Jesse Owens

James Cleveland Owens was born in Oakville, Alabama, on the twelfth of September 1913, the tenth child of sharecropping parents. The family moved to Cleveland when Jesse was nine; his elementary-school teacher misheard his nickname J.C. as "Jesse" and he kept the name for the rest of his life.

He attended East Technical High School in Cleveland and then Ohio State University. On the twenty-fifth of May 1935, at the Big Ten Conference championship meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan — in a span of forty-five minutes — Owens set three world records (long jump, 220-yard dash, 220-yard low hurdles) and tied a fourth (100-yard dash). The Ann Arbor performance is widely regarded as the most remarkable forty-five minutes in track and field history.

At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin — held under Hitler's National Socialist regime, which had explicitly intended the Games as a demonstration of Aryan racial supremacy — Owens won four gold medals: the 100 metres, the 200 metres, the long jump, and the 4x100-metre relay. His long-jump victory came in direct competition with the German jumper Luz Long, who advised Owens during qualifying on adjusting his takeoff mark — an act of sporting collegiality the Reich government punished by sending Long to the Russian front, where he was killed in 1943. Hitler refused to publicly congratulate Owens or any other Black athlete.

Owens's four gold medals refuted the regime's racial premise as fully as it could have been refuted on the field. The Berlin Olympic Stadium itself has named a street in his honor since 1984.

He died of lung cancer in Tucson, Arizona, on the thirty-first of March 1980, age sixty-six.

He is honored here as the sprinter whose four Berlin gold medals refuted the most consequential racial doctrine of the twentieth century.