Jesse Owens won 4 Olympic goldsthen was paid to campaign against FDR

Publish date: 2024-08-22

Adolf Hitler arrived too late to see Jesse Owens blazing down the track in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on Aug. 3, 1936, winning the 100-meter race in a record-tying 10.3 seconds and edging out fellow Black American Ralph Metcalfe.

But the German chancellor witnessed the day’s remaining events, and “with Der Fuehrer stroking his moustache in the royal box and brocaded swastikas flying in the breeze,” the United Press reported, “Old Man Nordic supremacy took an awful kicking around on the first day of competition in the Olympics.”

Owens stood on the podium in front of the crowd of 110,000 and saluted. “My eyes blurred as I heard the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ played first faintly and then loudly and then saw the American flag slowly raised for my victory,” he later recalled. On his right, a German Olympic official gave the Nazi salute.

Germany’s dictator didn’t shake hands with Owens or most other winners. “Hitler Snubs Owens” was the headline in U.S. newspapers. Owens later had his own version: “Hitler didn’t snub me — it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”

Owens delivered this verdict while campaigning against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, and for Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, a Republican. To stump for Landon, Owens had been paid $10,000, about $225,000 today.

On Friday in Paris, Olympic athletes will begin competing for the kinds of world records and fame Owens achieved 88 years ago when he won four gold medals. Returning home aboard the Queen Mary, Owens, 22, vowed to turn his gold into money. Contrary to frequent stories that he lived in poverty right after the Olympics, he initially did fantastically well with promotions.

But “as the months passed, no one had offered me a job,” Owens recalled later about the racism he faced as a Black American. “When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus. I couldn’t live where I wanted.”

Owens grew up in Cleveland as one of 10 children of former Alabama sharecroppers. Working odd jobs, he attended Ohio State University, where he gained fame as the “Buckeye Bullet,” winning track competitions. In 1936, he and 17 other Black athletes traveled with the U.S. team to Berlin for the “Nazi Olympics,” overseen by a dictator who preached Aryan racial supremacy.

At the Games, Owens won his second gold after the 100-meter with a record broad jump. “Jesse exploded beyond 26 feet as he hurled himself through space,” sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote. “The Negro collegian seemed to be jumping out of Germany. The American cheering started well before Jesse was airborne.” The Washington Post’s Shirley Povich wrote in his column. “Hitler declared Aryan supremacy by decree, but Jesse Owens is proving him a liar by degrees.”

Owens took his third gold medal running the 200-meter race in record time, ahead of Mack Robinson, the brother of future baseball great Jackie Robinson. Owens’s running was “a thing of beauty, a joy to behold,” and “one of the most amazing achievements in the ancient art of foot racing,” the New York Times reported. Owens won his fourth gold in a four-man relay race.

Back in the United States, after a ticker tape parade in New York City, Owens went to the Harlem apartment of aging vaudeville dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who introduced him to an agent. The two men, for a cut, arranged for the Olympic hero to appear at exhibitions and events and with a traveling jazz band for thousands of dollars.

Both political parties wooed Owens to win Black voters in the election. Democrats offered to buy him a house in Ohio, but a Sun Oil executive paid him a large fee to campaign for Landon, William J. Baker wrote in his 1986 book “Jesse Owens: An American Life.” Owens also was angered that Roosevelt hadn’t congratulated any of the Black Olympic athletes.

“The President of this country didn’t even send me a message of congratulations,” Owens told a campaign rally of 10,000 Black people in Baltimore, the Baltimore Sun reported. “People said he was too busy. But Governor Landon sent me one.”

Roosevelt crushed Landon, but Owens continued to live high.

“I’ve made $65,000 [almost $1.5 million today] since the Olympics, through personal appearances, exhibition runs, political rallies and endorsing various things,” Owens told International News Service in early 1937 as he prepared to take his jazz band on tour. He was a rich American in the Great Depression. He bought a new Buick, an 11-room house in Cleveland for his parents and a house for himself, his wife, Ruth, and the first of their three daughters. He opened the Jesse Owens Dry Cleaning Company with a big sign offering “Speedy 7 Hour Service by the World’s Fastest Runner.”

By 1940, the runner’s fame and riches had faded. “The world has changed for the Alabama-born speedster who had started picking cotton at 6 to help out at home,” United Press reported. The “world’s fastest human [has] endured the bitterness of bankruptcy in four short years and now is engaged in quietly building a life for his wife and child in comparative obscurity.”

To make money, he sometimes traveled with a Black baseball team and raced against horses in the outfield. “I was no longer a proud man who had won four Olympic gold medals,” Owens said later. “I was a spectacle, a freak who made his living by competing — dishonestly — against dumb animals. I hated it.”

In the 1940 election, Owens supported Roosevelt, declaring he “has done more for the advancement of the colored people than any president since emancipation,” the St. Louis Argus reported. He challenged boxing champion Joe Louis, who backed Republican Wendell Willkie, to a debate. FDR won an unprecedented third term, but Owens wasn’t invited to the White House. (Owens finally got presidential recognition in 1955, when Dwight D. Eisenhower named him “Ambassador of Sports.”)

Owens was relatively moderate on civil rights. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, he supported the removal of sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith from the U.S. track team for raising gloved fists in a “Black power” sign while receiving medals. When Owens talked to the team, “the black athletes all but spat in his face,” Jeremy Schapp wrote in his 2014 book “Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and the Hitler Olympics.”

Owens backed President Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, and was welcomed at the White House in 1972. In a 1976 White House ceremony, President Gerald Ford awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter gave him a Living Legacy Award. When Owens died of lung cancer the next year at 66, the New York Times described him as “perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history.”

In 2016, President Barack Obama hosted the families of the 16 Black men and two Black women from the 1936 U.S. Olympics team whom Roosevelt didn’t invite to the White House. “It wasn’t just Jesse,” Obama said.

But as this year’s Olympics begin in Paris, the image of Owens’s slim figure streaking down a racetrack in Berlin continues to endure, kicking up dust in the faces of Nazis who proclaimed an Aryan “master race.”

Ronald G. Shafer is a former Washington political features editor at the Wall Street Journal.

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Jesse Owens won 4 Olympic goldsthen was paid to campaign against FDR