Jesse Owens Smashing Records and Defying Expectations

 

Jesse Owens running for Ohio State University breaks a record at the 1935 Big Ten Track Meet.

On May 25, 1935, James Cleveland Owens, an athlete on the Ohio State University (OSU) track team, demolished three World Records and tied a fourth in 45 minutes at a Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor.  The jaw dropping accomplishment did not go unnoticed.

Jesse Owens was born in Alabama in 1913, one of eleven children.  He was 9 years old when his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he was recruited to run track by a junior high school coach while working part time jobs to support his family. 

Owens set his first records in the high jump and long jump at Fairmount Junior High School under coach and life-long mentor, Charles Riley.

Owens first came to national attention when he tied a world record in the 100 yard dash and long jumped for 24 feet 9 ½ inches at the National High School Championships in Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1933.  The sought-after young athlete was recruited by OSU, but not offered a scholarship.  A job was arranged for his father so the Owens could go to school, work only part time, and compete.  He was not allowed to live on campus and had to abide by local segregation laws when traveling with the team—eating take outs from restaurants that would not serve him and sleeping in separate hotels or while seated on the team bus. 

In his college career he won eight NCAA individual event championships over two years in 1935-36. 

Owens was naturally included on the 1936 Olympic Team.  During the  Berlin Olympics, meant to show off Adolph Hitler’s “New Germany” and establish the superiority of Aryan athletes, Owens famously won Gold Medals in the 100 meter sprint, long jump, 200 meter sprint, and the 4 x 100 relay—a feat unmatched until Carl Lewis in 1984. 

The day he won his first medal, Hitler left the stands after shaking the hands of only German athletes.  When the International Olympic Committee told Der Fuehrer that he had to greet all medal winners or none, he skipped all remaining medal ceremonies.  

Owens on the Medal stand at the 1936 Berlin Olympic games where he topped a German and a Japanese runners.

Owens disputed claims that he was snubbed by Hitler.  He said they had exchanged waves as he marched past and that he did not expect a personal greeting.  “Hitler didn't snub me—it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram,” Owens later said. 

Indeed, neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Harry Truman ever invited him to the White House or acknowledged his accomplishments. Dwight Eisenhower finally recognized him with an appointment as an international Ambassador of Sports. 

Owens also pointed out that ordinary Germans were enthusiastic and supportive and that while in Germany he could stay at hotels and dine with white athletes.  In America after a ticker-tape parade in his honor in New York he was forced to ride the freight elevator to a reception in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. 

After the Olympics he was stripped of his amateur standing for refusing to make a tour of Sweden with fellow athletes and instead trying to find paying opportunities in the U.S. to support his family.  But aside from a deal with the founder of Adidas shoes, he found no endorsement deals and there was then no professional track circuit in which to compete.  

Owens found less than a warm welcome after the initial hoopla and few of the other opportunities other high profile Olympians were offered.  He was eventually forced to take a job pumping gas to support his family.  Despite living on the edge of poverty, he was even prosecuted for income tax evasion.

He turned to self-promoting exhibitions which included taking on all comers in sprints giving the challengers big leads and running against racehorses.  An attempt at running a dry cleaning business failed.  At one point he was reduced to working as a gas station attendant. 

Despite all of these financial travails, he was successfully prosecuted by the Treasury Department for tax evasion in 1966. 

Ironically his public chastisement of Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos for giving Black Power salutes in their medal ceremony at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics led to a kind of public rehabilitation and opportunities as a motivational speaker for Ford Motor Company and as a spokesman for the United States Olympic Committee.  

At the request of Avery Brundage of the United States Olympic Committee Jesse Owens tried to dissuade Black athletes from protests at the 1968 Mexico City Games and denounced Juan Carlos and Tommy Smith after they famously raised their fists during the National Anthem.  Owens was widely condemned as an Uncle Tom in the Black community.

A smoker for 35 years, Owens died of lung cancer in Tuscan, Arizona in 1983 at the age of 66.  His friend and fellow Olympian Congressman Ralph Metcalfe helped arrange his burial at Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery.

Americans know, or think they know, Owens best through film.  First there was Leni Riefenstahl’s epic documentary of the Berlin Games meant to celebrate the triumph of Aryan superiority and Nazi glory.  But Owens’s four medals were so dominating and the footage of his events, his medal ceremonies, and of Hitler skulking out of his box were so compelling that Owens, not Der Furer, seemed the star of the movie.

Two American documentaries made years later also were widely viewed.  Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin by Bud Greenspan was shown on TV in connection with the 1964 Tokyo Games.  More recently Jesse Owens on the PBS American Masters series in 2012 not only celebrated his athletic feats, but looked unflinchingly as his post games life, racism, and how after his criticism of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, he was widely denounced as an Uncle Tom.

In the wake of the success of Roots, the made-for-TV-movie The Jesse Owens Story starring Dorian Harewood in 1984 told Owen’s story in flashbacks from his tax evasion trial.  Although Owens’s post-glory tribulations were detailed, curiously little attention was paid to his wife and family who he worked so hard to support.  The movie was syndicated mostly to independent outlets in mid-summer by Operation Prime Time.  It did get three Prime Time Emmy Awards and won one—for Best Men’s Hairstyling.

Stephan James starred as Jesse Owens in the 2016 film Race.

In 2016 in time for the 80th anniversary of the Berlin Games a new feature biopic, Race, directed by Stephen Hopkins and starring Stephan James concentrated on the games and Owen’s single-minded preparation.  It drew strong reviews and compliments from surviving family members for respect and accuracy but did disappointing box office and was shut out of the awards nominations that prestige pictures about race often garner.

 

Burning River Blues

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland burns in 1969

Note—The river on fire in Cleveland was a wake-up call from the depths of a long era of unfettered industrial pollution of America’s waters and air.  It even got Richard Nixon’s attention and was one of the events that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Water regulations.  Those are the regulations that the Trump administration is systematically either dismantling or declining to enforce.  For the first time in decades air and water pollution are both getting worse.  If the trend continues unabated maybe we can return to the Great America Trump treasures and toast our marshmallows on the river.

Fifty years ago on June 22, 1969 sparks from a passing freight train ignited a thick scum of oil and gunk that built up around the pilings of a railroad trestle across the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio.  The results were impressive.  Within minutes the fire spread from bank to bank and downriver.  Roaring red flames licked up into the air five stories high and thick black smoke enveloped the city and raised high into the air.  The fire burned intensely for about half an hour and died down only when the oil slick was consumed.  

The fire made national headlines, was covered by all of the TV evening news broadcasts, and became a cover story exposé on industrial pollution in Time Magazine.  But the astonishing thing was that it was not the first, most damaging, or deadliest fire on the Cuyahoga.  The river, with its banks lined by heavy industrial plants, for 100 years, all discharging their waste unimpeded and untreated into it, first burned in 1868.  Including the June fire, it was ablaze at least 12 more time, more than once a decade.  A fire in 1912 killed at least 5 people.  One in 1952 caused over $1.3 million in pre-inflation damage.  The latest fire singed a couple of railroad bridges, but most of the damage was to Cleveland’s reputation. 

The Burning River quickly became part of modern urban folk lore. The local underground newspaper was the Burning River Times.  Several songs were written, the most well-known by Randy Newman:

Burn On

There’s a red moon rising

On the Cuyahoga River

Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

There’s a red moon rising

On the Cuyahoga River

Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

There’s an oil barge winding

Down the Cuyahoga River

Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

There’s an oil barge winding

Down the Cuyahoga River

Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

Cleveland, city of light, city of magic

Cleveland, city of light, you’re calling me

Cleveland, even now I can remember

‘Cause the Cuyahoga River goes smokin’ through my dreams

Burn on, big river, burn on

Burn on, big river, burn on

Now the Lord can make you tumble

Lord can make you turn

The Lord can make you overflow

But the Lord can’t make you burn

Burn on, big river, burn on

Burn on, big river, burn on

—Randy Newman

Industry along the river.

Cleveland’s location as deep water port on Lake Erie, river connections to the rich Ohio agricultural heartland, and as a major rail hub all facilitated the city’s rapid growth.  With easily access to taconite iron ore and lumber from the Minnesota Iron Range and North Woods by ship and coal and oil from Pennsylvania, heavy industry took root early and flourished.  It was an early home to many pioneering automobile manufacturers and remained an important parts supplier to the industry.  Locomotive, heavy industrial equipment, stoves, and other appliances were just some of the items produced.  John D. Rockefeller incorporated Standard Oil there and built the largest oil refinery in the east there.

The population swelled, first with farm boys, and then with European immigrants.  During and after World Wars I and II Appalachian Whites and Southern Blacks added to the mix, all fodder for the insatiable factories.  By 1950 Cleveland was the fifth largest city in the US.

The Cuyahoga snakes its way across the Mud Flats in this 1937 aerial photograph.  Note the gleaming downtown towers rising just above the center loop.

Most of that industry was built on the broad delta of the Cuyahoga as it snaked its way to Lake Erie that the locals called the Mud Flats.  The factories and mills sucked up huge amounts of river water for their operations then discharged it back into the river contaminated by oil, grease, chemicals of every sort, and heavy metal residue.  The river was an open sewer emptying in a once pristine Lake Erie.

By 1969 the city, which rode to prosperity and prominence on its industry, was just beginning to feel the beginning of the long decline which would accelerate in the ‘70’s—the era of the Arab oil boycott, stagflation, and the beginning to the exodus of industrial production in the U.S. for foreign shores.  It became the first American city to enter into a financial default on federal loans since the Great Depression. By the late ‘80’s Cleveland was a poster child for the Rust Belt, complete with abandoned factories—many still heavily contaminated themselves—a shrinking population, and grim prospects.  Looking back, many local folk would identify the river fire as the beginning of the process.

The oil scum on the river as it piles up near a bridge.  A reporter dared dip his hand into it.

But the fire did fuel rising concerns about the environment nationally.  Public agitation led to Congressional hearings and the enactment of the National Environment Protection Act (NEPA) which was signed into law on January 1, 1970 by Richard Nixon.  At the first Earth Day demonstrations that spring, posters of the Burning River were a common symbol of the degradation of the environment.  Under the provision of the act Nixon would go on to create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which would make regulation of water pollution a high priority.  

The Clean Water Act of mandated that all rivers U. S. be hygienic enough to safely allow swimming and edible fishing by 1983.  Since the 1969 the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District has invested over $3.5 billion in the purification of the river and the development of new sewer systems.  Over the next thirty years the City of Cleveland will further endow over $5 billion to the upkeep of the waste water system.  

Although the rapid demise of industry reduced the continued introduction of pollutants, the clean-up and recovery of the Cuyahoga has been a great success story.  There was never again another major river fire, and river is now home to about sixty different species of fish.  Almost all of the old factories are out of business and many of the buildings have been torn down and the contaminated Mud Flats on which the stood have been partially restored thanks to Federal Brown Fields funding.

Today a gleaming Cleveland fire boat can make arches of water over the nearly pristine Cuyahoga River for the entertainment of tourists and local celebrating the Burning River Festival. How much longer until the boat has to return to quenching blazes on the river?

Today, Cleveland has a population of only 313,000 compared to a high of 914,000 in 1950.  It has rebranded itself as a regional center for commerce, technology, communications, and the arts.  Led by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Lake front redevelopment, it has even become a tourist attraction.

And those tourists can ride excursion boats on the Cuyahoga along tree lined shores.

Despite these successes, the State of Ohio was firmly in the hands of a right wing Republican government even before the rise of Trump who’s expressed allegedly libertarian ideology calls for the dismantlement of all of the regulations that made the recovery possible and the slashing of infrastructure investment to maintain Cleveland’s now aging sewer and water treatment facilities.  Like their ideological allies across the country, they advocated re-industrialization based on unrestricted exploitation of the environment and a domestic wage base driven down to Third World levels.  

If they have their way, we may not have seen the last of the Burning River. 

Jesse Owens Smashed Records, Defied Expectations

Jesse Owens running for Ohio State University breaks a record at the 1935 Big Ten Track Meet.

On May 25, 1935, James Cleveland Owens, an athlete on the Ohio State University (OSU) track team, demolished three World Records and tied a fourth in 45 minutes at a Big Ten meet in Ann Arbor.  The jaw dropping accomplishment did not go unnoticed.

Jesse Owens was born in Alabama in 1913, one of eleven children.  He was 9 years old when his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he was recruited to run track by a junior high school coach while working part time jobs to support his family. 

Owens set his first records in the high jump and long jump at Fairmount Junior High School under coach and life-long mentor, Charles Riley.

Owens first came to national attention when he tied a world record in the 100 yard dash and long jumped for 24 feet 9 ½ inches at the National High School Championships in Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1933.  The sought-after young athlete was recruited by OSU, but not offered a scholarship.  A job was arranged for his father so the Owens could go to school, work only part time, and compete.  He was not allowed to live on campus and had to abide by local segregation laws when traveling with the team—eating take outs from restaurants that would not serve him and sleeping in separate hotels or while seated on the team bus.  

In his college career he won eight NCAA individual event championships over two years in 1935-36.  

Owens was naturally included on the 1936 Olympic Team.  During the  Berlin Olympics, meant to show off Adolph Hitler’s “New Germany” and establish the superiority of Aryan athletes, Owens famously won Gold Medals in the 100 meter sprint, long jump, 200 meter sprint, and the 4 x 100 relay—a feat unmatched until Carl Lewis in 1984.  

The day he won his first medal, Hitler left the stands after shaking the hands of only German athletes.  When the International Olympic Committee told Der Fuehrer that he had to greet all medal winners or none, he skipped all remaining medal ceremonies.  

Owens on the Medal stand at the 1936 Berlin Olympic games where he topped a German and a Japanese runners.

Owens disputed claims that he was snubbed by Hitler.  He said they had exchanged waves as he marched past and that he did not expect a personal greeting.  “Hitler didn't snub me—it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram,” Owens later said.  

Indeed neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Harry Truman ever invited him to the White House or acknowledged his accomplishments. Dwight Eisenhower finally recognized him with an appointment as an international Ambassador of Sports.  

Owens also pointed out that ordinary Germans were enthusiastic and supportive and that while in German he could stay at hotels and dine with white athletes.  In America after a ticker-tape parade in his honor in New York he was forced to ride the freight elevator to a reception in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.  

After the Olympics he was stripped of his amateur standing for refusing to make a tour of Sweden with fellow athletes and instead trying to find paying opportunities in the U.S. to support his family.  But aside from a deal with the founder of Adidas shoes, he found no endorsement deals and there was then no professional track circuit in which to compete.  

Owens found less than a warm welcome after the initial hoopla and few of the other opportunities other high profile Olympians were offered.  He was eventually forced to take a job pumping gas to support his family.  Despite living on the edge of poverty, he was even prosecuted for income tax evasion.

He turned to self-promoting exhibitions which included taking on all comers in sprints giving the challengers big leads and running against race horses.  An attempt at running a dry cleaning business failed.  At one point he was reduced to working as a gas station attendant.  

Despite all of these financial travails, he was successfully prosecuted by the Treasury Department for tax evasion in 1966.  

Ironically his public chastisement of Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos for giving Black Power salutes in their medal ceremony at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics led to a kind of public rehabilitation and opportunities as a motivational speaker for Ford Motor Company and as a spokesman for the United States Olympic Committee.  

At the request of Avery Brundage of the United States Olympic Committee Jesse Owens tried to dissuade Black athletes from protests at the 1968 Mexico City Games and denounced Juan Carlos and Tommy Smith after they famously raised their fists during the National Anthem.  Owens was widely condemned as an Uncle Tom in the Black community.

A smoker for 35 years, Owens died of lung cancer in Tuscan, Arizona in 1983 at the age of 66.  His friend and fellow Olympian Congressman Ralph Metcalfe helped arrange his burial at Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery. 

Americans know, or think they know, Owens best through film.  First there was Leni Riefenstahl’s epic documentary of the Berlin Games meant to celebrate the triumph of Aryan superiority and Nazi glory.  But Owens’s four medals were so dominating and the footage of his events, his medal ceremonies, and of Hitler skulking out of his box were so compelling that Owens, not Der Furer, seemed the star of the movie. 

Two American documentaries made years later also were widely viewed.  Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin by Bud Greenspan was shown on TV in connection with the 1964 Tokyo Games.  More recently Jesse Owens on the PBS American Masters series in 2012 not only celebrated his athletic feats, but looked unflinchingly as his post games life, racism, and how after his criticism of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, he was widely denounced as an Uncle Tom. 

In the wake of the success of Roots, the made for TV movie The Jesse Owens Story starring Dorian Harewood in 1984 told Owen’s story in flashbacks from his tax evasion trial.  Although Owens’s post-glory tribulations were detailed, curiously little attention was paid to his wife and family who he worked so hard to support.  The movie was syndicated mostly to independent outlets in mid-summer by Operation Prime Time.  It did get three Prime Time Emmy Awards and won one—for Best Men’s Hairstyling.

Stephan James starred as Jesse Owens in the 2016 film Race.

In 2016 in time for the 80th anniversary of the Berlin Games a new feature bio-pic, Race, directed by Stephen Hopkins and starring Stephan James concentrated on the games and Owen’s single minded preparation.  It drew strong reviews, compliments from surviving family members for respect and accuracy but did disappointing box office and was shut out of the awards nominations that prestige pictures about race often garner.