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’ playing first faintly and then loudly, and then I saw the American flag slowly rise to my victory,” he later recalled. To his right, a German Olympic official gave the Nazi salute.
The dictator of Germany did not shake hands with Owens or most of the other winners. “Hitler Snubs Owens” was the headline in the American papers. 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 issued this verdict while campaigning against Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and for Republican Governor Alf Landon of Kansas. To beat Landon, Owens was paid $10,000, more than $225,000 today.
On Friday in Paris, Olympic athletes will begin competing for the kinds of world records and fame that Owens achieved 88 years ago when he won four gold medals. Returning home on the Queen Mary, 22-year-old Owens vowed to turn his gold into money. Contrary to the frequent stories that he lived in poverty immediately after the Olympics, he initially did fantastically with the promotions.
But “as the months went by, no one had offered me a job,” Owens later recalled of the racism he faced as a Black American. “When I returned home, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn’t ride in front of the bus. I couldn’t live where I wanted.”
Owens grew up in Cleveland as one of 10 children of former Alabama stockholders. Working odd jobs, he attended Ohio State University, where he earned a reputation as the “Buckeye Bullet,” winning track and field competitions. In 1936, he and 17 other black athletes traveled with the US team to Berlin for the “Nazi Olympics,” overseen by a dictator who preached Aryan racial supremacy.
In the Games, Owens he won his second gold after the 100m with a record wide jump. “Jesse exploded beyond 26 feet as he rocketed into space,” wrote sportswriter Grandland Rice. “The Negro college seemed to jump from Germany. The American cheers started long before Jesse hit the air.” Shirley Povich of the Washington Post wrote in his column. “Hitler proclaimed Aryan supremacy by decree, but Jesse Owens proves him a liar by degrees.”
Owens won his third gold medal by running the 200-meter race in record time, ahead of Mack Robinson, the brother of future baseball great Jackie Robinson. Owens’ run was “a thing of beauty, a joy to behold” and “one of the most astonishing achievements in the ancient art of foot-racing,” reported the New York Times. Owens won his fourth gold in a four-man relay.
Back in the United States, after a tape parade in New York, 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 touring jazz band for thousands of dollars.
Both political parties courted Owens to win over 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 was also outraged that Roosevelt had not congratulated any of the black Olympic athletes.
“The president of this country hasn’t sent me a single congratulatory message,” 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 [more than $1.4 million today] since the Olympics, through personal appearances, exhibitions, political rallies and endorsing various things,” Owens told the International News Service in early 1937 as he prepared to take his jazz band on tour. He was a wealthy 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 Jesse Owens Dry Cleaning Company with a large sign that offered “Expedited 7-Hour Service from the World’s Fastest Runner.”
By 1940, the racer’s fame and fortune had faded. “The world has changed for the Alabama-born speedster who started picking cotton at age 6 to help around the house,” the United Press reported. The “world’s fastest man [has] he endured the bitterness of bankruptcy in four short years and is now busy quietly building a life for his wife and child in comparative obscurity.”
To earn money, he sometimes traveled with a Black baseball team and competed against horses abroad. “I was no longer a proud man who had won four Olympic gold medals,” Owens later said. “I was a spectacle, a freak who made a living by competing—dishonestly—against stupid animals. I hated it.”
In the 1940 election, Owens endorsed Roosevelt, declaring that 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 endorsed Republican Wendell Willkie, to a debate. FDR won an unprecedented third term, but Owens was not invited to the White House. (Owens finally received presidential recognition in 1955, when Dwight 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 Tommy Smith from the US track and field team for raising gloved fists at a “Black power” sign while receiving medals. When Owens addressed the team, “the black athletes just spat in his face,” Jeremy Sapp wrote in his 2014 book “Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and the Hitler Olympics.”
Owens supported Republican President Richard Nixon and was welcomed to 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 presented him with a Living Legacy Award. When Owens died of lung cancer the following year at age 66, the New York Times described him as “perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in the history of track and field.”
In 2016, President Barack Obama hosted the families of the 16 black men and two black women from the 1936 US Olympic team whom Roosevelt did not 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’ slender figure striding down a track in Berlin continues to endure, raising dust in the faces of Nazis who declared an Aryan “master race”.
Ronald G. Shafer is a former Washington political features editor at the Wall Street Journal.