Jesse Owens

Their life

The grandson of enslaved Alabamians and son of a sharecropper, who in a single afternoon at Ann Arbor in 1935 broke three world records and tied a fourth in forty-five minutes — still regarded as the greatest hour in track and field. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics he won four gold medals in front of Hitler, and formed a public friendship with the German long jumper Luz Long, who advised him during the qualifying round. He returned home to a country that had not changed: no White House invitation, no endorsements, and a livelihood made for years from exhibition races, including races against horses. "I had four medals," he said, "but you can't eat four gold medals."

Known for

• Four golds at Berlin 1936
• Ann Arbor's record-setting forty-five minutes
• Friendship with Luz Long
• Long-jump record lasting 25 years
• Defying Nazi racial ideology on the track

The road they walked

James Cleveland Owens was born on September 12, 1913, in Oakville, Alabama, the youngest of ten children in a family of sharecroppers. His grandparents had been enslaved. He was a sickly boy who worked in the cotton fields, and around 1922 the family joined the Great Migration north to Cleveland, Ohio. The story goes that a teacher misheard his Southern-accented 'J.C.' as 'Jesse,' and the name stuck for life.

In Cleveland he met Charles Riley, a junior-high track coach who gave him early training and lasting encouragement. By 1933, at East Technical High School, Owens had equaled the world record in the 100-yard dash at the national interscholastic championships in Chicago. At Ohio State University he received no athletic scholarship. He worked part-time jobs, including as an elevator operator, and as a Black student he was barred from campus housing and often from restaurants and hotels on the road. On May 25, 1935, at the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor, he set world records in the long jump, 220-yard dash, and 220-yard low hurdles, and tied the 100-yard record, all within about forty-five minutes. His long-jump mark of 26 feet 8¼ inches stood for 25 years.

At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, staged by Nazi Germany as a showcase for its ideology, Owens won gold in the 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4x100-meter relay. In the long jump he met the German competitor Luz Long, who finished second and became his friend. Long was killed in World War II, in Sicily in 1943. The relay carries its own controversy. Owens and Ralph Metcalfe replaced the Jewish sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller shortly before the race, and historians still debate who made that decision and why. At home, Owens said, the slight that stung was from his own government: President Roosevelt never congratulated him. After the Games he left a post-Olympic European exhibition tour early, the Amateur Athletic Union suspended him, and his amateur career ended. He spent years scraping together a living from exhibition races, promotions, and odd jobs, and he was convicted of tax evasion in 1966. Later he found steadier work as a public speaker and goodwill ambassador, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976.

How their story ended

Jesse Owens died of lung cancer on March 31, 1980, in Tucson, Arizona, at age 66, after decades of heavy smoking. In his last years he had won the honors long denied him, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976 and the Living Legend Award in 1979, and he spent his time speaking and representing American sport. He was buried at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago, and Congress posthumously awarded him its Gold Medal in 1990.

In their words

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