Jesse Owens achieved feats that made him one of the most celebrated track-and-field athletes of the twentieth century. In his lifetime, he was described as “perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history.” At the Big Ten Championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 25 May 1935, he produced the performance for which he remains legendary: in approximately 45 minutes, he set five world records and equaled a sixth. The day is still widely remembered as “the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport.”
Yet it was Owens’s extraordinary performance at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin that brought him international renown. In Nazi Germany, he won four gold medals: in the 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump, and 4 × 100-metre relay. He was the most successful athlete of those Games. His victories offered a conspicuous and enduring rebuke to Nazi propaganda about so-called Aryan racial superiority, though it would be an overstatement to say that one athlete alone destroyed that ideology.
Jesse Owens was born James Cleveland Owens in Oakville, Alabama, on 12 September 1913. He was the tenth and youngest child of Henry and Emma Owens, sharecroppers. Known as “J.C.” in childhood, he moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, at about the age of nine. There, a teacher misunderstood his name when he introduced himself as “J.C.” and recorded it as “Jesse.” The name stayed with him for the rest of his life.
“I always loved running – it was something you could do by yourself and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.”
As a boy, Owens took different jobs in his spare time: he delivered groceries, loaded freight cars, and worked in a shoe repair shop while his father and older brother worked at a steel mill. During this period, Owens realized that he had a passion for running. Because Owens worked in a shoe repair shop after school, his track coach at Fairmount Junior High School, Charles Riley, let him practice before school instead.
Owens first came to national attention when he was a student of East Technical High School in Cleveland. During his high school days, he won all of the major track events, including the Ohio state championship three consecutive years. At the National Interscholastic meet in Chicago, during his senior year, he set a new high school world record by running the 100 yard dash in 9.4 seconds to tie the accepted world record, and he created a new high school world record in the 220 yard dash by running the distance in 20.7 seconds. A week earlier he had set a new world record in the long jump by jumping 24 feet 11 3/4 inches.
Owens’s sensational high school career drew recruiting interest from dozens of colleges. He chose Ohio State University, although the university could not offer athletic scholarships then. To support himself, his young wife, Minnie Ruth Solomon Owens, and their growing family, he worked several part-time jobs. The couple had met at Fairmount Junior High School in Cleveland, when he was fifteen and she was thirteen. They dated throughout high school. Their first daughter, Gloria, was born in 1932; they married in 1935 and later had two more daughters, Marlene and Beverly. Their marriage lasted until Owens’s death in 1980.
While working as a night elevator operator, waiter, petrol-station attendant, and Ohio Statehouse page, Owens kept training and dominated collegiate competition. He won eight individual NCAA championships—four in 1935 and four in 1936. He also confronted the routine humiliations of racial segregation: he was required to live off campus with other Black athletes and, while travelling with the team, was often limited to takeaway food or restaurants serving Black customers. Owens’s eight individual NCAA titles remain one of the defining collegiate records of his era.
Owens’s successes at Ohio State confirmed he could excel at the highest level of international athletics. His defining pre-Olympic performance came at the Big Ten Championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 25 May 1935. The feat is often described in shorthand as three world records and one world-record-equalling performance in 45 minutes. More precisely, the record books credited Owens with five world records and one equaled world record, because his 220-yard results also counted as world records at the corresponding metric distances.
The day had begun under difficult circumstances. Owens had injured his back after falling down a flight of stairs, and he was in considerable pain. His coach initially let him run the 100-yard dash largely to test whether his back would allow him to continue. Owens equaled the world record with a time of 9.4 seconds. He then produced a world-record long jump of 26 feet 8¼ inches, or 8.13 meters—a mark that stood for twenty-five years.
Owens followed this with a world-record 20.3-second 220-yard dash, also recognized as a record for 200 meters, and a 22.6-second 220-yard low hurdles performance. That run was also recognized for the 200-meter low hurdles, making Owens the first man to break 23 seconds in the event. In little more than three-quarters of an hour, while suffering from a painful back injury, he produced one of the most remarkable sequences of performances in sporting history.
The 1935 championships gave Owens the confidence he needed for the Olympic stage. The following year, he traveled to Berlin for the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler and his government had invested heavily in the Games, intending to use them as a showcase for the Third Reich. Nazi ideology promoted the fiction of an Aryan “master race” and cast people of African descent, Jews, Roma people, and other communities as inferior or dangerous.
The Olympic Games offered Nazi Germany an opportunity to present a polished international image while concealing, or temporarily moderating, some of the regime’s most overt persecution. German officials hoped for athletic victories that would reinforce their claims of national strength and racial superiority. Owens’s performances ensured that the spectacle could not fully serve the ideological purpose the regime intended.
“For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.”
Owens became the first American track-and-field athlete to win four gold medals at a single Olympic Games. On 3 August, he won the 100 metres in 10.3 seconds. He defeated Ralph Metcalfe, his U.S. teammate and former collegiate rival, by one-tenth of a second, while Tinus Osendarp of the Netherlands finished a further tenth behind Metcalfe.
On 4 August, Owens won the long jump with a leap of 26 feet 5¼ inches, or 8.06 metres. His victory is closely associated with his friendship with Luz Long, the German jumper whom he defeated. Owens later said that Long had offered him useful technical advice after Owens fouled on his first two qualifying attempts. Long’s gesture of sportsmanship has become one of the most resonant stories of the Games, although it should not obscure the political setting in which both men competed.
On 5 August, Owens won the 200 metres in 20.7 seconds. He defeated Mack Robinson, the older brother of Jackie Robinson, who later broke Major League Baseball’s colour barrier. Owens’s victory gave him his third gold medal in three individual events.
On 9 August, Owens won his fourth gold medal in the 4 × 100-metre relay. He ran with Ralph Metcalfe, Foy Draper, and Frank Wykoff, and the United States team set a world record of 39.8 seconds. The relay victory, however, carried a painful controversy. Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, the two Jewish-American runners originally expected to compete in the event, were removed from the team shortly before the race and replaced by Owens and Metcalfe.
No official explanation for the decision has ever been conclusively established. It was widely considered controversial at the time and has often been interpreted in light of the political pressure surrounding the Nazi Games, particularly because Glickman and Stoller were the only Jewish members of the U.S. track team. The replacement decision is generally associated with U.S. head coach Lawson Robertson, rather than Dean Cromwell.
During a period of deep-rooted racial segregation in the United States, Owens demonstrated that excellence was never the possession of one race, nation, or people. His performances in Berlin did not end racism in America or dismantle Nazi racial ideology in Germany. They did, however, provide a dramatic and enduring rebuke to a regime that sought to turn international sport into proof of racial hierarchy.
The story that Hitler deliberately refused to shake Owens’s hand has often been simplified. On the first day of Olympic competition, Hitler greeted selected German medal winners. Olympic officials then informed him that he had to receive every medal winner or none at all. Hitler chose to receive none. Owens did not compete on that first day, and there is no reliable evidence that Hitler personally shook his hand.
Owens himself later rejected the claim that Hitler had “snubbed” him. He was quoted as saying:
“Hitler didn’t snub me—it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”
The broader point behind Owens’s remark was unmistakable. He was celebrated abroad for his Olympic accomplishments, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not invite him to the White House, nor did he send him a congratulatory telegram. Owens returned to a country where racial segregation remained embedded in public life.
In later years, the German journalist Siegfried Mischner claimed that Owens had shown him a photograph of Hitler shaking his hand behind the honour stand in Berlin. Mischner said Owens believed that newspapers had reported unfairly on Hitler’s attitude towards him and had hoped journalists might correct the accepted version of events. Mischner later conceded, however, that he did not know where the alleged photograph was and could not establish whether it still existed.
In 2014, the British fighter and test pilot Eric Brown said in a BBC documentary that he had witnessed Hitler shaking Owens’s hand and congratulating him. A 1936 newspaper report also suggested that Hitler had sent Owens an inscribed cabinet photograph. These later recollections and reports have not produced conclusive evidence of a private handshake. The most careful conclusion is therefore that the famous snub story is historically more complicated than popular retellings suggest, while the alleged handshake remains unverified.
“After I came home from the 1936 Olympics with my four medals, it became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, want to shake my hand or have me up to their suite. But no one was going to offer me a job.”
After the games had finished, the Olympic team and Owens were all invited to compete in Sweden. Owens decided to capitalize on his success by returning to the United States to take up some of the more lucrative commercial offers. United States athletic officials were furious and withdrew his amateur status, ending his career immediately. Owens was angry, saying, “A fellow desires something for himself.”
Prohibited from amateur sporting appearances to bolster his profile, Owens found the commercial offers all but disappeared. In 1946, he joined Abe Saperstein in the formation of the West Coast Baseball Association (WCBA), a new Black baseball league; Owens was Vice-President and the owner of the Portland (Oregon) Rosebuds franchise. He toured with the Rosebuds, sometimes entertaining the audience in between doubleheader games by competing in races against horses. The WCBA disbanded after only two months.
Owens then tried to make a living as a sports promoter. He also ran a dry cleaning business and worked as a gas station attendant to earn a living; he eventually filed for bankruptcy. In 1966, he was prosecuted for tax evasion. Eventually, the government appointed him as a US goodwill ambassador.
“We all have dreams. In order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline and effort.”
Owens traveled widely as a highly sought after speaker. He addressed youth groups, professional organizations, civic meetings, sports banquets, PTAs, church organizations, brotherhood and black history programs, as well as high school and college commencements and ceremonies. He was also a public relations representative and consultant to many corporations, including Atlantic Richfield, Ford and the United States Olympic Committee.
In 1976, Owens was awarded the highest civilian honor in the United States when President Gerald Ford presented him with the Medal of Freedom in front of the members of the U.S. Montreal Olympic team in attendance. In February, 1979, he returned to the White House, where President Carter presented him with the Living Legend Award.
Jesse Owens died from complications due to lung cancer on March 31, 1980 in Tucson, Arizona. Although words of sorrow, sympathy and admiration poured in from all over the world, perhaps President Carter said it best when he stated:
“Perhaps no athlete better symbolized the human struggle against tyranny, poverty and racial bigotry. His personal triumphs as a world-class athlete and record holder were the prelude to a career devoted to helping others. His work with young athletes, as an unofficial ambassador overseas, and a spokesman for freedom are a rich legacy to his fellow Americans.”
Owens was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush.
“She (Minnie Ruth Solomon) was unusual because even though I knew her family was as poor as ours, nothing she said or did seemed touched by that. Or by prejudice. Or by anything the world said or did. It was as if she had something inside her that somehow made all that not count. I fell in love with her some the first time we ever talked, and a little bit more every time after that until I thought I couldn’t love her more than I did. And when I felt that way, I asked her to marry me… and she said she would.”
Owen was survived by his wife and three daughters. His daughters have honored his legacy by managing the Jesse Owens Foundation. The Foundation provides financial assistance, support, and services to young individuals with untapped potential in order to develop their talents, broaden their horizons, and become better citizens.
Source:
http://www.jesseowens.com/about/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Owens
