American Experience (1988–…): Season 24, Episode 7 - Jesse Owens - full transcript
On April 2, 1936, when the 22-year-old son of a sharecropper entered the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, he was barely able to control his anger in the face of Nazi racism. But instead of letting himself be distracted, the young athlet...
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Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.
Jesse Owens was a model
of technical perfection,
the way he ran.
Jesse Owens was a machine.
That was in such opposition
of what African Americans
were supposed to be...
Technically proficient.
MARGARET MacMlLLAN:
Well, of course, Jesse Owens
was not meant to win anything.
The Olympics were to be
a sort of symbol
of German racial superiority,
which to Hitler
was so important,
and also a symbol of how
successful the Nazis were.
There were voluminous warnings
concerning Nazi philosophy,
intentions,
the character of Adolf Hitler,
and the people that he
was surrounding himself with.
Jesse Owens stated
that if there are minorities
in Germany
who are being
discriminated against,
the United States
should withdraw
from the 1936 Olympics.
It's the height
of the Depression.
And he's a black man
in a country
in which he is afforded
very few opportunities.
For Jesse Owens, the 1936
Olympics are everything.
Without those Olympics,
who knows what's in store
for Jesse Owens?
This is his opportunity to
become a hero, an enduring hero.
Track and field,
on our landscape of sports,
was probably the most heroic,
it was the purest,
it was basically
the American ideal.
And there was still something
to be said then
about who's the fastest person.
There was something about
going to the Olympics
and being the fastest person
in the world.
In the 1930s,
the country was much closer
to its frontier roots.
There were so many millions
of people who had grown up
going to county fairs
and state fairs
where there were races.
And the simple foot race
was something that people
could appreciate
in a way that later generations
don't appreciate.
As a child,
Jesse Owens raced other kids
from his Cleveland neighborhood
on city sidewalks.
He was the youngest
of ten children
born to sharecroppers who had
migrated north from Alabama.
The world that Jesse grew up in
was an accommodationist world.
These are people
who have to cooperate
with the white power structure
to survive.
And it began in Alabama.
They had to be obedient,
and they had to be deferential.
And Jesse early on learned
to smile to get his way.
And that carried
right into his adulthood.
For young Jesse,
running was freedom.
"You could go in any direction,
fast or slow as you wanted,"
he once said, "fighting the wind
if you felt like it,
"just on the strength
of your feet
and the courage of your lungs."
In junior high school,
a gym teacher, Charles Riley,
noticed his natural talents.
Charles Riley became a kind
of father figure for Jesse.
So much so that for years,
on Sunday afternoons,
Charles Riley would go and fetch
Jesse in the old Model-T Ford
and bring him
to his home for dinner.
Jesse, in his adulthood,
becomes a very well-mannered,
smooth...
he's a smooth operator.
And much of that came from the
dinner table of Charles Riley.
One of the things Charles Riley
told Jesse Owens was,
"Never look to your left or
right, never look behind you,
"that's wasted effort, it's only
going to slow you down.
"Look at the horses.
"You don't see them looking
left or right or behind them.
They just keep running."
By the time he was
in high school,
Jesse had begun to make
a name for himself.
He quickly became a star
in the 100 and 200 meters,
the broad jump and the hurdles.
Unsurprisingly, Owens was wooed
by an enormous number
of colleges.
I mean, it was almost like
a beauty parade.
But Ohio State were
the lucky ones to get him,
and that's where he ended up.
Jesse Owens would be
the greatest athlete
at a great track school,
but there's still race.
Outside of track,
there's still certain things
that you cannot do
because you are a black person.
They would cover many miles
going from one track meet to
another, mainly in the Midwest,
and there were times when they
would have to stop for food,
and the black athletes could not
be served in the restaurants.
As a black student,
Owens wasn't allowed to live
on the Ohio State campus.
As he would throughout his life,
Owens chose to ignore
the racist policy.
For him, the track was
a great equalizer.
And there, Owens excelled.
He was just a...
really, a graceful piece
of a guy.
He was just...
nothing bothered him.
Somebody made a racial slur
against him, he'd say,
"That's his problem, not mine."
So Jesse was great
for returning, you might say,
good for evil.
At Ohio State, he was taken
under the wing
of an innovative coach,
Larry Snyder.
His methods were unorthodox.
One of the things that he was
best known for
was having his athletes train
to the strains of music
on the phonograph.
He thought it helped them
develop rhythm in their strides.
♪ Here's a dance
you ought to do ♪
♪ Let me introduce to you ♪
♪ Posing, everybody pose ♪
♪ Get a partner, then begin ♪
♪ Hold whatever pose you're in ♪
♪ Posing, everybody pose. ♪
Snyder made sure Owens
was elected captain
of the track team...
The first black to lead a sports
team in school history...
And pushed him relentlessly
to perfect his technique.
Jesse Owens, Ohio State marvel,
ties the meet records with...
Jesse Owens of Ohio State
set up a new world record
for the 220-yard.
100-meter dash, Owens again
covers himself with glory
as he equals the championship
mark of ten and four-tenths...
On the eve of Owens's most
important competition so far,
the 1935 Big Ten Championship,
Owens was horsing around
with teammates
when he fell down a flight
of stairs, injuring his back.
Larry Snyder
told him to withdraw.
But Jesse refused.
As I tried to get down
on my mark,
I felt this pain,
still in my back,
and then when he said "set,"
I came up.
The gun went off.
One of the remarkable things
about Jesse Owens
is how injury, pressure,
circumstances which might make
another man wilt,
really steeled his nerves and
concentrated all of his talents.
What Jesse Owens achieves
at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor
is arguably the most spectacular
achievement ever in sports.
He set three brand-new world
records in the 220-yard dash,
the 220-yard hurdles
and the broad jump.
And, by the way,
he's equaled the world record
in the 100-yard dash.
All in less than an hour,
at a time when most people
thought he should be back in bed
nursing a sore back.
He becomes the great hope
as the Games
of the 11th Olympiad approach.
Five years earlier, the
International Olympic Committee
had chosen Berlin as host city
for the 1936 Olympics.
Since then, Germany had
witnessed the rise to power
of the Nazi Party
and its leader, Adolf Hitler.
Now Hitler's propaganda
minister, Joseph Goebbels,
planned to use the Games
to the Nazis' advantage.
Initially, Hitler doesn't like
the idea of the Olympics.
He rejects it as, I quote,
"a Jewish niggerfest."
And that's what he calls it.
It takes Goebbels
to make him realize
that actually
this is a great opportunity
for the Germans to show
that the "Nordic superman"
is actually superior to all
these other types of people.
Hitler insisted that his Aryan
athletes would jump higher,
run faster and prove themselves
the best in the world.
He made German domination
at the Olympics a national goal.
MARGARET MacMlLLAN:
Black people were not meant to
be able to compete with Aryans.
How could they?
For Hitler and the Nazis,
this was not the way
the very careful script
was going to play out.
What their script was
was the triumph
of the Aryan race,
the triumph of Nazi Germany.
King of the track!
Ohio State's Jesse Owens
makes history
in the national collegiate games
at Berkeley, California.
This is the 220.
Owens, third from right,
already has won the hundred
and is out to cop this one, too.
Just a streak of dark lightning
as he burns up the track...
A year out
from the Olympic Games,
Jesse Owens went
from Midwest college sensation
to national celebrity.
He left his girlfriend
Ruth Solomon
and their young daughter behind,
and for the first time
in his life,
traveled west
of the Mississippi.
The trip to California was very
important for Jesse Owens.
He came into a world
that he had never known,
and that was an affluent world,
it was in some ways
a glitzy world,
and he was distracted
by the new world
that he had come in contact with
in California.
And he so finds that he's, uh...
quite a few female fans
are attracted to him,
and one of them's called
Quincella Nickerson,
and she's the daughter of this
very wealthy businessman,
and I think she represents
to Jesse a type of figure,
a type of society figure, that
he's never encountered before,
and he's soon
stepping out with her.
Back in Cleveland,
Ruth Solomon got word of Jesse's
new social life in California.
Ruth sends him
a threatening letter:
"If you're not coming home
right now,
"and we're not getting married
right now, forget about it.
I'm done with you."
At the same time,
Owens acquired his first
real rival on the track,
Eulace Peacock
of Temple University.
Peacock, a faster starter
and even better finisher,
began beating Owens in one race
after the other.
He starts losing races;
he's out of shape.
It doesn't go well.
You know, celebrity
and sporting ability,
it's a very, very hard mix
to get right.
Jesse, in this instance, just
doesn't get it right at all.
In Nebraska, an astonished crowd
watched Peacock
tie the world record
in the 100 meters,
as Owens placed third.
In Ontario, Peacock sailed past
Owens again in the 100 meters.
When Owens lost to Peacock
in a third matchup,
the Associated Press picked
Peacock as the favorite
to win the Olympic gold
in Berlin.
If anything,
Jesse Owens peaked too soon,
and some of his supporters
feared that Peacock
would conquer Jesse
in one or two of the events
for the Olympic team.
He's suddenly torn because
he is having a good time, um,
and he's losing races now
which he should not be losing.
Owens decided to return home.
The same day he arrived
in Cleveland,
he and Ruth were married.
Jesse settled into a strict
training program
to prepare for the Olympics.
But far from Ohio,
events were unfolding
that would soon thrust Owens
to the center
of a national controversy.
There were broad-scale
discussions in Europe,
in the United States, in Canada,
about whether or not teams
should go to Berlin
to participate in those Games.
There were warnings
about the absolutely vile
and explosive anti-Semitism
that was coming out
of the Nazi regime,
so it's not like
this wasn't obvious.
During this period,
America and Germany still had
cordial diplomatic
and economic relations,
which the Roosevelt
administration
did not want to upset.
So the government's position
was to take part in the Games.
But a growing movement
of Americans,
cutting across all religious
and racial boundaries,
urged U.S. athletes to boycott
the Berlin Olympics.
I'm here this evening to join
with my fellow New Yorkers
in a great protest,
not against the German people
but against the present
German government!
Owens had never seen himself
as a spokesman.
But as the movement
for a boycott grew,
the NAACP convinced Owens
to take a public stand.
Jesse Owens stated
that if there are minorities
in Germany
who are being
discriminated against,
the United States
should withdraw
from the 1936 Olympics.
That was his expressed
sentiment.
But he gets a stern talking to
from Larry Snyder,
telling him, you know,
"What are you, crazy?
"This is your chance, you have
to seize this opportunity.
You're going to the Olympics."
Avery Brundage was not only
the president of the American
Olympic Committee,
which oversaw relations between
the U.S. Olympic team
and the International
Olympic Committee,
but had strong ties to the AAU...
The Amateur Athletic Union...
The governing body
for all amateur sports
in the United States.
Avery Brundage was an admirer
of Nazi Germany.
He was someone who believed
that there was a Jewish
Communist conspiracy
to keep America
out of the Games.
Brundage returned from his trip
and declared the Nazis
to be fit Olympic hosts.
He criticized supporters
of the boycott,
calling them "un-American alien
agitators" and "stooges,"
and pressured American athletes
to put representing
their country above all else.
The U.S. boycott fizzled.
The Olympic Games belong
to the athletes,
and not to the politicians,
and speaking for the American
Olympic Committee,
I can say definitely
that there will be teams
representing the United States
in the 1936 Games.
Once that decision was made,
people who had sentiments
to the contrary,
including Jesse Owens,
were simply instructed
to essentially shut up
and represent
the United States of America.
On the sunny morning
of July 15, 1936,
383 American athletes
boarded a ship in New York
bound for Berlin.
Owens seemed eager to focus
on sports rather than politics.
Just before he sailed
for the Olympic Games,
track star Jesse Owens,
Ohio's athletic wonder,
made the following statement:
I'm going to try
to bring back three crowns:
that is, in the 100 meters,
200 meters and the broad jump.
Rival Eulace Peacock,
Owens's main competition,
had sustained an injury
and didn't make the trip.
Sprinter Ralph Metcalfe
took his place
on a team that was
the most diverse
in the history of the Olympics.
Despite the fact that America is
a very segregated society
racially,
the actual integration
on board that boat
is almost the least talked-about
element of that boat ride.
You've got this microcosm
in which race doesn't seem
to play a part at all.
And I think that's absolutely
a wonderful thing.
And I think that someone
like Jesse
must have felt absolutely
delighted
and, indeed, liberated, along
with the other black athletes.
Even before the start,
the weight-lifting boys
have a training spell.
They want to be tops
among the 22 teams.
Sampling the deck track,
America's triple champion,
Jesse Owens.
"In the early 1830s,"
Owens wrote,
"my ancestors
were brought on a boat
"across the Atlantic Ocean
from Africa to America
"as slaves for men who felt they
had a right to own other men.
"I boarded a boat to go back
across the Atlantic Ocean
"to do battle with Adolf Hitler.
"As the last traces of land
vanished,
"I knew that we were moving
further and further from America
and that I wouldn't see it again
until I had won or I had lost."
We were delighted to finally
get to where we were going.
There were lots of people
turned out to see the U.S. team.
The Nazi regime tried to project
an image of tolerance.
But if you look at
the situation closely,
you see the oppression
was going on, full-bore.
The previous year,
the Nazi regime had introduced
the Nuremburg Laws,
which excluded Jews
from German citizenship,
prohibited marriage
between Jews and non-Jews,
and deprived Jews
of most political rights.
That aspect of German life
was not on display
as the Berlin Games opened
on August 1, 1936.
The opening was a big moment
for the Games.
Hitler himself came
to the opening ceremony.
He swept out
from the Reich's chancellery
in this enormous motorcade.
The whole street was lined
on both sides with people.
There were swastika banners
and Olympic flags all along.
There was much shouting
and screaming
and throwing of flowers,
and "Sieg heil-ing."
It was delirium.
In Berlin's massive new stadium,
thousands of visitors
from around the world
witnessed a spectacular
opening ceremony.
It's described by Thomas Wolfe,
the American novelist
who was there,
as an almost religious event,
the crowd screaming, swaying
in unison, begging for Hitler.
There was something scary about
it, this cult of personality.
Hitler wanted to be on top
in his box,
overlooking everything,
like, as if this was
his celebration,
this was his event.
He wanted to be glorified.
That was part of it.
We're all standing
on the infield, the grass,
all lined up military style.
They released 25,000 pigeons,
they say,
and the sky was clouded
with pigeons.
And the pigeons circled overhead
and then they shot a cannon
and they scared the...
the poop out of the pigeons.
And we had straw hats,
flat straw hats.
You could hear the pitter-patter
on our hats.
But we felt sorry for the women
because they got it
in their hair.
But I mean,
it was a mass of droppings,
and I tell you, it was so funny.
Once we were all in place,
then the torchbearer
ran in through the tunnel
to go around the stadium.
This was the first time
it had ever been done.
The Nazis invented the concept
of the torch run
from ancient Olympia
to the host city.
This young man ran up the steps
all the way up to the top
of the stadium there
to light a cauldron which would
start this eternal flame
that would burn
for the duration of the Games.
The 100-meter race,
the highlight of the modern
Olympic Games,
was Jesse Owens's best event.
But the stakes were high.
A slow start or a faulty step
would mean the difference
between losing
and being crowned
the world's fastest man.
You've got, you know,
people like Joseph Goebbels,
the Nazi propaganda minister,
looking at Jesse Owens,
and he says, you know,
quite openly,
"I think it's unfair
"to have people
like Jesse Owens competing
because you might as well have
deer or gazelle on your team."
Owens's main competitors
were the German runner
Erich Borchmeyer
and his teammate Ralph Metcalfe.
Jesse Owens wins
in 10.3 seconds,
equaling the world record.
And now he can breathe.
I'm very glad to have won
the 100 meters
at the Olympic Games
here in Berlin,
a very beautiful place
and a very beautiful setting.
The competition was grand,
and we're very glad
to come out on top.
Thank you very kindly.
Tradition called for the leader
of the host country
to congratulate
the gold medal winner,
but Hitler refused
to greet Owens.
"Do you really think,"
the German leader said,
"I will allow myself
to be photographed
shaking hands with a Negro?"
The snub of Jesse Owens
by Adolf Hitler
gave the press a hook to really
excoriate Adolf Hitler
and to push Jesse Owens
to the fore
as the man who essentially
stuck a thumb in the eye
of the Nazi leader
and his theories
of Aryan superiority.
As an African American,
all of us shared the snubbery
by Hitler of Jesse Owens.
Jesse was ours.
He was us.
He was me.
And when Hitler snubbed him,
he snubbed every one of us.
Germany's top competitor
in the broad jump was Luz Long,
the European record holder
in the event.
Luz Long is a German athlete
out of central casting.
He's tall, he's blond,
he's good-looking.
This rivalry that was going
to take place
between Luz Long and Jesse Owens
was very much built up
by a Nazi regime
hungry to show that, in fact,
the white man was better.
As the preliminaries
got under way,
Owens was uncharacteristically
sloppy.
Jesse Owens fouled his first
attempts in the preliminaries.
It was just a run-through,
and they counted it.
And then he fouled
the second one.
And so he had to qualify
in the third one.
Owens was close
to being eliminated
when Luz Long offered
some friendly advice.
"Why don't you just,
"in your mind, put a mark
a foot behind the board,
and then you will be certain
not to foul."
Jesse Owens jumps 25 feet,
easily qualifying
for the next round.
Now we're in the final round
of the broad jump,
and they put on
a spectacular show.
Finally, Jesse Owens
jumps 26 feet.
Long can't match him
at this point,
and the gold medal is Owens's.
Long went over to Jesse Owens,
he hugged him,
and then together they walked
arm-in-arm around the stadium.
Now this was really verboten.
That was extraordinary,
when you think about it.
There are these moments
in history
when the actors understand
that moment in history.
And they just do
the right thing.
Luz Long did the right thing.
That was a very
humanizing moment
for Owens and for Germany.
By the time the runners
set their marks
for the 200-meter race,
thousands of German fans
knew they were witnessing
something extraordinary.
Yessay Offens! Yessay Offens!
He hears this shouting,
"Yessay Offens, Yessay Offens,"
and he suddenly realizes
it's him.
It's... it's, you know,
it's obviously the German
pronunciation of his name.
And he's absolutely lionized
by the German people.
Owens won his third gold medal,
shattering the Olympic
200-meter record.
He'd already equaled both
the Olympic and world records
in the 100 meters,
and his record in the long jump
would last for decades.
After he won his third medal,
arguably, he was the world's
most famous athlete
at that moment.
MacMlLLAN:
He seemed to be able to do
everything effortlessly.
He was enormously graceful,
charming,
a person of tremendous poise
and elegance in public.
And the Nazis were
absolutely furious.
I mean, Hitler was
absolutely livid.
By the fourth day of the Games,
Goebbels was enraged.
"We Germans win a gold medal,
the Americans get three,
two of which are won
by niggers,"
he wrote in his diary.
"This is a scandal!
White humanity should be ashamed
of itself."
For a lot of black folks,
this was a popular thing
to show black folks winning.
Yes, we were winning a lot
in our private lives,
just surviving day-to-day,
but you need these sort
of public moments.
And that's the role that sports
played for us.
I'm very glad to have won
my three events
in the Games here at Berlin.
Wonderful competition here,
wonderful stadium
and a wonderful crowd.
And the days have been
very nice.
Jesse Owens had learned
not to share his deepest,
most innermost thoughts
with most people,
especially white folks.
Keeping things on the surface
at a fairly superficial level
was perfect for the newsreel.
Telegrams flooded in
from promoters in the U.S.
Showman Eddie Cantor
offered Owens $40,000
to appear with him
on stage and radio;
a California orchestra
offered $25,000.
Coach Snyder bragged
to reporters
that Owens had a good chance
to make $100,000
once he returned to the States.
The people here in Germany
have been very nice to me,
and I'm very glad to have
displayed my talent here.
Thank you.
Owens had completed
all his events.
Then, U.S. officials
abruptly announced changes
in the lineup
for the 4x100 relay.
Although the Americans
were heavily favored to win,
the team's only two
Jewish sprinters,
Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller,
would be replaced
by Owens and Metcalfe.
Their coaches did not give them
a clear explanation why.
Glickman was told years later
that in fact the Nazis
had specifically demanded
that no Jewish athletes
take part in the race.
The Nazis hated blacks, too.
But the Jews were
their primary targets.
And so, if given the choice,
they preferred to have blacks
competing in the race
rather than Jews.
Jesse Owens refused to do it.
He fought 'em back
and they said...
they pointed their finger
in his face and said,
"You'll do as you're told."
And that was a horrible thing
that happened
during the Olympic Games.
That fault was on our side.
Marty and Sam were crushed;
they watched the medals that
were their medals, essentially,
put on the neck of Jesse Owens
and Ralph Metcalfe.
This is what they had spent
their lives for
and this is what they'd come
to Berlin for.
Owens became the first
African American
to win four gold medals
in a modern Olympics,
yet he was far from triumphant.
"I feel bad for Marty and Sam,"
he confided to friends.
As the Berlin Games
drew to a close,
Avery Brundage announced
that the U.S. track team
would go on a European tour
to raise money for the AAU.
Brundage wanted to cash in
on the success
of the American team
and especially its popular
new star.
The 400-yard relay.
Jesse Owens, number three,
fresh from his Olympic triumphs,
competed.
The race was run
in 37 and four-tenths seconds,
so we only had nine seconds
in which to admire
the wonderful running
of this great athlete.
For Owens, the tour
was a relentless grind
of shabby accommodations, little
food, less rest and no money.
For the first time, he rebelled,
abruptly leaving
the tour in London
and boarding a ship
back to America.
I was tired,
I wanted to come home,
and I really did.
After all, I haven't seen
my wife for three months,
and I'm very glad to be
back home to see her.
Avery Brundage threatened that
if he did go home,
he would be stripped of his
amateur athletic standing.
My father chose not to continue.
Avery Brundage suspended him.
My suspension,
I really couldn't say.
I don't know anything
about it at all.
I haven't had any
official word from it.
I've been on the boat
for four days, and I...
I really don't know
what it's all about.
Suspension from the AAU
barred Owens from competing
in any sanctioned sporting
events in the U.S.
The impact of the ban
would play out later;
for now, Jesse Owens was a hero.
When he came back from Berlin
I was 11 years old,
but I remember waiting excitedly
to see this parade
that was going to be
in the black community.
And of course you...
you felt like,
"Jesse Owens just waved to me!"
He comes back
to the United States
thinking that everything's
going to be good for him.
He's going to be rich
and he's going to be up there
with all those movie stars
he so loves and respects
and wants to be part of.
And the truth, of course,
is very, very different.
Owens had always hoped
that success on the track
would translate to respect
off the track.
But on his first night home,
Owens and his wife
could not find a hotel
in downtown New York
willing to take black customers.
Finally, one agreed
to rent them a room,
but only if they used
the service entrance.
There just simply
aren't the roles
for a black American
to fit into in the 1930s,
however many Olympic medals
he may have won.
If he were a white athletic guy,
he could maybe play Tarzan
in the movies,
and that's what Johnny
Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe,
Glenn Morris and a whole string
of American athletes did.
But who wants a black Tarzan?
Nobody.
The lucrative offers
that had poured in to Berlin
turned out to be empty promises.
To support his family,
Owens was forced to take part
in the most demeaning race
of his life.
Cuba.
Jesse Owens, the ebony streak
of Olympic Games,
celebrates turning professional
by racing against a horse...
That winter, Christmastime,
he goes down to Havana
to race a horse named
Julio McCaw.
Jesse had a start of 40 yards
and 100, and he won by inches.
I thought racing a horse
was kind of a depressing thing
for publicity.
And what did he get out of it?
Probably very little or nothing.
They used him.
It's just like saving
somebody's life,
and then the next day that
person slaps you in the face.
A lot of people felt that he
was not dignifying his self.
But when you have a family
to feed and you have no job,
then you do what you have to do
to feed your family,
as long as it's honest.
Owens took whatever jobs
he could find
and tried his hand at business.
He owned a dry cleaners,
he tap-danced with Bill
"Bo Jangles" Robinson,
and continued to make money
racing against horses.
He ended up in financial trouble
over back taxes.
The United States government
sued him for moneys
that he purportedly made
racing horses
and off those few endorsements
that he was able to get,
and ultimately, he ended up
declaring bankruptcy.
For years, Jesse Owens
disappeared from view.
After the Berlin Games,
the mainstream press
simply did not deal with him
any further.
Have you anything
to do with athletics?
Some.
Nine down and one to go,
Mr. Randall.
Tiddlywinks?
Ten down and no more to go.
Panel, would you meet
Jesse Owens.
By the mid-1950s,
as the Cold War heated up,
Jesse Owens suddenly emerged
from obscurity.
Here is Jesse Owens.
In 1955, President
Dwight Eisenhower
named Owens goodwill ambassador,
charged with promoting America
to the world.
I'm glad we could make it
before you leave on your trip.
Where exactly are you going?
Well, we're going to India,
Singapore, Malaya
and the Philippines
for about 51 days.
On that trip, we will be talking
about our American way of life,
Mr. Murrow.
We feel that we have the best
way of life in the world today.
We're going to combat communism,
we're going to show...
He did eventually become
"a professional good example."
Here was Jesse Owens,
who was still considered a god
in the world of track and field,
and that was the way
he could support himself.
In the 1960s, the endorsements
started coming in.
I always carry
the American Express card.
The American Express card.
Don't leave home without it.
I was on a national TV show
with him, and he was...
he didn't look too good.
And when I got back
to California I said,
"You know, Jesse didn't
look too good.
I think... I don't think he's
going to live long."
He died within the year.
And he was fairly young.
But I think his heart
was broken.
You know, after winning
all those gold medals,
he expected the whole nation
to love him,
and here the greatest athlete
in America
is being treated shabbily.
MacMlLLAN:
His career is partly
a reflection
of the ways in which we use
our public figures.
You know, we use them
when we need them
and then we forget about them
when we don't need them.
Jesse Owens was immensely
popular in 1936,
and then people
forgot about him.
So Jesse Owens got relegated
to a back burner.
Without him, the issue
of integrating blacks
into mainstream American sports
would have been moot.
Jackie Robinson stood on
the shoulders of Jesse Owens.
You have to understand
Jesse Owens
in the pantheon
of great athletic figures
who have contributed to not just
black advancement in sport
but to black advancement
overall.
He is the quintessential
Olympic hero.
He stood up to racists
in Germany,
he stood up to racists at home,
and he did it with a grace
and a genius
that have not been equaled.
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Jesse Owens was a model
of technical perfection,
the way he ran.
Jesse Owens was a machine.
That was in such opposition
of what African Americans
were supposed to be...
Technically proficient.
MARGARET MacMlLLAN:
Well, of course, Jesse Owens
was not meant to win anything.
The Olympics were to be
a sort of symbol
of German racial superiority,
which to Hitler
was so important,
and also a symbol of how
successful the Nazis were.
There were voluminous warnings
concerning Nazi philosophy,
intentions,
the character of Adolf Hitler,
and the people that he
was surrounding himself with.
Jesse Owens stated
that if there are minorities
in Germany
who are being
discriminated against,
the United States
should withdraw
from the 1936 Olympics.
It's the height
of the Depression.
And he's a black man
in a country
in which he is afforded
very few opportunities.
For Jesse Owens, the 1936
Olympics are everything.
Without those Olympics,
who knows what's in store
for Jesse Owens?
This is his opportunity to
become a hero, an enduring hero.
Track and field,
on our landscape of sports,
was probably the most heroic,
it was the purest,
it was basically
the American ideal.
And there was still something
to be said then
about who's the fastest person.
There was something about
going to the Olympics
and being the fastest person
in the world.
In the 1930s,
the country was much closer
to its frontier roots.
There were so many millions
of people who had grown up
going to county fairs
and state fairs
where there were races.
And the simple foot race
was something that people
could appreciate
in a way that later generations
don't appreciate.
As a child,
Jesse Owens raced other kids
from his Cleveland neighborhood
on city sidewalks.
He was the youngest
of ten children
born to sharecroppers who had
migrated north from Alabama.
The world that Jesse grew up in
was an accommodationist world.
These are people
who have to cooperate
with the white power structure
to survive.
And it began in Alabama.
They had to be obedient,
and they had to be deferential.
And Jesse early on learned
to smile to get his way.
And that carried
right into his adulthood.
For young Jesse,
running was freedom.
"You could go in any direction,
fast or slow as you wanted,"
he once said, "fighting the wind
if you felt like it,
"just on the strength
of your feet
and the courage of your lungs."
In junior high school,
a gym teacher, Charles Riley,
noticed his natural talents.
Charles Riley became a kind
of father figure for Jesse.
So much so that for years,
on Sunday afternoons,
Charles Riley would go and fetch
Jesse in the old Model-T Ford
and bring him
to his home for dinner.
Jesse, in his adulthood,
becomes a very well-mannered,
smooth...
he's a smooth operator.
And much of that came from the
dinner table of Charles Riley.
One of the things Charles Riley
told Jesse Owens was,
"Never look to your left or
right, never look behind you,
"that's wasted effort, it's only
going to slow you down.
"Look at the horses.
"You don't see them looking
left or right or behind them.
They just keep running."
By the time he was
in high school,
Jesse had begun to make
a name for himself.
He quickly became a star
in the 100 and 200 meters,
the broad jump and the hurdles.
Unsurprisingly, Owens was wooed
by an enormous number
of colleges.
I mean, it was almost like
a beauty parade.
But Ohio State were
the lucky ones to get him,
and that's where he ended up.
Jesse Owens would be
the greatest athlete
at a great track school,
but there's still race.
Outside of track,
there's still certain things
that you cannot do
because you are a black person.
They would cover many miles
going from one track meet to
another, mainly in the Midwest,
and there were times when they
would have to stop for food,
and the black athletes could not
be served in the restaurants.
As a black student,
Owens wasn't allowed to live
on the Ohio State campus.
As he would throughout his life,
Owens chose to ignore
the racist policy.
For him, the track was
a great equalizer.
And there, Owens excelled.
He was just a...
really, a graceful piece
of a guy.
He was just...
nothing bothered him.
Somebody made a racial slur
against him, he'd say,
"That's his problem, not mine."
So Jesse was great
for returning, you might say,
good for evil.
At Ohio State, he was taken
under the wing
of an innovative coach,
Larry Snyder.
His methods were unorthodox.
One of the things that he was
best known for
was having his athletes train
to the strains of music
on the phonograph.
He thought it helped them
develop rhythm in their strides.
♪ Here's a dance
you ought to do ♪
♪ Let me introduce to you ♪
♪ Posing, everybody pose ♪
♪ Get a partner, then begin ♪
♪ Hold whatever pose you're in ♪
♪ Posing, everybody pose. ♪
Snyder made sure Owens
was elected captain
of the track team...
The first black to lead a sports
team in school history...
And pushed him relentlessly
to perfect his technique.
Jesse Owens, Ohio State marvel,
ties the meet records with...
Jesse Owens of Ohio State
set up a new world record
for the 220-yard.
100-meter dash, Owens again
covers himself with glory
as he equals the championship
mark of ten and four-tenths...
On the eve of Owens's most
important competition so far,
the 1935 Big Ten Championship,
Owens was horsing around
with teammates
when he fell down a flight
of stairs, injuring his back.
Larry Snyder
told him to withdraw.
But Jesse refused.
As I tried to get down
on my mark,
I felt this pain,
still in my back,
and then when he said "set,"
I came up.
The gun went off.
One of the remarkable things
about Jesse Owens
is how injury, pressure,
circumstances which might make
another man wilt,
really steeled his nerves and
concentrated all of his talents.
What Jesse Owens achieves
at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor
is arguably the most spectacular
achievement ever in sports.
He set three brand-new world
records in the 220-yard dash,
the 220-yard hurdles
and the broad jump.
And, by the way,
he's equaled the world record
in the 100-yard dash.
All in less than an hour,
at a time when most people
thought he should be back in bed
nursing a sore back.
He becomes the great hope
as the Games
of the 11th Olympiad approach.
Five years earlier, the
International Olympic Committee
had chosen Berlin as host city
for the 1936 Olympics.
Since then, Germany had
witnessed the rise to power
of the Nazi Party
and its leader, Adolf Hitler.
Now Hitler's propaganda
minister, Joseph Goebbels,
planned to use the Games
to the Nazis' advantage.
Initially, Hitler doesn't like
the idea of the Olympics.
He rejects it as, I quote,
"a Jewish niggerfest."
And that's what he calls it.
It takes Goebbels
to make him realize
that actually
this is a great opportunity
for the Germans to show
that the "Nordic superman"
is actually superior to all
these other types of people.
Hitler insisted that his Aryan
athletes would jump higher,
run faster and prove themselves
the best in the world.
He made German domination
at the Olympics a national goal.
MARGARET MacMlLLAN:
Black people were not meant to
be able to compete with Aryans.
How could they?
For Hitler and the Nazis,
this was not the way
the very careful script
was going to play out.
What their script was
was the triumph
of the Aryan race,
the triumph of Nazi Germany.
King of the track!
Ohio State's Jesse Owens
makes history
in the national collegiate games
at Berkeley, California.
This is the 220.
Owens, third from right,
already has won the hundred
and is out to cop this one, too.
Just a streak of dark lightning
as he burns up the track...
A year out
from the Olympic Games,
Jesse Owens went
from Midwest college sensation
to national celebrity.
He left his girlfriend
Ruth Solomon
and their young daughter behind,
and for the first time
in his life,
traveled west
of the Mississippi.
The trip to California was very
important for Jesse Owens.
He came into a world
that he had never known,
and that was an affluent world,
it was in some ways
a glitzy world,
and he was distracted
by the new world
that he had come in contact with
in California.
And he so finds that he's, uh...
quite a few female fans
are attracted to him,
and one of them's called
Quincella Nickerson,
and she's the daughter of this
very wealthy businessman,
and I think she represents
to Jesse a type of figure,
a type of society figure, that
he's never encountered before,
and he's soon
stepping out with her.
Back in Cleveland,
Ruth Solomon got word of Jesse's
new social life in California.
Ruth sends him
a threatening letter:
"If you're not coming home
right now,
"and we're not getting married
right now, forget about it.
I'm done with you."
At the same time,
Owens acquired his first
real rival on the track,
Eulace Peacock
of Temple University.
Peacock, a faster starter
and even better finisher,
began beating Owens in one race
after the other.
He starts losing races;
he's out of shape.
It doesn't go well.
You know, celebrity
and sporting ability,
it's a very, very hard mix
to get right.
Jesse, in this instance, just
doesn't get it right at all.
In Nebraska, an astonished crowd
watched Peacock
tie the world record
in the 100 meters,
as Owens placed third.
In Ontario, Peacock sailed past
Owens again in the 100 meters.
When Owens lost to Peacock
in a third matchup,
the Associated Press picked
Peacock as the favorite
to win the Olympic gold
in Berlin.
If anything,
Jesse Owens peaked too soon,
and some of his supporters
feared that Peacock
would conquer Jesse
in one or two of the events
for the Olympic team.
He's suddenly torn because
he is having a good time, um,
and he's losing races now
which he should not be losing.
Owens decided to return home.
The same day he arrived
in Cleveland,
he and Ruth were married.
Jesse settled into a strict
training program
to prepare for the Olympics.
But far from Ohio,
events were unfolding
that would soon thrust Owens
to the center
of a national controversy.
There were broad-scale
discussions in Europe,
in the United States, in Canada,
about whether or not teams
should go to Berlin
to participate in those Games.
There were warnings
about the absolutely vile
and explosive anti-Semitism
that was coming out
of the Nazi regime,
so it's not like
this wasn't obvious.
During this period,
America and Germany still had
cordial diplomatic
and economic relations,
which the Roosevelt
administration
did not want to upset.
So the government's position
was to take part in the Games.
But a growing movement
of Americans,
cutting across all religious
and racial boundaries,
urged U.S. athletes to boycott
the Berlin Olympics.
I'm here this evening to join
with my fellow New Yorkers
in a great protest,
not against the German people
but against the present
German government!
Owens had never seen himself
as a spokesman.
But as the movement
for a boycott grew,
the NAACP convinced Owens
to take a public stand.
Jesse Owens stated
that if there are minorities
in Germany
who are being
discriminated against,
the United States
should withdraw
from the 1936 Olympics.
That was his expressed
sentiment.
But he gets a stern talking to
from Larry Snyder,
telling him, you know,
"What are you, crazy?
"This is your chance, you have
to seize this opportunity.
You're going to the Olympics."
Avery Brundage was not only
the president of the American
Olympic Committee,
which oversaw relations between
the U.S. Olympic team
and the International
Olympic Committee,
but had strong ties to the AAU...
The Amateur Athletic Union...
The governing body
for all amateur sports
in the United States.
Avery Brundage was an admirer
of Nazi Germany.
He was someone who believed
that there was a Jewish
Communist conspiracy
to keep America
out of the Games.
Brundage returned from his trip
and declared the Nazis
to be fit Olympic hosts.
He criticized supporters
of the boycott,
calling them "un-American alien
agitators" and "stooges,"
and pressured American athletes
to put representing
their country above all else.
The U.S. boycott fizzled.
The Olympic Games belong
to the athletes,
and not to the politicians,
and speaking for the American
Olympic Committee,
I can say definitely
that there will be teams
representing the United States
in the 1936 Games.
Once that decision was made,
people who had sentiments
to the contrary,
including Jesse Owens,
were simply instructed
to essentially shut up
and represent
the United States of America.
On the sunny morning
of July 15, 1936,
383 American athletes
boarded a ship in New York
bound for Berlin.
Owens seemed eager to focus
on sports rather than politics.
Just before he sailed
for the Olympic Games,
track star Jesse Owens,
Ohio's athletic wonder,
made the following statement:
I'm going to try
to bring back three crowns:
that is, in the 100 meters,
200 meters and the broad jump.
Rival Eulace Peacock,
Owens's main competition,
had sustained an injury
and didn't make the trip.
Sprinter Ralph Metcalfe
took his place
on a team that was
the most diverse
in the history of the Olympics.
Despite the fact that America is
a very segregated society
racially,
the actual integration
on board that boat
is almost the least talked-about
element of that boat ride.
You've got this microcosm
in which race doesn't seem
to play a part at all.
And I think that's absolutely
a wonderful thing.
And I think that someone
like Jesse
must have felt absolutely
delighted
and, indeed, liberated, along
with the other black athletes.
Even before the start,
the weight-lifting boys
have a training spell.
They want to be tops
among the 22 teams.
Sampling the deck track,
America's triple champion,
Jesse Owens.
"In the early 1830s,"
Owens wrote,
"my ancestors
were brought on a boat
"across the Atlantic Ocean
from Africa to America
"as slaves for men who felt they
had a right to own other men.
"I boarded a boat to go back
across the Atlantic Ocean
"to do battle with Adolf Hitler.
"As the last traces of land
vanished,
"I knew that we were moving
further and further from America
and that I wouldn't see it again
until I had won or I had lost."
We were delighted to finally
get to where we were going.
There were lots of people
turned out to see the U.S. team.
The Nazi regime tried to project
an image of tolerance.
But if you look at
the situation closely,
you see the oppression
was going on, full-bore.
The previous year,
the Nazi regime had introduced
the Nuremburg Laws,
which excluded Jews
from German citizenship,
prohibited marriage
between Jews and non-Jews,
and deprived Jews
of most political rights.
That aspect of German life
was not on display
as the Berlin Games opened
on August 1, 1936.
The opening was a big moment
for the Games.
Hitler himself came
to the opening ceremony.
He swept out
from the Reich's chancellery
in this enormous motorcade.
The whole street was lined
on both sides with people.
There were swastika banners
and Olympic flags all along.
There was much shouting
and screaming
and throwing of flowers,
and "Sieg heil-ing."
It was delirium.
In Berlin's massive new stadium,
thousands of visitors
from around the world
witnessed a spectacular
opening ceremony.
It's described by Thomas Wolfe,
the American novelist
who was there,
as an almost religious event,
the crowd screaming, swaying
in unison, begging for Hitler.
There was something scary about
it, this cult of personality.
Hitler wanted to be on top
in his box,
overlooking everything,
like, as if this was
his celebration,
this was his event.
He wanted to be glorified.
That was part of it.
We're all standing
on the infield, the grass,
all lined up military style.
They released 25,000 pigeons,
they say,
and the sky was clouded
with pigeons.
And the pigeons circled overhead
and then they shot a cannon
and they scared the...
the poop out of the pigeons.
And we had straw hats,
flat straw hats.
You could hear the pitter-patter
on our hats.
But we felt sorry for the women
because they got it
in their hair.
But I mean,
it was a mass of droppings,
and I tell you, it was so funny.
Once we were all in place,
then the torchbearer
ran in through the tunnel
to go around the stadium.
This was the first time
it had ever been done.
The Nazis invented the concept
of the torch run
from ancient Olympia
to the host city.
This young man ran up the steps
all the way up to the top
of the stadium there
to light a cauldron which would
start this eternal flame
that would burn
for the duration of the Games.
The 100-meter race,
the highlight of the modern
Olympic Games,
was Jesse Owens's best event.
But the stakes were high.
A slow start or a faulty step
would mean the difference
between losing
and being crowned
the world's fastest man.
You've got, you know,
people like Joseph Goebbels,
the Nazi propaganda minister,
looking at Jesse Owens,
and he says, you know,
quite openly,
"I think it's unfair
"to have people
like Jesse Owens competing
because you might as well have
deer or gazelle on your team."
Owens's main competitors
were the German runner
Erich Borchmeyer
and his teammate Ralph Metcalfe.
Jesse Owens wins
in 10.3 seconds,
equaling the world record.
And now he can breathe.
I'm very glad to have won
the 100 meters
at the Olympic Games
here in Berlin,
a very beautiful place
and a very beautiful setting.
The competition was grand,
and we're very glad
to come out on top.
Thank you very kindly.
Tradition called for the leader
of the host country
to congratulate
the gold medal winner,
but Hitler refused
to greet Owens.
"Do you really think,"
the German leader said,
"I will allow myself
to be photographed
shaking hands with a Negro?"
The snub of Jesse Owens
by Adolf Hitler
gave the press a hook to really
excoriate Adolf Hitler
and to push Jesse Owens
to the fore
as the man who essentially
stuck a thumb in the eye
of the Nazi leader
and his theories
of Aryan superiority.
As an African American,
all of us shared the snubbery
by Hitler of Jesse Owens.
Jesse was ours.
He was us.
He was me.
And when Hitler snubbed him,
he snubbed every one of us.
Germany's top competitor
in the broad jump was Luz Long,
the European record holder
in the event.
Luz Long is a German athlete
out of central casting.
He's tall, he's blond,
he's good-looking.
This rivalry that was going
to take place
between Luz Long and Jesse Owens
was very much built up
by a Nazi regime
hungry to show that, in fact,
the white man was better.
As the preliminaries
got under way,
Owens was uncharacteristically
sloppy.
Jesse Owens fouled his first
attempts in the preliminaries.
It was just a run-through,
and they counted it.
And then he fouled
the second one.
And so he had to qualify
in the third one.
Owens was close
to being eliminated
when Luz Long offered
some friendly advice.
"Why don't you just,
"in your mind, put a mark
a foot behind the board,
and then you will be certain
not to foul."
Jesse Owens jumps 25 feet,
easily qualifying
for the next round.
Now we're in the final round
of the broad jump,
and they put on
a spectacular show.
Finally, Jesse Owens
jumps 26 feet.
Long can't match him
at this point,
and the gold medal is Owens's.
Long went over to Jesse Owens,
he hugged him,
and then together they walked
arm-in-arm around the stadium.
Now this was really verboten.
That was extraordinary,
when you think about it.
There are these moments
in history
when the actors understand
that moment in history.
And they just do
the right thing.
Luz Long did the right thing.
That was a very
humanizing moment
for Owens and for Germany.
By the time the runners
set their marks
for the 200-meter race,
thousands of German fans
knew they were witnessing
something extraordinary.
Yessay Offens! Yessay Offens!
He hears this shouting,
"Yessay Offens, Yessay Offens,"
and he suddenly realizes
it's him.
It's... it's, you know,
it's obviously the German
pronunciation of his name.
And he's absolutely lionized
by the German people.
Owens won his third gold medal,
shattering the Olympic
200-meter record.
He'd already equaled both
the Olympic and world records
in the 100 meters,
and his record in the long jump
would last for decades.
After he won his third medal,
arguably, he was the world's
most famous athlete
at that moment.
MacMlLLAN:
He seemed to be able to do
everything effortlessly.
He was enormously graceful,
charming,
a person of tremendous poise
and elegance in public.
And the Nazis were
absolutely furious.
I mean, Hitler was
absolutely livid.
By the fourth day of the Games,
Goebbels was enraged.
"We Germans win a gold medal,
the Americans get three,
two of which are won
by niggers,"
he wrote in his diary.
"This is a scandal!
White humanity should be ashamed
of itself."
For a lot of black folks,
this was a popular thing
to show black folks winning.
Yes, we were winning a lot
in our private lives,
just surviving day-to-day,
but you need these sort
of public moments.
And that's the role that sports
played for us.
I'm very glad to have won
my three events
in the Games here at Berlin.
Wonderful competition here,
wonderful stadium
and a wonderful crowd.
And the days have been
very nice.
Jesse Owens had learned
not to share his deepest,
most innermost thoughts
with most people,
especially white folks.
Keeping things on the surface
at a fairly superficial level
was perfect for the newsreel.
Telegrams flooded in
from promoters in the U.S.
Showman Eddie Cantor
offered Owens $40,000
to appear with him
on stage and radio;
a California orchestra
offered $25,000.
Coach Snyder bragged
to reporters
that Owens had a good chance
to make $100,000
once he returned to the States.
The people here in Germany
have been very nice to me,
and I'm very glad to have
displayed my talent here.
Thank you.
Owens had completed
all his events.
Then, U.S. officials
abruptly announced changes
in the lineup
for the 4x100 relay.
Although the Americans
were heavily favored to win,
the team's only two
Jewish sprinters,
Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller,
would be replaced
by Owens and Metcalfe.
Their coaches did not give them
a clear explanation why.
Glickman was told years later
that in fact the Nazis
had specifically demanded
that no Jewish athletes
take part in the race.
The Nazis hated blacks, too.
But the Jews were
their primary targets.
And so, if given the choice,
they preferred to have blacks
competing in the race
rather than Jews.
Jesse Owens refused to do it.
He fought 'em back
and they said...
they pointed their finger
in his face and said,
"You'll do as you're told."
And that was a horrible thing
that happened
during the Olympic Games.
That fault was on our side.
Marty and Sam were crushed;
they watched the medals that
were their medals, essentially,
put on the neck of Jesse Owens
and Ralph Metcalfe.
This is what they had spent
their lives for
and this is what they'd come
to Berlin for.
Owens became the first
African American
to win four gold medals
in a modern Olympics,
yet he was far from triumphant.
"I feel bad for Marty and Sam,"
he confided to friends.
As the Berlin Games
drew to a close,
Avery Brundage announced
that the U.S. track team
would go on a European tour
to raise money for the AAU.
Brundage wanted to cash in
on the success
of the American team
and especially its popular
new star.
The 400-yard relay.
Jesse Owens, number three,
fresh from his Olympic triumphs,
competed.
The race was run
in 37 and four-tenths seconds,
so we only had nine seconds
in which to admire
the wonderful running
of this great athlete.
For Owens, the tour
was a relentless grind
of shabby accommodations, little
food, less rest and no money.
For the first time, he rebelled,
abruptly leaving
the tour in London
and boarding a ship
back to America.
I was tired,
I wanted to come home,
and I really did.
After all, I haven't seen
my wife for three months,
and I'm very glad to be
back home to see her.
Avery Brundage threatened that
if he did go home,
he would be stripped of his
amateur athletic standing.
My father chose not to continue.
Avery Brundage suspended him.
My suspension,
I really couldn't say.
I don't know anything
about it at all.
I haven't had any
official word from it.
I've been on the boat
for four days, and I...
I really don't know
what it's all about.
Suspension from the AAU
barred Owens from competing
in any sanctioned sporting
events in the U.S.
The impact of the ban
would play out later;
for now, Jesse Owens was a hero.
When he came back from Berlin
I was 11 years old,
but I remember waiting excitedly
to see this parade
that was going to be
in the black community.
And of course you...
you felt like,
"Jesse Owens just waved to me!"
He comes back
to the United States
thinking that everything's
going to be good for him.
He's going to be rich
and he's going to be up there
with all those movie stars
he so loves and respects
and wants to be part of.
And the truth, of course,
is very, very different.
Owens had always hoped
that success on the track
would translate to respect
off the track.
But on his first night home,
Owens and his wife
could not find a hotel
in downtown New York
willing to take black customers.
Finally, one agreed
to rent them a room,
but only if they used
the service entrance.
There just simply
aren't the roles
for a black American
to fit into in the 1930s,
however many Olympic medals
he may have won.
If he were a white athletic guy,
he could maybe play Tarzan
in the movies,
and that's what Johnny
Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe,
Glenn Morris and a whole string
of American athletes did.
But who wants a black Tarzan?
Nobody.
The lucrative offers
that had poured in to Berlin
turned out to be empty promises.
To support his family,
Owens was forced to take part
in the most demeaning race
of his life.
Cuba.
Jesse Owens, the ebony streak
of Olympic Games,
celebrates turning professional
by racing against a horse...
That winter, Christmastime,
he goes down to Havana
to race a horse named
Julio McCaw.
Jesse had a start of 40 yards
and 100, and he won by inches.
I thought racing a horse
was kind of a depressing thing
for publicity.
And what did he get out of it?
Probably very little or nothing.
They used him.
It's just like saving
somebody's life,
and then the next day that
person slaps you in the face.
A lot of people felt that he
was not dignifying his self.
But when you have a family
to feed and you have no job,
then you do what you have to do
to feed your family,
as long as it's honest.
Owens took whatever jobs
he could find
and tried his hand at business.
He owned a dry cleaners,
he tap-danced with Bill
"Bo Jangles" Robinson,
and continued to make money
racing against horses.
He ended up in financial trouble
over back taxes.
The United States government
sued him for moneys
that he purportedly made
racing horses
and off those few endorsements
that he was able to get,
and ultimately, he ended up
declaring bankruptcy.
For years, Jesse Owens
disappeared from view.
After the Berlin Games,
the mainstream press
simply did not deal with him
any further.
Have you anything
to do with athletics?
Some.
Nine down and one to go,
Mr. Randall.
Tiddlywinks?
Ten down and no more to go.
Panel, would you meet
Jesse Owens.
By the mid-1950s,
as the Cold War heated up,
Jesse Owens suddenly emerged
from obscurity.
Here is Jesse Owens.
In 1955, President
Dwight Eisenhower
named Owens goodwill ambassador,
charged with promoting America
to the world.
I'm glad we could make it
before you leave on your trip.
Where exactly are you going?
Well, we're going to India,
Singapore, Malaya
and the Philippines
for about 51 days.
On that trip, we will be talking
about our American way of life,
Mr. Murrow.
We feel that we have the best
way of life in the world today.
We're going to combat communism,
we're going to show...
He did eventually become
"a professional good example."
Here was Jesse Owens,
who was still considered a god
in the world of track and field,
and that was the way
he could support himself.
In the 1960s, the endorsements
started coming in.
I always carry
the American Express card.
The American Express card.
Don't leave home without it.
I was on a national TV show
with him, and he was...
he didn't look too good.
And when I got back
to California I said,
"You know, Jesse didn't
look too good.
I think... I don't think he's
going to live long."
He died within the year.
And he was fairly young.
But I think his heart
was broken.
You know, after winning
all those gold medals,
he expected the whole nation
to love him,
and here the greatest athlete
in America
is being treated shabbily.
MacMlLLAN:
His career is partly
a reflection
of the ways in which we use
our public figures.
You know, we use them
when we need them
and then we forget about them
when we don't need them.
Jesse Owens was immensely
popular in 1936,
and then people
forgot about him.
So Jesse Owens got relegated
to a back burner.
Without him, the issue
of integrating blacks
into mainstream American sports
would have been moot.
Jackie Robinson stood on
the shoulders of Jesse Owens.
You have to understand
Jesse Owens
in the pantheon
of great athletic figures
who have contributed to not just
black advancement in sport
but to black advancement
overall.
He is the quintessential
Olympic hero.
He stood up to racists
in Germany,
he stood up to racists at home,
and he did it with a grace
and a genius
that have not been equaled.
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