Jesse Owens

By Tom Kirvan

“Find the good. It’s all around you. Find it, showcase it, and you’ll start believing it.”

So said Jesse Owens, the most famous athlete of his time and one of the greatest Olympians of all time.

Nicknamed “The Buckeye Bullet,” Owens made history at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany by winning four gold medals, setting Olympic records in each event (the 100 meters, long jump, 200 meters, and the 4 x 100-meter relay). As a Black American, Owens was credited by historians with “single-handedly crushing Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy.”

And despite his Olympic heroics in the face of the growing Nazi menace, Owens returned home to a nation draped in segregation, a place where the then 22-year-old son of a sharecropper could not even ride in the front of a public bus. His unparalleled success on the track, regrettably, didn’t translate to fair treatment off the track.

“Although I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either,” Owens said, reflecting on the sad state of race relations in America.

Jesse Owens*

Born on September 12, 1913 in Oakville, Ala. as the youngest of 10 children, Owens took his athletic talents to Ohio State University, where at the 1935 Big Ten Championships in Ann Arbor he set three world records within the span of an hour.

Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics 1936**

The luster of his athletic achievements, however, had little lasting value for Owens, who struggled to find meaningful work until landing a job with Ford Motor Co. in 1942 in its “ad hoc civil rights division, serving as the liaison between black and white workers.”

He later took on menial jobs as a gas station attendant, playground janitor, and manager of a dry-cleaning store, while also resorting to racing against motorbikes, trucks, and horses for a cash prize.

“People say it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals,” said Owens.

It was only after his death on March 31, 1980 at the age of 66 that Owens rightly received his due.

“I add to Jesse Owens’ collection a fifth gold medal, this one for his humanitarian contributions in the race of life,” noted President George H.W. Bush with the posthumous presentation of the Congressional Gold Medal in 1990.

*Acme News Photos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

*Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R96374 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons