The story of Jesse Owens is one of the most inspiring stories in American history. As part of the United States team competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he braved the hostility of the Nazis to triumph with four gold medals. Hitler himself refused to shake hands with Owens, and stormed out of the stadium in disgust at the sight of a black man defeating the cream of the Aryan race.
Jesse Owens was indeed an inspiring figure and did indeed win four golds at the Berlin Olympics, but the rest of the preceding paragraph is not true. Not only is this myth not true, it has become practically an alternative reality to the extent that Owens eventually gave up trying to restore the true version of events; the mythical version was just too powerful, particularly in terms of American history. The myth is disproved by both the contemporary Nazi record, and by Owens’ own testimony. The photographs within the official German publications of the event, such as Olympia 1936, actually celebrate the multiracial harmony among the athletes. Asians, blacks and whites stand smiling side by side, and there is even a touching photograph of Jesse Owens and the great German athlete Luz Long lying on the grass together, the very model of warm friendship between races, and a photograph for which it would be difficult to find many equivalents in the US of 1936. It could easily pass for a 60s Coke advert.
Owens’ story that Long, in a remarkable gesture of sportsmanship, noticed that Owens technique was faulty, and advised him on how to avoid fouling his leaps in the long jump, has been doubted, but they obviously liked each other (and Hitler adored Long). Owens won the long jump, and the stadium photograph shows Owens saluting with his hand to his head while Long gives a Nazi salute a step below him. They walked off together, arm-in-arm (during WWII Long was badly wounded in Sicily in 1943, and died in a British hospital).
Admiration for Owens was widespread in Germany: the Berlin crowd gave him huge ovations, and Leni Riefenstahl – Hitler’s favourite director – gave Owens equal godlike status with the white athletes in her documentary, Olympia (1938). As for Hitler’s attitude to Owens, Owens says: ‘When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticising the man of the hour in Germany’.
What Happened Next
Owens has been crticised for giving conflicting accounts of what happened in Berlin, but this is unfair: Owens found himself custodian of a powerful myth he did not create, a myth that America was comfortable with. The fact that the American Olympic Association cowardly dropped two Jewish sprinters from the contest was quietly forgotten, as was the fact that when Owens returned to the States, President Roosevelt refused to meet him, on the grounds that honouring a black man would lose him votes. Roosevelt, not Hitler, snubbed Jesse Owens.