourth gold medal, the head of the AAU and US Olympic Committee (or USOC), Avery Brundage,
sent him on a grueling unpaid exhibition tour to raise money for the two organizations.
All of that work without pay was too much for Owens. As reported in The Guardian,
Owens quit the exhibitions. Brundage, however, retaliated, stripping Owens of his amateur status,
which meant he couldn't compete in many athletic competitions.
Owens had been receiving lucrative offers for public appearances in Europe, but these dried
up when he got back to the States, even though he was honored with much fanfare in a New York City
parade. Prevented from making his Olympic fame profitable, he resorted to racing against trains,
horses, and motorbikes for money. Through the '40s, Owens held a variety of jobs,
including selling sporting goods, working as head of personnel for Black workers at Ford,
and touring with the Harlem Globetrotters. His finances improved in the '50s,
when he started a PR company in Chicago and became a motivational speaker.
Owens’s Olympic victories on Hitler's turf made him an unwitting political
symbol. He enjoyed the publicity to a degree, saying that, in his view,
"If I could just win those gold medals [...] the Hitlers of the world would have no more meaning."
But Owens generally preferred to keep out of politics,
especially where race was involved. When Owens and his Black Ohio State teammate
David Albritton were refused service on road trips because of their race,
Owens would try to defuse the situation. According to The Telegraph, he once said,
"I wanted no part of politics [...] The purpose of the Olympics,
anyway, was to do your best [...] The only victory that counts is the one over yourself."
When Tommie Smith and John Carlos were kicked off the US Olympic Team for
raising the Black Power salute during the American national anthem in 1968,
Owens — who was there in Mexico City for the Olympics — supported their punishment. He said
that although he agreed with their anti-racism message, he felt that the Olympics were not the
appropriate place for political protest. In his 1972 book I Have Changed, however, Owens wrote,
"I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word
was the only answer where the Black man was concerned."
After the global attention gained at the Olympics, Owens was ignored and then largely forgotten in
the 1940s, but he finally started receiving full recognition for his accomplishments in the '50s.
In 1953, he was made secretary of the Illinois Youth Commission, and in 1955 was appointed a
goodwill ambassador for US sports, traveling around the world to promote American ideas
and the benefits of exercise. At the same time, Owens became a sought-after public
speaker in his own right, racking up endorsements along the way. He was
appointed to the US Olympic Committee's board of directors in 1973, and the following year,
was inducted into the Track and Field Hall of Fame and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Jesse Owens died from lung cancer aged 66 on April 1st, 1980: his New York Times obituary reported
that after quitting athletics, he'd smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 35 years. Since his death,
he's been memorialized in a wide variety of tributes. He has streets named after him in Berlin
and Cleveland, Ohio. You can send a letter from Cleveland's Jesse C. Owens Post Office with a 1992
or 1998 Jesse Owens stamp. Aspiring young athletes can burn off energy in New York's Jesse Owens
Playground. And in his birthplace of Oakville, Alabama, you'll find the Jesse Owens Museum.
The US was slow to celebrate the world's fastest man, but at least it's been trying to catch up.
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