James Cleveland “Jesse” Owens (September 12, 1913 – March 31, 1980)
✪ James Cleveland “Jesse“ Owens (September 12, 1913 – March 31, 1980) was an American track and field athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games. Owens specialized in the sprints and the long jump and was recognized in his lifetime as “perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history.” He set three world records and tied another, all in less than an hour, at the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan—a feat that has never been equaled and has been called “the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport.“
Jesse Owens, originally known as J.C., was the youngest of ten children (three girls and seven boys) born to Henry Cleveland Owens (a sharecropper) and Mary Emma Fitzgerald in Oakville, Alabama, on September 12, 1913. He was the grandson of a slave.
Owens, the 10th and last child of poor sharecroppers, was a sickly child. The day after his 5th birthday, he developed a large fibrous bump on his chest that began to painfully press against his lungs. Unable to afford a doctor to remove it, his parents decided to perform the surgery on their own. As Owens bit down hard on a leather strap, his mother used a sterilized kitchen knife to carve into her son’s chest and remove a golf-ball sized growth. Owens suffered a great loss of blood but survived.
At the age of nine, he and his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio for better opportunities as part of the Great Migration (1910–40) when 1.6 million African Americans left the segregated and rural South for the urban and industrial North. When his new teacher asked for his name to enter in her roll book, he said “J.C.”, but because of his strong Southern accent, she thought he said “Jesse.” The name stuck, and he was known as Jesse Owens for the rest of his life.
Owens took different menial jobs as a youth 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 he had a passion for running. Throughout his life, Owens attributed the success of his athletic career to the mentorship & encouragement of Charles Riley, his junior high school track coach at Fairmount Junior High School.
Owens first met Minnie Ruth Solomon (1915–2001) at Fairmont Junior High School in Cleveland when he was 15 and she was 13. They dated steadily through high school and married on July 5th, 1935. Jesse and Ruth had three daughters together: Gloria, Marlene and Beverly. They remained married until his death in 1980.
Owens first came to national attention when he was still a student of East Technical High School in Cleveland when he equaled the world record of 9.4 seconds in the 100 yards (91 m) dash and long-jumped 24 feet 9+1⁄2 inches (7.56 m) at the 1933 National High School Championship in Chicago.
Affectionately known as the “Buckeye Bullet,” Owens won a record eight individual NCAA Championships under the coaching of Larry Snyder; four each in 1935 and 1936. Owens did not receive a scholarship for his efforts, so he continued to work part-time jobs to pay for school.
May 25, 1935 is remembered as the day Jesse Owens established 4 world records in athletics. On that day, Owens achieved track and field immortality in a span of only 45 minutes during the Big Ten meet at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he set three world records and tied a fourth. He equaled the world record for the 100-yard dash (9.4 seconds) and set world records in the long jump (26 feet 8+1⁄4 inches or 8.13 metres, a world record that would stand for the next 25 years); 220 yards (201.2 m) sprint (20.3 seconds); and 220-yard low hurdles (22.6 seconds, becoming the first to break 23 seconds). Both 220 yard records may also have beaten the metric records for 200 meters (flat and hurdles), which would count as two additional world records from the same performances.
On December 4, 1935, NAACP Secretary Walter Francis White wrote a letter to Owens which was never sent trying to dissuade him from taking part in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany. White argued that an African American should not promote such a regime after Blacks had suffered through slavery in their own country.
However, in the summer of 1936, Owens and his United States teammates sailed on the SS Manhattan and arrived in Germany to compete at the Summer Olympics in Berlin. According to fellow American sprinter James LuValle, who won the bronze in the 400 meters, Owens arrived at the new Olympic Stadium to a throng of noisy fans, many of them young girls yelling “Wo ist Jesse? Wo ist Jesse?” (“Where is Jesse? Where is Jesse?”)
Prior to the competitions, the founder of the Adidas athletic shoe company, Adi Dassler, visited Owens in the Olympic Village and persuaded Owens to wear Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik shoes. This was the first sponsorship ever for a male African American athlete.
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On August 3, Owens won the 100 m dash with a time of 10.3 seconds. On August 4, he won the long jump with a leap of 8.06 meters (26 ft 5 in) (3¼ inches short of his own world record). The long-jump victory is documented, along with many other 1936 events, in the 1938 film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl.
On August 5, he won the 200 m sprint with a time of 20.7 seconds. On August 9, Owens won his fourth gold medal in the 4 × 100 m sprint relay when head coach Lawson Robertson replaced sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller with Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, who teamed with Frank Wykoff and Foy Draper to set a world record of 39.8 seconds in the event.
On August 1, 1936, Nazi Germany’s leader Adolf Hitler shook hands with the German victors only and then left the stadium. International Olympic Committee president Henri de Baillet-Latour insisted that Hitler greet every medalist or none at all. Hitler opted for the latter and skipped all further medal presentations.
Although Hitler did not publicly congratulate any of the medal winners after this time; even so, the communist New York City newspaper the Daily Worker still claimed Hitler received all the track winners except Owens’s African-American team-mate Cornelius Johnson, who won gold in the high jump final and left the stadium as a “deliberate snub” after watching Johnson’s winning jump. Hitler was also subsequently accused of failing to acknowledge Owens (who won gold medals on August 3, 4 (two), and 9) or shake his hand. Owens responded to these claims at the time:
“Hitler had a certain time to come to the stadium and a certain time to leave. It happened he had to leave before the victory ceremony after the 100 meters (the race began at 5:45 p.m). But before he left I was on my way to a broadcast and passed near his box. He waved at me and I waved back. I think it was bad taste to criticize the “man of the hour” in another country.”
In an article dated August 4, 1936, the African-American newspaper editor Robert L. Vann describes witnessing Hitler “salute” Owens for having won gold in the 100m sprint (August 3):
“And then… wonder of wonders… I saw Herr Adolph Hitler salute this lad. I looked on with a heart which beat proudly as the lad who was crowned king of the 100 meters event, get an ovation the like of which I have never heard before. I saw Jesse Owens greeted by the Grand Chancellor of this country as a brilliant sun peeped out through the clouds. I saw a vast crowd of some 85,000 or 90,000 people stand up and cheer him to the echo.”
On October 15, 1936, Owens repeated this allegation when he addressed an audience of African Americans at a Republican rally in Kansas City, remarking:
“Hitler didn’t snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”
Still, Owens’ success at the games caused considerable consternation for Hitler, who was using them to show the world a resurgent Nazi Germany. He and other government officials had hoped that German athletes would dominate the games. Nazi minister Albert Speer wrote that Hitler “was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens.“
When Owens returned to the United States after the Olympics, he was greeted in New York City by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. During a Manhattan ticker-tape parade in his honor along Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes, someone handed Owens a paper bag. Owens paid it little mind to it at the time until the parade concluded. When he finally opened it, he found the bag contained $10,000 in cash. Owens’ wife Ruth later said: “And he [Owens] didn’t know who was good enough to do a thing like that.”
Owens joined the Republican Party after returning from Europe and was paid to campaign for African American votes for the Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential election. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) never invited Jesse Owens to the White House following his triumphs at the Olympic Games.
Owens was quoted saying the secret behind his success was, “I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.”
After the Olympic games ended, the entire Olympic team was invited to compete in Sweden. Owens decided to capitalize on his success by returning to the United States to take advantage of more lucrative endorsement offers. United States athletic officials were furious and withdrew his amateur status, which immediately ended his career. Owens angrily stated, “A fellow desires something for himself.” Owens argued he deserved the endorsements because the discrimination he had faced throughout his entire athletic career, such as not being eligible for scholarships in college meant he had to give up on amateur athletics in pursuit of financial gain elsewhere.
Owens was prohibited from making any further appearances at amateur sporting events to bolster his profile; and after time, the commercial offers all but disappeared. He took on menial jobs as a gas station attendant, playground janitor, and manager of a dry cleaning firm. He also raced against amateurs and horses for cash. On the lack of opportunities, Owens added, “There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.”
Owens ran a dry cleaning business and worked as a gas station attendant to earn a living, but he eventually filed for bankruptcy. In 1966, he was successfully prosecuted for tax evasion.
Owens initially refused to support the black power salute by African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympics. He told them:
“The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers—weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there’s money inside. There’s where the power lies.”
Owens traveled to Munich for the 1972 Summer Olympics as a special guest of the West German government meeting West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. A few months before his death, Owens had unsuccessfully tried to convince President Jimmy Carter to withdraw his demand that the United States boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He argued that the Olympic ideal was supposed to be observed as a time-out from war and that it was above politics.
Starting at the age of 32, Owens became a pack a day smoker for 35 years. In December 1979, he was hospitalized on and off with an extremely aggressive and drug-resistant type of lung cancer. He died of the disease at age 66 in Tucson, Arizona, on March 31, 1980, with his wife and other family members at his bedside. He was interred next to the Lake of Memories at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago. His gravestone is inscribed:
Jesse Owens. Olympic Champion. 1936. Athlete and humanitarian. A master of the spirit as well as the mechanics of sports. A winner who knew that winning was not everything. He showed extraordinary love for his family and friends. His achievements have shown us all the promise of America. His faith in America inspired countless others to do their best for themselves and their country. September 12, 1913 – March 31, 1980. ✪
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