The Encyclopedia of Alabama calls him the nation’s greatest Olympian, and the record supports the superlative. James Cleveland Owens — the world would come to know him as Jesse — was born in 1913 in Oakville, in Lawrence County, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers and the grandson of slaves. Twenty-three years later, in Nazi-ruled Berlin, he won four Olympic gold medals and dismantled, one race at a time, the doctrine of Aryan superiority that Germany’s ruling party had built its games around.
The story of how he got there, and what happened after, is one of the most consequential in American sports — and it begins in the red dirt of north Alabama.
“Jesse” Was an Accident
His family called him J.C., short for James Cleveland. But when a schoolteacher in Oakville asked his name, she thought he said “Jesse,” and the name stuck for life. The family, like so many Black families of the era, eventually joined the Great Migration north, and Owens landed in Cleveland, where a track coach spotted a sprinter who ran as if the ground owed him money.
His signature moment before Berlin came on May 25, 1935, at the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In the span of about 45 minutes, Owens set three world records and tied a fourth — a feat sportswriters still call “the greatest 45 minutes in sports history.” Writer Alson Pierce, who witnessed it, described a performance that has never been equaled.
Berlin, 1936
At the 1936 Games, Owens won gold in the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the long jump, and the 4×100 relay — the first African-American athlete to win four Olympic track and field golds. He did it as an African-American man competing before a sea of faces ruled by a party whose founding principles held white people supreme.
The triumph, however, met an ugly reception at home. President Franklin D. Roosevelt neither invited Owens and the other 17 African-American members of the U.S. team to the White House nor sent a congratulatory telegram. The snub took four decades to formally correct: in 1976, President Gerald Ford presented Owens with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1990 President George H.W. Bush awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously. In 2016, President Barack Obama met with the families of the 18 Black athletes from the Berlin Games to honor what they had carried — competing in Nazi Germany while living under segregation at home. The same year, the film “Race” dramatized the Games (“There is no black or white; there is only fast or slow,” actor Stephan James says as Owens) and the documentary “Olympic Pride, American Prejudice” told the story of all 18 athletes.
Life After the Track
Owens’ post-athletic career was more varied than his fame suggests. He directed a national fitness program for African-Americans through the Office of Civilian Defense, served as a liaison for Ford Motor Company’s Black employees, and in the 1950s traveled the world on goodwill tours at President Eisenhower’s request. He fronted national ad campaigns for Quaker Oats, Johnson & Johnson and Sears, Roebuck. His 1970 book Blackthink argued, contentiously for its moment, that the Black Power movement had lost touch with most African-Americans. He spent his last years on the lecture circuit and on the U.S. Olympic Committee’s board, and died of lung cancer in Tucson, Arizona in March 1980, at 66.
The Museum at Oakville
The best place to understand any of it is the Jesse Owens Museum in Oakville, built on his birthplace by local volunteers. James and Nancy Pinion, with a handful of other community visionaries, opened the museum in 1998 after a fundraising campaign that included volunteer Curtis Cole and Oakville resident Therman White — a group featured in a national magazine in 2008.
The grounds hold a restored sharecropper’s cabin, where brother Sylvester’s recorded narration explains life for a family of twelve in three rooms; a full-size replica of the Berlin long-jump pit, where visitors can test their own leaps against Owens’ record; and a replica 1936 torch. Birmingham sculptor Branko Medenica created the statue of Owens running through the Olympic rings. Inside, a theater screens footage of the Berlin Games narrated by Owens himself.
The museum has carried the Olympic flame through it, too: at the 1996 Atlanta Games, museum founder James Pinion persuaded Olympic officials to route the torch through Oakville. Owens’ grandson, Stuart Owen Rankin, carried the torch into the park, and Owens’ widow, Ruth, lit the eternal flame at the replica torch.
Honors follow the highways as well. A stretch of Highway 36 between Hartselle and Danville is designated the Jesse Owens Parkway, and a monument in Jesse Owens Park — funded by Governor George Wallace, planned for the Lawrence County Courthouse lawn but rejected there by county commissioners in 1983 — stands where it found its home.
For Alabamians, the moral of the story travels well: a boy born in a sharecropper’s cabin in Oakville, running on Red Dirt and cinder tracks, ended up redefining what the world believed about the color of speed. Alabama keeps his memory the way he earned it — in gold.