OWENS, JESSE

In an era of rigid racial segregation of all the major team sports in the United States, track star and Olympic champion James Cleveland "Jesse" Owens (September 12, 1913–March 31, 1980), along with heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, was the most prominent African-American athlete of the 1930s. Owens, the youngest of ten children born to Henry and Emma Owens in Oakville, Alabama, moved with the family in the early 1920s to Cleveland, Ohio, where he received the nickname of "Jesse" from an elementary school teacher who misunderstood his drawled pronunciation of J. C. In junior high school an energetic physical education teacher, Charles Riley, taught Owens the mechanics of athleticism, as well as proper manners and good citizenship.

A spectacular high school career in track propelled Owens to Ohio State University, where he enrolled in 1933 on a work-study arrangement. As a sophomore (his first year of varsity eligibility), he broke three world records and tied another in the Big Ten finals at Ann Arbor, Michigan. Just over a year later, Owens dominated the Berlin Olympics, winning four gold medals with new world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes, the broad jump, and the 400-meter relay.

These successes were all the sweeter because they occurred under the nose of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Owens disproved Hitler's theory of Aryan supremacy, and Hitler was reported to have snubbed Owens by refusing to shake his hand. In truth, American sportswriters concocted the snub story for patriotic readers, thus creating one of the most enduring of all American legends. While hotels refused admission to Jesse Owens's parents who had come to New York City to welcome their son home from Berlin, the Hitler snub story allowed racist Americans to focus on bigotry abroad.

After rousing receptions in New York City, Columbus, and Cleveland, the youthful Owens faced the ominous task of finding a job. By now his amateur athletic career was officially finished because the Amateur Athletic Union banned him for refusing to participate in a post-Olympics fund-raising tour of European cities. Instead, Owens rushed home to capitalize on various stage and screen offers. All those proposals turned out to be insubstantial, but Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon paid Owens handsomely to rally black voters in the election of 1936.

That failed effort appropriately represented Owens's unsatisfactory experience from 1937 to the outbreak of World War II. He barnstormed with several athletic and musical groups, supervised a public recreational program in Cleveland, and ran exhibition races at professional baseball games. Often his athletic efforts were clownishly framed on the order of an infamous race against a horse in Havana, Cuba, on the day after Christmas in 1936, and two years later a farcical loss to Joe Louis in a sprint in Chicago between games of a Negro League doubleheader. Owens established a dry-cleaning business in Cleveland, but saw it go bankrupt in 1939; he re-enrolled at Ohio State, but within a week of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Owens gave up his dream of earning a baccalaureate degree.

Had the Cold War and the civil rights movement not cast Owens's Depression-era feats in a new light, he might well have been forgotten. As American-Soviet rivalries turned the Olympic Games into a symbolic war, Owens became a premier showpiece of American success. His modest, conservative style made him an effective antidote to radical blacks, especially after the black-power salutes of two American sprinters at the Mexico City Olympics of 1968. Owens's mature years saw him comfortably active as a public speaker and as a spokesperson for a dozen or so major corporations.

OWENS, JESSE

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