Jesse Owens

“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.”  --Jesse Owens, “The Buckeye Bullet”  

Jesse Owens was born James Cleveland Owens on September 12, 1913, in Danville, Alabama.  His parents, Henry and Emma Owens, were poor sharecroppers who struggled to support their eleven children.  The children had to help out the family by working as often as possible, and by the age of seven, James Cleveland was picking cotton in the fields along with everyone else.   

When James Cleveland, who was called “J.C.” by his family, was eight years old, his parents decided to move the family to Cleveland, Ohio, in hopes of finding more lucrative employment.  J.C. was enrolled in school, and on the first day the teacher asked him his name.  He replied, “J.C.”, but the teacher interpreted this as “Jesse,” and the name stuck.  Young Jesse worked part time jobs doing such things as delivering groceries and working at a greenhouse.  Despite being somewhat sickly, Jesse began to realize that he liked to run.   

The track coach at Owens’s school noticed his talent during gym class.  He asked Owens if he would like to be on the track team, but because Jesse had to work after school, he was not able to join the team.  The coach, Charlie Riley, offered to train Jesse in the morning before school, and Owens took him up on the offer.  Coach Riley brought him breakfast every morning so he would keep up his strength and not get sick so often.  Owens’s performance in track and field improved, and at East Technical High School Owens became well known to everyone as a track star.  He was popular and was elected president of the student council, even though he was one of only a few African American students at East Technical.   

At high school-level track meets, Owens tied the world record for the 100-yard dash twice.  He was offered track scholarships to various universities, but he worried about his family.  He had married Ruth Solomon at the age of sixteen and still held part-time jobs while in high school, and he did not want his wife or his parents to struggle without his financial assistance while he went away to college.  Coach Riley convinced the track coach at Ohio State University to assist Jesse’s father in obtaining a permanent job at the university, and Jesse decided to attend Ohio State.  Instead of accepting the scholarship that was offered, Jesse took various jobs on campus and paid his own way.   

Two weeks before the Big Ten Championships (college track competition) in 1935, Owens was engaging in horseplay with his fellow students when he slipped and fell, injuring his back.   He was in severe pain in the days leading up to the competition and could not even bend over; his coach almost did not let him compete.  But Owens said that the pain “miraculously” disappeared, and he set three world records (the 220-yard low hurdles, the long jump, and the 220-yard dash) and tied another (the 100-yard dash). 

The Olympic games of 1936 were to be held in Nazi Germany, and Adolph Hitler intended to showcase his blond, blue-eyed German athletes as the epitome of Aryan superiority and dominance.  Nazi commentators made derisive remarks about the supposed “inferiority” of African American athletes who would represent the United States in the Games.    The whole world was watching the outcome of these Olympic Games—it was here that Owens’s triumphs in track and field events made him a hero of American sports history.   

First he took the Gold Medal in the 100-meter dash (another African American, Ralph Metcalfe, took the Silver).  The next day Owens was to compete in the long jump event.  Three attempts were allowed for an athlete to qualify.  Owens took a practice run and was dismayed to learn that the officials had counted it as an attempt.  He fouled his next attempt, and only had one try left.  A German athlete, Luz Long, was considered to be Owens’s main competition in the event.  Long came over to Owens and introduced himself; he gave Owens a suggestion that he mark the spot from which he should jump, to make sure he would not foul his final attempt.  It worked, and Owens qualified.  Long and Owens competed in the long jump that afternoon, and Owens won the Gold Medal.  Long congratulated him in front of everybody.   

ESPN reports that Owens stated, “It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler.  You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn’t be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment.  Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace.  The sad part of the story is I never saw Long again.  He was killed in World War II.”  Owens wrote to Long’s family after his death.   

The next day, August 5, Owens set an Olympic record in the 200-meter dash, winning the Gold again.  This was supposed to be Owens’s last event.  The person who came in second was Mack Robinson, the older brother of baseball’s Jackie Robinson.   

There were two Jewish members of the American track team.  It was rumored that the Nazis requested that American officials remove them from the relay team to avoid further humiliation after being beaten so many times by Black athletes like Owens.  In apparent acquiescence to the Nazis, U.S. officials did remove Glickman and Stoller from the relay team, replacing them with Metcalfe and Owens.  The relay team set a world record and took the Gold Medal.   

The American press said that Hitler had snubbed Owens by not shaking his hand, as he had done with other winning athletes.  However, Owens was a very calm and even-tempered person, well experienced in handling discrimination in his own country (for example, after the ticker tape parade he received on his return, he had to ride the freight elevator upstairs to his reception at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, because the lobby elevator was only for Whites).  He 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…When I came back, after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country and I could not ride in the front of the bus.  I had to go to the back door.  I couldn’t live where I wanted.  Now, what’s the difference?” 

After the Olympics, Owens ran professionally in various exhibitions, and traveled around to speaking engagements.  In the 1950s he became a spokesman for the Olympic Committee and the Ford Motor Company, and started his own public relations firm.  He was involved with youth sports organizations, and in 1976 President Ford presented him with the Medal of Freedom.  Owens, who took up smoking, died in 1980 from lung cancer at the age of sixty-six.  A street in Berlin, Germany, was named after him.  His wife and one of their three daughters administer the Jesse Owens Foundation, an organization that assists underprivileged youth.  In 1990, President George Bush posthumously awarded Jesse Owens the Congressional Medal of Honor for his achievements at the Berlin Olympics, calling them “a triumph for all humanity.” []

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