Jesse Owens: Education, Academic Pursuits, and Enduring Legacy

Jesse Owens, an iconic American athlete, left an indelible mark on the world stage with his extraordinary achievements at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Beyond his athletic prowess, Owens' life story encompasses his educational journey, academic challenges, and his role as an inspirational figure.

Early Life and Education

Born James Cleveland Owens on September 12, 1913, in Oakville, Alabama, to Henry Cleveland Owens and Mary Emma (née Fitzgerald) Owens, both sharecroppers and descendants of slaves. He was the last of nine children who survived infancy. Initially called J. C., he acquired the name Jesse when a teacher in Cleveland, Ohio, misheard him.

Seeking better opportunities, the Owens family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, when Jesse was around eight or nine years old. His athletic talent became apparent at Fairmount Junior High School, where he caught the attention of physical education teacher and coach Charles Riley. Riley, a white man, became Owens' mentor, teaching him not only athletic techniques but also citizenship. Riley worked long hours with his pupil and continued to do so through high school.

High School Achievements

While on his high school track team at East Technical High School, Owens set several interscholastic records. As a high school senior at EAST TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL, Owens equaled the world record of 9.4 seconds in the 100-yard dash. During his senior year at East Tech, he was elected president of the senior class and captain of the track team. In 1932, he failed to win a place on the United States Olympic squad, but by the time he had finished high school, in 1933, he had won much acclaim as a track athlete of extraordinary promise.

Collegiate Career at Ohio State University

Owens wished to attend the University of Michigan. No track scholarships were available in that day, however, and his parents could not afford tuition. He therefore matriculated at Ohio State University, athletic boosters having arranged for him to work at part-time jobs to pay his expenses. He waited on tables in the dining hall, operated an elevator in the State House, and served as a page for the Ohio legislature.

Read also: More on Jonathan Owens

Despite his athletic success, Owens faced academic challenges at Ohio State University. Poorly prepared for college work and distracted by athletics, he was never a good student. After his first term he was constantly on academic probation; once he had to sit out the indoor track season because of bad grades. Despite these challenges, Owens excelled in sports, setting numerous Big Ten and national track records. His finest day was May 25, 1935, at the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor. Within a single hour he set new world records in the 220-yard sprint, the 220-yard hurdles, and the long jump, and tied the world record in the 100-yard dash. Well over a year before the Berlin Games of 1936, Owens emerged as a young man destined for Olympic fame.

At the Drake Relays held in Des Moines, Iowa, on April 26, 1935, Ohio State University track star Jesse Owens won the long jump, setting a new American record and coming within an inch of setting a new world record in the event. A month later, at the Big Ten Championship Meet, Owens would break the world record with a jump of 26 feet, 8 inches.

Racial Discrimination at Ohio State

At the time of Owens’ matriculation, The Ohio State University had only one men’s dorm, and Owens was barred from it because of his race. He instead shared a boarding house with several other African-American students on East 11th Avenue, where they cooked their own meals and sometimes ate in the student union. No restaurant along High Street would serve them, nor were they allowed to go to most movie theaters.

While Owens was logging many victories on the track - he was even chosen team captain, the first African American elected to that position on a Big Ten team - he had few such highlights in the classroom. His grades were so poor his junior year that the University made him academically ineligible to compete in any winter indoor meets in 1936. He had brought his grades up sufficiently by spring quarter to compete in the regular outdoor season, but that was the last full academic year Owens spent at Ohio State. After doing so well in the 1936 Summer Games, he decided to take advantage of the financial opportunities his fame offered. He did go back to OSU the fall of 1940, but he once again was placed on academic probation. In December 1941 he withdrew from OSU and never finished his degree.

The 1936 Berlin Olympics

Owens' performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics cemented his place in history. He won four gold medals, in the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter race, the long jump, and the 400-meter relay.

At the Olympic trials in the summer of 1936, he finished first in all three of the events he had entered. Several weeks later, he took the Berlin Olympics by storm. First, he won the 100-meter dash in 10.3 seconds, equaling the world record. Next he took the gold medal in the long jump with a new Olympic distance of 8.06 meters. Then he won the gold in the 200-meter race with a new Olympic mark of 20.7 seconds. Toward the end of the week, he was unexpectedly placed on the American team for the 400-meter relays. He ran the opening leg in yet another gold-medal, record-making effort.

In the 100- and 200-meter sprints, he set records of 10.3 and 20.7 seconds respectively. In the long jump, he set an Olympic record of 26 feet, 5 1/4 inches.

Owens' success at the Berlin Olympics, held in Nazi Germany, was a powerful statement against Adolf Hitler's ideology of Aryan supremacy. His victories served as an inspirational model of success for African Americans and later became a symbol and eloquent spokesperson for the United States as a land of opportunity for all.

Life After the Olympics

For several years after the Berlin Olympics, life did not go smoothly for Owens. American officials had planned a barnstorming tour for the track team immediately after the Berlin Games. At first, Owens cooperated, running exhibitions in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and England. Having received numerous offers from the United States to capitalize on his Olympic fame, he balked when the team departed from London for a series of exhibitions in Scandinavia. The Amateur Athletic Union suspended him from any further amateur competition.

Accompanied by his Ohio State coach, Larry Snyder, Owens returned to the United States only to find that all the “offers” were phony publicity stunts by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. They never seriously intended to give a young black man not even an Olympic hero a steady job at decent pay. Instead, Owens found a lucrative assignment in the presidential campaign of Alf Landon, who paid him to stump for black votes. That turned out to be a futile effort but no more futile than a subsequent string of unsatisfactory jobs. For a time, Owens directed a band for Bill “Bojangles” Robinson on the black nightclub circuit. Tiring of that, he organized traveling basketball and softball teams, raced against horses at baseball games and county fairs, served for a summer as a playground director in Cleveland, and briefly worked as a clothes salesman. He suffered his biggest failure in a dry-cleaning venture that went bankrupt within six months. Ineligible to continue competing for the Ohio State University due to his poor academic standing, Owens signed with Consolidated Radio Artists as a professional entertainer in 1937, tap dancing with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. After working briefly for Cleveland's Parks and Recreation Department, he started a dry-cleaning business in 1938 but was forced to file for personal bankruptcy in 1939.

Now married with three young daughters, Owens at twenty-seven years of age returned to Ohio State to finish his baccalaureate degree. However, he could not bring his grade average up sufficiently to earn his degree. At the outbreak of World War II, he took a government appointment as director of a physical fitness program for blacks. Two years later, he took a job with Ford Motor Company in Detroit, in charge of Ford’s black labor force. Dismissed from that position at the end of the war, by 1946 Owens no doubt winced when he looked back on the ten years since his Olympic victories. During that decade he had held about ten jobs, all confined to the segregated black community. Office of Civilian Defense appointed Owens as director of a national fitness program for African Americans in 1942. He traveled around the nation holding fitness clinics and promoting the war effort. In 1943, Owens joined the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, Michigan, as assistant personnel director for African American workers. He was put in charge of hiring and firing employees as well as settling disputes between workers and management. He rose to the position of personnel director, but lost his job at the end of the war. When a sporting goods store he opened in Detroit failed, Owens went on the road to make money. He raced horses and toured with the Harlem Globetrotters and the Cincinnati Crescents, a baseball team.

Public Relations and Inspirational Speaking

Finally, in the 1950’s, Owens broke out of that ghetto existence. When, after the onset of the Cold War, America needed a successful black to display to the world as an exemplar of the cherished American ideal of equal opportunity, Jesse Owens fit the bill. Having moved to Chicago in 1949, he worked with the Southside Boys Club and gave addresses to both black and white audiences in the greater Chicago area. Soon, he was in great demand throughout the United States as a spokesperson for American patriotism and the American Dream. In 1951, he returned to Berlin with that message. In 1955, he toured India, Malaya, and the Philippines under the sponsorship of the United States Department of State, and the following year, he attended the Melbourne, Australia, Olympic Games as a personal representative of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Never again would Owens be shunted aside as a black man in a white man’s world. For the last two decades of his life, he gave more than one hundred speeches a year in praise of athletics, religion, and the flag. Owens worked as a public relations representative and consultant, leveraging his fame and influence to make a positive impact on society.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower enlisted Owens as a goodwill ambassador in 1955 and sent the world-renown track star to India, the Philippines, and Malaya to promote physical exercise as well as tout the cause of American freedom and economic opportunity in the developing world. He would continue his goodwill tours in the 1960s and 1970s.

Later Life and Honors

Becoming politically more conservative as he got older, Owens refused to join the Civil Rights movement. His moderate position put him out of touch with the younger, angrier generation of blacks. He was rejected as an “Uncle Tom” in the 1960’s. After Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave their world-famous black-power salutes at the Olympic Games held in Mexico City in 1968, Owens demanded apologies, but to no avail.

He received numerous honors during his final years. In 1974, the National Collegiate Athletic Association presented him its highest recognition, the Theodore Roosevelt Award for distinguished achievement. Two years later, President Gerald R. Ford bestowed on him the Medal of Freedom Award for his “inspirational” life, and in 1979, Democratic president Jimmy Carter honored him with the Living Legends Award for his “dedicated but modest” example of greatness.

In 1965, Atlantic Richfield Company sponsored the first ARCO/Jesse Owens Games, an annual track meet for children aged ten to fifteen. Olympic Committee appointed him to its board of directors the following year. Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1974, Owens received the Presidential Medal of Honor from President Gerald Ford.

Death and Legacy

Less than a year after receiving the Living Legends Award, on March 31, 1980, Jesse Owens died of lung cancer. Ironically, America’s greatest track and field athlete fell victim to a twenty-year habit of cigarette smoking.

Four years after Owens’s death, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics demonstrated his perennial popularity. In Los Angeles, Carl Lewis won gold medals in the same four events Owens had dominated half a century earlier, with much better statistical results. However, Owens’s fame remained undiminished. Each time Lewis won a race, he was compared to Owens. Old film clips from the Berlin Games were aired repeatedly on television, showing the graceful Owens in action. Numerous interviews with family and friends kept his memory alive. Arguably, Owens was the posthumous star of the Los Angeles Olympics.

The year Owens died, the City of Tucson opened a park, featuring a swimming pool, baseball fields, and a playground, in his name on the East Side, off of Sarnoff Avenue. The Ohio State University dedicated the Jesse Owens Memorial Plaza outside the Ohio Stadium in 1984. The Jesse Owens Memorial Park and Museum opened in his hometown of Oakville, Alabama, in 1996.

Cultural Impact and Portrayals

Owens' life inspired the biographical drama film "Race," released in 2016. The movie portrays Owens' journey to the Berlin 1936 Olympic Games, highlighting his struggles against racism and his groundbreaking achievements on the world stage.

Owens’s life illustrates the principle that an athlete becomes a national hero only when his or her achievements, personality, and image coincide with momentous events to fulfill a cultural need beyond the athletic arena. As long as people struggle against the odds of racial prejudice and economic deprivation, the story of Owens will be told. He overcame the odds.

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