Jesse Owens Revisited

Posted: 4/26/2015

Trigger

Just watched for the 2nd time “AMERICAN EXPERIENCE/Jesse Owens”. Unfortunately, this great documentary about this son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave expires very soon (4/30/15) on the PBS website.

I found it quite condescending by American Experience to allude to Jesse Owens as if he was an Uncle Tom American.

There are a number of things many people probably do not remember or do not even know about this extraordinary athlete and the Olympic Games of 1936 in Hitler’s Germany. I bet, a lot of African-Americans would be surprised too.

Highlights

1. There were at least two black American male athletes at the time competing for the world track record in the 100 meter dash, Jesse Owens and Eulace Peacock. Peacock would have qualified for the Olympic Games of 1936 had he not been injured.
2. There were at least two white men who discovered and promoted Jesse Owens talents as an athlete very early on, i.e. Charles Riley and Larry Snyder (?). One of them encouraged or helped Owen to become even the first black man elected captain of an Ohio State varsity team.
3. There were at least two black athletes on the U.S. olympic track team, famous Jesse Owens and lesser known Ralph Metcalf. Both of them won multiple gold medals. The documentary did not mention, but Ralph Metcalf himself almost won the gold medal already at the Olympic Games of 1932 (his loss by not even one second was contested) and later became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (not mentioned in the PBS documentary).
4. I was not aware that Jesse Owens won a total of four gold medals at the Olympic Games of 1936
5. The documentary specifically points out that all the chosen U.S. athletes for the Olympic Games of 1936 were traveling together on the same luxury ocean liner (S. S. Manhattan) crossing the Atlantic ocean (about 359 athletes). Dozens or so pictures were shown of the social life of the white and black athletes together on the boat. It was described as a life far different from home for the black athletes. Unfortunately, the documentary does not mention how many black athletes were on the boat and whether or how any segregation etc. was maintained. There were apparently a lot more stories about this transatlantic trip (see e.g. the story of Eleanor Holm)
6. Although I grew up in Germany, I did not know that one of Hitler’s favorite Aryan athletes, a tall, blond man (Luz Long), who lost the long jump against Owens would walk around the stadium, arm in arm with Owens. What a scene to behold!
7. Avery Brundage, who later became a well known, because he served 20 years as the president of the International Olympic Committee, saw to it that Jesse Owens would lose his amateur status.
8. Obscurity, financial struggle, and unsuccessful career after the Olympic Games. According to the documentary, he was only discovered again decades later as if was a consequence of racial discrimination.
9. The Wikipedia article about Jesse Owens mentions that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt never invited him to the White House upon his return from the Olympic Games. The PBS documentary made no mention of this, was it because Owens joined the Republican Party? According to this entry in Wikipedia, FDR invited the white athletes to the White House. Owens is quoted in this entry as saying: "Hitler didn't snub me--it was [FDR] who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram." Unfortunately, these remarks by Owen are not well sourced it appears (here is a repeat of the above quote by History Channel)
10. In 1976, Jesse Owens was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award bestowed upon a civilian, by Gerald R. Ford. I am not sure whether the documentary showed that.
11. I believe, the PBS documentary did not mention that a number of black American athletes won medals at the Olympic Games of 1936:
    Archie Franklin Williams (followed by a remarkable career later), a black athlete, won the Gold medal in the 400 meters of the Olympic Games of 1936. The bronze medal went to James LuValle, another black athlete with a distinguished lifetime career.
    Then, there was John Woodruff, black athlete, who won the 800 meters.
    Fritz Pollard Jr. the son of Fritz Pollard (first black NFL head coach), who won bronze in the 110 meter hurdles.
    Jack Wilson won the silver medal in the bantamweight class
    Unfortunately, I do not have the time to do more research on this.
12. “Owens ran to gold in German-made track shoes handcrafted by the founder of [German] Adidas [Adolf “Adi” Dassler]” according to History Channel, providing him and other athletes with extra long spikes. The PBS documentary is mute on this peculiar fact.
13. “His mother performed makeshift surgery on him with a knife.
    Owens, the 10th and last child of a pair of poor sharecroppers, was a sickly child. The day after his 5th birthday, he developed a large fibrous bump on his chest that began to painfully press against his lungs. Unable to afford a doctor to remove it, his parents decided to perform the surgery on their own. As Owens bit down hard on a leather strap, his mother used a sterilized kitchen knife to carve into her son’s chest and remove a golf-ball sized growth. Owens suffered a great loss of blood but survived.” according to History Channel. This is very remarkable, but entirely missing from the PBS documentary.

Takeaway

PBS American Experience completely missed the opportunity to tell the astonishing story of how many black American athletes competed and won medals at the Olympic Games of 1936 in Hitler’s Germany. Was this simply an oversight or was it deliberately done?

Why are we not more people familiar with those athletes in our days? Is it perhaps it does not fit into the generally repeated, neat narrative that only after Jackie Robinson (1947) or Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) or after the civil rights struggle were black athletes given opportunities. I believe, the story of Jesse Owens and other black athletes significantly contradicts this dominating narrative.

I have written a number blog posts about race relations, American Civil War, Martin Luther King Jr. etc. here. I believe, the story of Jesse Owens and the other, above mentioned athletes supports my argument that the much celebrated Civil Rights Struggle was more like a second, unnecessary American Civil War (see e.g. here). I would further contend that thanks to these two unnecessary Civil Wars, race relations in the U.S. are still so contentious.