Jesse Owens

Athlete

• Born: September 12, 1913
• Birthplace: Oakville, Alabama
• Died: March 31, 1980
• Place of death: Tucson, Arizona

American athlete

The winner of four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Owens served as an inspirational model of success for African Americans and later became a symbol and eloquent spokesperson for the United States as a land of opportunity for all.

Area of achievement Sports

Early Life

Jesse Owens was born to Henry Cleveland Owens and Mary Emma (née Fitzgerald) Owens, both sharecroppers and descendants of slaves. James Cleveland, the last of nine children who survived infancy, was called J. C. When he was eight or nine years old, the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, for better work and educational opportunities. On his first day of school, he introduced himself as “J. C.,” but his teacher misunderstood him to say “Jesse.” The young Owens bashfully accepted the mistake, thus taking on the name by which he would become famous.

At Fairmount Junior High School his exceptional athletic ability caught the eye of a physical education teacher, Charles Riley. A white man, Riley became Owens’s coach, his moral monitor, and his surrogate father, teaching him citizenship as well as athletic techniques. Riley worked long hours with his pupil and continued to do so through high school. While on his high school track team, Owens set several interscholastic records. In 1932, he failed to win a place on the United States Olympic squad, but by the time he had finished high school, in 1933, he had won much acclaim as a track athlete of extraordinary promise.

Owens wished to attend the University of Michigan. No track scholarships were available in that day, however, and his parents could not afford tuition. He therefore matriculated at Ohio State University, athletic boosters having arranged for him to work at part-time jobs to pay his expenses. He waited on tables in the dining hall, operated an elevator in the State House, and served as a page for the Ohio legislature.

Poorly prepared for college work and distracted by athletics, he was never a good student. After his first term he was constantly on academic probation; once he had to sit out the indoor track season because of bad grades. All the while he excelled in sports, setting numerous Big Ten and national track records. His finest day was May 25, 1935, at the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor. Within a single hour he set new world records in the 220-yard sprint, the 220-yard hurdles, and the long jump, and tied the world record in the 100-yard dash. Well over a year before the Berlin Games of 1936, Owens emerged as a young man destined for Olympic fame.

His physique, style, and personality made him a sportswriter’s dream. He carried about 165 pounds on a compact frame of five feet ten inches. A model of graceful form, he ran so smoothly that each performance seemed effortless. Whether on or off the track, he frequently flashed a warm, spontaneous smile. Never did he refuse an interview or autograph. In the face of racial insults and discrimination, he kept a mild, pleasant demeanor. Like most blacks of his generation, Owens survived by turning the other cheek, by presenting himself as a modest individual who did not openly retaliate against the bigotry of his day.

At the Olympic trials in the summer of 1936, he finished first in all three of the events he had entered. Several weeks later, he took the Berlin Olympics by storm. First, he won the 100-meter dash in 10.3 seconds, equaling the world record. Next he took the gold medal in the long jump with a new Olympic distance of 8.06 meters. Then he won the gold in the 200-meter race with a new Olympic mark of 20.7 seconds. Toward the end of the week, he was unexpectedly placed on the American team for the 400-meter relays. He ran the opening leg in yet another gold-medal, record-making effort.

By the end of that fabulous week in Berlin, an attractive yarn attached itself to the name of Jesse Owens. Supposedly, he was “snubbed” by Adolf Hitler, who reportedly refused to congratulate him publicly after his victories. Actually, the story was concocted by American sportswriters, who were all too willing to read the worst of motives into Hitler’s behavior and to assume innocent excellence from America’s newest hero. Although it had no basis in fact, the story of “Hitler’s snub” was repeated so often that people took it as truth. It remains one of the great anecdotes of American popular culture.

Life’s Work

For several years after the Berlin Olympics, life did not go smoothly for Owens. American officials had planned a barnstorming tour for the track team immediately after the Berlin Games. At first, Owens cooperated, running exhibitions in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and England. Having received numerous offers from the United States to capitalize on his Olympic fame, he balked when the team departed from London for a series of exhibitions in Scandinavia. The Amateur Athletic Union suspended him from any further amateur competition.

Accompanied by his Ohio State coach, Larry Snyder, Owens returned to the United States only to find that all the “offers” were phony publicity stunts by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. They never seriously intended to give a young black man not even an Olympic hero a steady job at decent pay. Instead, Owens found a lucrative assignment in the presidential campaign of Alf Landon, who paid him to stump for black votes. That turned out to be a futile effort but no more futile than a subsequent string of unsatisfactory jobs. For a time, Owens directed a band for Bill “Bojangles” Robinson on the black nightclub circuit. Tiring of that, he organized traveling basketball and softball teams, raced against horses at baseball games and county fairs, served for a summer as a playground director in Cleveland, and briefly worked as a clothes salesman. He suffered his biggest failure in a dry-cleaning venture that went bankrupt within six months.

Now married with three young daughters, Owens at twenty-seven years of age returned to Ohio State to finish his baccalaureate degree. However, he could not bring his grade average up sufficiently to earn his degree. At the outbreak of World War II, he took a government appointment as director of a physical fitness program for blacks. Two years later, he took a job with Ford Motor Company in Detroit, in charge of Ford’s black labor force. Dismissed from that position at the end of the war, by 1946 Owens no doubt winced when he looked back on the ten years since his Olympic victories. During that decade he had held about ten jobs, all confined to the segregated black community.

Finally, in the 1950’s, Owens broke out of that ghetto existence. When, after the onset of the Cold War, America needed a successful black to display to the world as an exemplar of the cherished American ideal of equal opportunity, Jesse Owens fit the bill. Having moved to Chicago in 1949, he worked with the Southside Boys Club and gave addresses to both black and white audiences in the greater Chicago area. Soon, he was in great demand throughout the United States as a spokesperson for American patriotism and the American Dream. In 1951, he returned to Berlin with that message. In 1955, he toured India, Malaya, and the Philippines under the sponsorship of the United States Department of State, and the following year, he attended the Melbourne, Australia, Olympic Games as a personal representative of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Never again would Owens be shunted aside as a black man in a white man’s world. For the last two decades of his life, he gave more than one hundred speeches a year in praise of athletics, religion, and the flag.

Becoming politically more conservative as he got older, Owens refused to join the Civil Rights movement. His moderate position put him out of touch with the younger, angrier generation of blacks. He was rejected as an “Uncle Tom” in the 1960’s. After Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave their world-famous black-power salutes at the Olympic Games held in Mexico City in 1968, Owens demanded apologies, but to no avail.

He received numerous honors during his final years. In 1974, the National Collegiate Athletic Association presented him its highest recognition, the Theodore Roosevelt Award for distinguished achievement. Two years later, President Gerald R. Ford bestowed on him the Medal of Freedom Award for his “inspirational” life, and in 1979, Democratic president Jimmy Carter honored him with the Living Legends Award for his “dedicated but modest” example of greatness. Less than a year later, on March 31, 1980, Jesse Owens died of lung cancer. Ironically, America’s greatest track and field athlete fell victim to a twenty-year habit of cigarette smoking.

Significance

When Owens achieved stardom in the Berlin Olympics of 1936, rigid racial segregation pervaded baseball, football, and basketball in the United States. Owens and Joe Louis stood virtually alone as black athletes who had excelled against whites. African Americans viewed them as examples of success, inspirational models of black ability, symbols of racial pride and dignity.

Although he was America’s first Olympic superstar, Owens did not become a widely acclaimed hero until after World War II. As Americans transposed their hatred of Hitler and the Nazis to Stalin and the communists, Owens’s rags-to-riches story confirmed American values as superior to communist claims to a better way of life. “In America, anybody can become somebody,” Owens often said, and American politicians, the media, and the public at large loved him for it. Especially to people in the nonaligned developing world, he was an effective spokesman for American democracy.

Four years after Owens’s death, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics demonstrated his perennial popularity. In Los Angeles, Carl Lewis won gold medals in the same four events Owens had dominated half a century earlier, with much better statistical results. However, Owens’s fame remained undiminished. Each time Lewis won a race, he was compared to Owens. Old film clips from the Berlin Games were aired repeatedly on television, showing the graceful Owens in action. Numerous interviews with family and friends kept his memory alive. Arguably, Owens was the posthumous star of the Los Angeles Olympics.

Owens’s life illustrates the principle that an athlete becomes a national hero only when his or her achievements, personality, and image coincide with momentous events to fulfill a cultural need beyond the athletic arena. As long as people struggle against the odds of racial prejudice and economic deprivation, the story of Owens will be told. He overcame the odds.

Bibliography

Baker, William J. Jesse Owens: An American Life. New York: Free Press, 1986. The only complete, critical biography available. Based on archival research, the black press, interviews with family and friends, and FBI files on Owens, all fully documented. A candid appraisal of Owens’s limitations and vices as well as his achievements and virtues, set against the background of American society.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sports in the Western World. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982. Places Owens in the larger context of sport history, briefly focusing on his Olympic victories in the face of Hitler’s ambitions in 1936. A survey, undocumented, but with a good critical bibliography of sport history.

Edwards, Harry. The Revolt of the Black Athlete. New York: Free Press, 1970. A firsthand account of the movement for black athletes’ rights in the ’s by the leader of the revolt that culminated in Mexico City. Depicts Owens as a lamentable representative of an older generation’s acquiescence to racial abuse. A fiery, argumentative treatise.

Mandell, Richard D. The Nazi Olympics. New York: Macmillan, 1971. The best treatment of the Berlin Games of 1936. Strong on Nazi ideology and technical efficiency behind the Games, also on daily events and profiles of athletes. Well documented from German as well as English sources, a gem of cultural history.

Owens, Jesse, with Paul Neimark. Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man. New York: William Morrow, 1970. A tirade against black-power advocates, especially against black athletes who openly protested American racism. Mostly autobiographical, with Owens illustrating his own acquaintance with bigotry, concluding that patience and moral character rather than angry rebellion would produce social change. Evoked hostile response from black readers, prompting Owens to collaborate once again with Paul Neimark to produce I Have Changed (New York: William Morrow, 1972), another collection of stories from his life to explain his point of view.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Jesse: A Spiritual Autobiography. Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1978. An indulgent use of anecdotes in the service of homilies. As always, Owens’s recollections cannot be taken at face value. Some are outright fabrications; most are romantically embellished.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Jesse Owens Story. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970. A lightweight, ghost written autobiography directed towards a teenage readership. More inspirational than factually accurate; anecdotal, not analytical. Undocumented and untrustworthy, the Jesse Owens story as Owens himself wanted it told.

Quercetani, Roberto L. A World History of Track and Field Athletics, 1864-1964. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Useful reference for Owens’s achievements in comparison with other athletes before and since his day. Covers his intercollegiate as well as his Olympic victories.

Schaap, Jeremy. Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Based on extensive research and access to Owens’s family, this book recounts Owens’s performance at the Olympics in a dramatic and entertaining style.

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