Jesse Owens

The Full Biography

Jesse Owens. Sprinter. The Oakville, Alabama, kid who made four golds in Berlin into an American sermon, then spent the decades after working a country that had cheered him and would not rent him a front door.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is Berlin, 1936, a long jump, a story about Hitler that is cleaner than the file. What the still cannot show is James Cleveland Owens of Oakville and Cleveland, a “Jesse” from a teacher who heard J.C., a man who had to race for money after the medals, and a death in 1980 that the four golds have never been allowed to reduce to a single Sunday.

He was born on September 12, 1913, in Oakville, Alabama, the son of Henry and Mary Emma Owens, a sharecropping household in a county that did not pretend the doors were open. James Cleveland was J.C. in the family. When the Great Migration took them to Cleveland, a teacher heard “J.C.” as Jesse, and the name stuck. East Technical High School. A body that could already do things other boys could not. He married Minnie Ruth Solomon in 1935; they had been a pair since they were young in Cleveland. The marriage held. The country would not always.

Ohio State. Larry Snyder was the coach. The university would let him run and would not let him live in the dorms with the white athletes. He worked jobs. He ran anyway. On May 25, 1935, at the Big Ten championships on Ferry Field in Ann Arbor, he set three world records and tied a fourth in about forty-five minutes: the long jump, the 220-yard dash, the 220-yard low hurdles, and a share of the 100-yard mark. That afternoon is a monument Berlin has to share. The folk sermon likes only the German week. The file has Michigan first.

In August 1936, in Berlin, he won four gold medals: the 100 meters in 10.3 seconds, the 200 meters in 20.7, the long jump at 8.06 meters, and the 4×100 relay. Luz Long, the German jumper, is in the friendship the pictures kept. The sermon is that he wrecked a Nazi idea of a body. He did. The sermon also likes a Hitler snub that the careful file complicates. Hitler did not shake every champion’s hand after the first day; the Olympic committee asked him to greet all or none. Owens would say, a month after the Games, that the American door was the one that stayed shut.

Hitler didn’t snub me — it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.Jesse Owens, 1936

Franklin Roosevelt did not invite the Black Olympians to the White House. White teammates were received. Owens came home to a ticker tape in New York and to hotels that still sent him to the service entrance. The Amateur Athletic Union stripped him of remaining amateur eligibility when he declined a Scandinavian exhibition tour the officials wanted and tried, instead, to make a living. The medals were never, in the legal sense, in doubt. The rent was.

That is the turn, and it is not Hitler’s box. It is the American door after the boat came home. A complete life of 1936 has to hold Ann Arbor, the relay that replaced two Jewish teammates — Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller — with Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, an argument that still runs, the exhibitions, the money, the cancer. He did not get a long rich elder lap. He got work, and a country that used the golds as a sermon and the man as an afterthought until it needed the sermon again.

The work after Berlin was a living made from a body the amateur rules had already used. He raced horses in exhibitions because a sprinter who is no longer an amateur still has to eat, and a promoter can sell a man against a thoroughbred. He ran against cars. He played, for stretches, with basketball units that toured, including time in the orbit of the Harlem Globetrotters, a famous body hired as a halftime. He opened a dry-cleaning shop in Cleveland; it failed. He worked for a time at a gas station. He did playground work and youth clinics because a city will hire a gold medal to stand on a blacktop and tell boys to stay in school. He was, for a stretch, the most famous Black athlete the country had and a man who still had to use the back entrance. Both are the biography.

He learned, in those years, what a gold medal is worth in a country that will cheer a body and then ask it to use the service stair. He packed bags. He signed programs. He stood in a hotel kitchen while the banquet that had hired him ate in the ballroom. He did not make a career of bitterness. He made a career of showing up anyway. The sermon likes the stadium. The life is the stair.

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson helped him find dates when the dates thinned. He packed Lucky Strikes in advertisements, a tobacco job the saint version skips and the lung file will not. He worked public relations for Ford in the 1940s, a Black spokesman a company could send into rooms it had not previously needed to enter. He went bankrupt in 1966. He kept speaking. The Cold War, when it needed a body that had already been to Berlin, hired him for the United States Information Agency and for State Department tours. He told the Berlin week the way the government wanted it told, and he also, in other rooms, told the doors. Ruth stayed. Three daughters — Gloria, Marlene, Beverly — grew up inside a sermon and a payroll that did not always match.

Ruth and the daughters have had to share a husband and father who is a sermon. Friends from the speaking years describe a man who was careful, tired, and done with a myth that did not pay the bill. The Owens at a podium was a clerk of a week the country would not let him retire and would not fully fund.

The later years

Home, after the exhibitions and the failed shop, was a speaker’s suitcase and, in the last stretch, Arizona. He had already, in Ann Arbor and Berlin, written the public man. The private man of the decades after the boat was a husband who kept the Cleveland marriage, a father of three daughters, and a wage earner who learned that a gold medal is not a pension. He testified, he keynoted, he cut ribbons, he told the week in Berlin to rooms that wanted the sermon and not the service entrance. When the United States needed a Cold War exhibit, it sent him. When a company needed a Black face next to a product, it hired him. The work was real. The dignity was something he had to insist on in hotels that still had a back door.

In 1974 he was inducted into the USA Track & Field Hall of Fame, a civic object that arrived while he was still working the circuit. In 1976 Gerald Ford hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him in the White House that Roosevelt had not opened. The medal was late. It was also the first time the building fully performed the welcome the 1936 team had been denied. He took it. He did not pretend it unsay the telegram that never came. In 1979 Jimmy Carter named him a Living Legend. The titles stacked up as the body declined. He had been a smoker. The Lucky Strike years were not a metaphor. In December 1979 he was in a Tucson hospital with lung cancer. He died there on March 31, 1980. He was sixty-six. Ruth was there. The daughters were there. Oakville still had the boy. Cleveland still had the name. Berlin still had the sermon. The doors at home still had the file.

The last decade was not a rich elder lap. It was clinics, banquets, a government that had decided the sermon was useful again, and a man who knew the difference between a medal and a key to a front door. He kept the marriage. He kept the careful public voice. He did not become a bitter act, and he did not become a wax saint. He became a clerk of his own week: telling it, charging for it, watching the country use it, going home to a house that was not a monument. Friends from those rooms describe a man who would still sign the program and still notice which entrance he had been shown. Both notices are the life.

After 1980 the country kept spending the golds. A Congressional Gold Medal was struck in 1990 and given to the family. Streets and tracks and a Ohio State facility took the name. In 2016 the White House, under Barack Obama, received relatives of the 1936 Black Olympians, a welcome seventy years late. The folk sermon still prefers Hitler’s box. The file still prefers the American door: no telegram, no invitation, a stripped amateur card, a horse race, a dry cleaner, a gas station, a tobacco ad, a bankruptcy, a Medal of Freedom when the lungs were already going. Ann Arbor is the correction. The four golds are the climate. The rent is the life.

What he did not get is the chapter the saint version writes: a nation that opened every door because a man had opened a stadium. What he got was work. He did the work. He spoke for the government and for himself. He stayed married. He died of the cigarettes the saint version also skips. Oakville put up a museum. Cleveland kept the teacher’s name. Berlin kept the film. The American doors, the ones after the boat, are the chapter that makes the film honest. Without them the four golds are a Sunday. With them they are a man.

The speaking years had a circuit and a script and, if you listened, a second script. The first was Berlin, Luz Long, the four golds, a Nazi idea of a body that had failed in public. The second was Cleveland, the dorm he could not enter, the telegram that did not come, the horse, the shop, the gas station, the playground, the back door. He told both, in different mixes, depending on who had paid for the chicken. A State Department room got more of the first. A Black church or a school gym got more of the second. He was not two men. He was one man with two audiences and a payroll that required both. Ruth heard both when he came home. The daughters grew up inside both. That is the last weather. Tucson is only where it stopped.

He had already, before the Medal of Freedom, been used as a symbol so often that the symbol could have eaten the clerk. It did not, quite. He kept the careful voice. He kept the job. He kept the knowledge of which entrance he had been shown. The country, when it finally hung a medal on him in the building Roosevelt had closed, was performing a welcome it still wanted credit for. He let it perform. He had bills. He had lungs that were already going. He had a week in 1936 the country would not let him retire. He retired only when the cancer closed the suitcase. The suitcase, for forty-four years after Berlin, was the life.

After he was gone

Every Olympic sermon still pays him a tax. Every “he showed Hitler” still steals a cleaner story. Ann Arbor is the correction. The American doors are the file. The four golds are the climate. The rent is the life.

He came out of Oakville, became Jesse in Cleveland, broke Ann Arbor, took Berlin, came home to doors that would not open, worked, spoke, and died of the cigarettes the saint version also skips. If you only remember Berlin, you have the sermon. If you remember Ann Arbor, the doors, and Tucson, you have him.

Portrait: Acme News Photos · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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