Jesse Owens

1913–1980 · 67 years Tier I

A Cleveland teacher misheard J.C. and wrote down Jesse

Portrait of Jesse Owens — Acme News Photos — 1936-07-12 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Ten children on a sharecrop at Oakville, Alabama, and James Cleveland Owens was the last of them, grandson of a man who had been owned. When he was nine the family went north to Cleveland with the Great Migration. A teacher asked his name, heard J.C. through the Alabama in it, and wrote Jesse. He delivered groceries, loaded freight cars and worked in a shoe repair shop while his father and older brother took shifts at a steel mill. Charles Riley, the track coach at Fairmount Junior High, moved practice to the mornings so the boy could keep the afternoon jobs. Owens met Minnie Ruth Solomon at that school at 15. Their daughter Gloria arrived in 1932, three years before they married.

At Ferry Field in Ann Arbor on May 25, 1935, he won four events, set five world records and tied a sixth inside 45 minutes, and one of those marks, a long jump of 26 feet and 8 and a quarter inches, stood for 25 years. Berlin came 15 months later. BriefHistory has the Games and the long argument about what Hitler did or did not do that week. What it does not have is the 44 years afterward, which were harder and are stranger.

He came home 22 years old and broke. Avery Brundage, who had branded the boycott campaigners un-American agitators, put the team straight onto a European exhibition tour, and when Owens quit it to take the paid offers waiting at home, Brundage suspended him from amateur competition for good. He endorsed Alf Landon that autumn and told a Republican rally in Kansas City that it was the president who had snubbed him, not Hitler. Then came the dry cleaning store, the gas station, bankruptcy, and a federal conviction for tax evasion in 1966. In 1968 he told Tommie Smith and John Carlos that a raised fist was a meaningless symbol, and only meant anything with money inside it.

Four years later he printed the retraction. Any Black man who was not a militant in 1970, he wrote in I Have Changed, was either blind or a coward. Eisenhower had already made him a goodwill ambassador in 1955, Ford gave him the Medal of Freedom in 1976, and Congress voted him a Gold Medal in 1990, ten years after he died. He had smoked a pack a day since he was 32. Drug-resistant lung cancer killed him in Tucson on March 31, 1980, at 66, and he was buried beside the Lake of Memories at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago. Berlin keeps getting retold in the version he spent his life correcting.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Jesse Owens's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Five world records inside 45 minutes other
Big Ten Championships, Ferry Field, Ann Arbor, May 25, 1935 1935
Four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics other
100 meters, 200 meters, long jump and the 4x100 relay 1936
Goodwill sports ambassador tours mission
Eisenhower sent him to India, the Philippines and Malaya 1955
I Have Changed book
The book in which he reversed himself on Black militancy 1972

Life in brief

with age at each point

1922 aged ~9 The family leaves Alabama for Cleveland He was nine, the youngest of ten children of a sharecropper.
1932 aged ~19 His daughter Gloria is born He and Ruth Solomon married three years later.
May 25, 1935 aged 21 Sets five world records and ties a sixth in 45 minutes at Ann Arbor The long jump mark of 26 feet 8 and a quarter inches lasted 25 years.
July 5, 1935 aged 21 Marries Minnie Ruth Solomon
August 1936 aged 22 Wins four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics
October 15, 1936 aged 23 Tells a Kansas City rally the president snubbed him, not Hitler He was campaigning for Alf Landon against Franklin Roosevelt.
1966 aged ~53 Convicted of tax evasion after bankruptcy
1976 aged ~63 Gerald Ford awards him the Presidential Medal of Freedom
March 31, 1980 aged 66 Dies of drug-resistant lung cancer in Tucson at 66