OWENS, James Cleveland ("Jesse")

(b. 12 September 1913 in Oakville, Alabama; d. 31 March 1980 in Tucson, Arizona), track and field athlete who set world records in sprints, hurdles, and long jump events and won four gold medals at 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Owens was the last of ten surviving children of Henry Cleveland Owens and Mary Emma Fitzgerald Owens, who were sharecroppers. Located in the played-out soil of northern Alabama not far from Huntsville, his hometown of Oakville was typical of many small country towns in the South where tenant farming and limited opportunity were a way of life for generations after the Civil War. Henry Owens considered the season a success if his family was sufficiently fed and decently clothed. With racial restrictions and outright violence holding sway, striving for anything more seemed foolhardy, if not dangerous.

Although life as a sharecropper took its toll on Henry Owens, Mary Owens was determined to seek a better life for the family. After daughter Lillie went to Cleveland and wrote letters back home with descriptions of ready jobs, high wages, and more freedom than they ever could have dreamed of in Alabama, her mother insisted on moving the family to the North. Although Henry objected at first, he took their two oldest sons to Cleveland to work for a while and save enough for the rest of the family to join them. Around 1922 the entire Owens family was reunited in Cleveland.

Like thousands of other African-American families taking part in the Great Migration northward during and after World War I, the Owenses were both delighted and disappointed in what they found. Henry Owens and his older sons quickly found work in Cleveland's steel mills, but it was months before Mary Owens could bring herself to open the drapes out of fear that strangers could look in on the family's apartment. Eventually, the family adjusted to its new surroundings. Owens—called "J.C." by his family but soon rechristened "Jesse" after a teacher misunderstood his southern drawl—quickly adapted to the multicultural environment in which immigrants from Eastern Europe were the majority at his new grade school. With an outgoing and optimistic personality, Owens was immediately popular with his classmates. Although he was several years older than his fellow pupils and would always struggle with academic work, Owens's smile seemed to belie any struggles he encountered.

Recognized as a sprinter of enormous potential during his days at Cleveland's Fairmount Junior High, Owens's most important early mentor was track coach Charles Riley. Under Riley's tutelage, Owens streamlined his sprinting style, a fleet form that commentators likened to floating around the track. In 1928 Owens set his first two world records at the junior high level with a 6-foot high jump and long jump of 22 feet, 11.75 inches. Entering East Technical High School in the fall of 1930, Owens continued his achievements in the long jump, 100-yard dash, and 200-yard dash, setting records at the high school level in each event. In June 1933 Owens led the East Tech team to a National Interscholastic Championship when he scored a majority of the team's points in the competition. He also set a new record in the 200-yard dash in 20.7 seconds and 100-yard dash record of 9.4 seconds. Upon his return to Cleveland, Owens was greeted as a conquering hero with a parade through the city and addresses from the mayor and city councilmen. During his high school career, Owens, who was five feet, ten inches tall, and weighed 165 pounds, won 75 of the 79 races he entered.

With such an impressive string of victories, Owens was offered admittance to a number of colleges with the promise of an easy job to cover his expenses; in an era when athletic scholarships were rare in track and field, such arrangements were commonplace. Owens accepted an offer from Ohio State University (OSU) that included a job as a page in the Ohio State House. He also earned a significant amount of money from weekly appearances at local business and civic groups, where he began to learn the public-speaking skills that would become invaluable later in his life. The young athlete sent much of his earnings back to Cleveland, since his father had become disabled after he was hit by a car. Owens also had his own family to support, as his relationship with former Fairmount classmate Minnie Ruth Solomon had resulted in the birth of their daughter in 1932. The two married on 5 July 1935, although Owens would later insist in deference to the morals of the day that they had secretly eloped years before. The Owens family eventually included three daughters.

Owens's achievements as a collegiate athlete were astounding. Building on his work with Charles Riley, Owens refined his sprinting and jumping techniques with OSU Coach Larry Snyder and set numerous state, inter-collegiate, and American Amateur Union (AAU) records. The highlight of his college career occurred on 25 May 1935 at the Big Ten Track and Field Championship in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Arriving at the meet with a sore back, Owens barely made it through the qualifying heats. The day of the finals, however, Owens turned in record-breaking performances in the 220-yard dash, broad jump, 220-yard hurdles, 200-meter dash, and 200-meter low hurdles. He also tied the existing record in the 100-yard dash with a time of 9.4 seconds. In recognition of his astonishing accomplishment, Owens was elected captain of the OSU track team, the first African American to receive such an honor in the Big Ten.

By now a national celebrity, Owens faced the first of many controversies when the AAU threatened to exclude him from further competition. Upon learning that the Ohio State House had reimbursed his travel expenses under the guise of paying him for his job as a page, the AAU launched an investigation that threatened to keep Owens from going to the trials for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The AAU eventually deemed Owens a victim of circumstance, but not before it had removed him from consideration for the 1935 Sullivan Award for the outstanding amateur athlete of the year. The controversy behind him, Owens prepared to take part as one of nineteen African-American athletes on the U.S. track and field squad headed for Berlin. Their sheer presence signified that a new generation of African-American athletes had come of age; although four African Americans had taken part in the Olympic track and field events in 1932, none had done so in 1928.

Owens was the undisputed star of the delegation, and the press detailed the well-dressed athlete's every move and utterance. Always calm in competition, Owens remained affable and accessible throughout the games, and was careful to sidestep the enormous political outcry against holding the Olympics in Hitler's Berlin. In the finals of the 100-meter dash on 3 August 1936, Owens took the gold medal with a time of 10.3 seconds that tied the world record. He followed that victory with a new Olympic record in the long jump of 26 feet, 5.25 inches. Two days later, Owens earned his third gold medal of the games with an Olympic-record time of 20.7 seconds in the 200-meter finals. Capping off his historic Olympic run, Owens then received a fourth gold medal as part of the U.S. relay team in the 400-meter race.

Hailed in the United States in direct repudiation of Hitler's beliefs in Aryan superiority, Owens joined boxer Joe Louis as one of the nation's first African-American sports heroes. In the aftermath of such acclaim, however, Owens struggled for several years to capitalize on his success. Leaving OSU to take up a series of promotional appearances—including a campaign for 1936 Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon for which he earned $10,000—Owens was banned by the AAU from further amateur competition. With his career on the track effectively over, Owens attempted to start his own dry-cleaning business in Cleveland. After a year of mounting debts and extravagant spending on new cars and homes, Owens had to close his business. The former Olympian also faced tax evasion charges for earnings that he had failed to declare. Returning to OSU to finish his undergraduate degree, Owens did not pass enough of his classes and left the university for good in 1941.

After a stint as assistant personnel manager for African-American employees at the Ford Motor Company from 1943 to 1945, Owens moved his family to Chicago, where he opened a public relations firm. As a motivational speaker with his own story of triumph over poverty and racism, Owens was much sought after by business and civic clubs, and his work finally brought him success off the track. For his efforts on behalf of the Republican Party, Owens was also rewarded with a patronage job with the Illinois State Athletics Commission in 1953, a job that allowed him to reshape the myths that became part of the Jesse Owens story. One of the athlete's favorite anecdotes related to a supposed snubbing that Hitler delivered after Owens won the first of his gold medals. Although Hitler had stopped meeting with any gold medal winners after the first day of competition and had not singled Owens out, the story nevertheless became part of Owens's stock of Olympic tales.

Although Owens enjoyed a comfortable income from corporate sponsorships, his conviction on tax evasion charges in 1965 tarnished his image as a successful businessman. His legacy as an Olympic hero also came under attack for his opposition to black power supporters at the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City. After sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists on the medals stand, Owens was furious at what he perceived as their lack of patriotism. With cowriter Paul Niemark, Owens published a critique of militant activists, Blackthink: My Life as a Black Man and White Man (1970). He later softened his rhetoric in the 1972 work I Have Changed, but the gulf between Owens's outlook and the younger generation remained stark.

Although he maintained a heavy schedule of public appearances, Owens retired to Scottsdale, Arizona in the 1970s. After a stressful period in their marriage brought about by his innumerable extramarital affairs, Jesse and Ruth Owens remained together and shared in the glory as Owens was hailed as an elder statesman among U.S. Olympic champions. Among the many honors, OSU awarded Owens an honorary doctorate in 1972; Owens also received the Medal of Freedom Award from President Gerald R. Ford four years later. After decades of heavy smoking, Owens was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1979; the following year the illness took his life. He is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago. Ruth Owens became the chairperson of the Jesse Owens Foundation, which provided scholarships to students active in their communities; she died in June 2001.

Jesse Owens published a number of autobiographical and inspirational works during his lifetime in collaboration with Paul Niemark, Blackthink: My Life as a Black Man and White Man (1970); The Jesse Owens Story (1970); I Have Changed (1972); Jesse: A Spiritual Autobiography (1978); and Jesse, the Man Who Outran Hitler (1978). There are numerous biographies of Owens, perhaps the leading work is William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (1986). Owens's story as part of the 1936 Olympics is recounted in Duff Hart-Davis, Hitler ' s Games: The 1936 Olympics (1986); Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (1992); and Alfred E. Senn, Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games: A History of the Power Brokers, Events, and Controversies That Shaped the Games (1999). The Owens story is regularly invoked in any discussion of the Olympics and the history of African Americans in sports—often reviving the myths popularized by Owens himself—including essays by Lerone Bennett, Jr., "Jesse Owens's Olympic Tribute Over Time and Hitlerism," Ebony (Apr. 1996); Gloria Owens Hemphill, "Humiliating Hitler," Newsweek (25 Oct. 1999); Phil Taylor, "Flying in the Face of the Fuhrer," Sports Illustrated (29 Nov. 1999); and Timothy Kelley, "Stealing Hitler's Show," New York Times Upfront (4 Sep. 2000). An obituary is in the New York Times (1 Apr. 1980). Footage from Owens's 1936 Olympic triumph is included in the film Olympia (1940), directed by the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. A fictionalized account of Owens's life appeared as The Jesse Owens Story (1984); a television documentary of his life, Jesse Owens: Champion Athlete (1994), is included in the Black Americans of Achievement Video Collection and is available on videocassette.

Timothy G. Borden