(Amazing story on Jesse Owens - a must read for the fan of...)
Amazing story on Jesse Owens - a must read for the fan of the man!
https://www.amazon.com/I-have-changed-Jesse-Owens/dp/B0006C31J4?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0006C31J4
https://www.amazon.com/Jesse-spiritual-autobiography-31-May-1905-Hardcover/dp/B013J92MEA?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B013J92MEA
(The outstanding Olympic athlete, drawing on his experienc...)
The outstanding Olympic athlete, drawing on his experiences as a Negro in America, offers his views on the United States' racial crisis, suggesting methods of peaceful change
https://www.amazon.com/Blackthink-Life-Black-Man-White/dp/0688011632?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0688011632
James Owens was born on September 12, 1913, in Oakville, Alabama, the tenth surviving child of sharecroppers Henry Owens and Emma Fitzgerald. In the early 1920's the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Henry and his older sons found work in steel mills. The youngest Owens underwent a name change when an elementary schoolteacher mistook his drawled "J. C. " for "Jesse. "
James Owens attended Fairmount Junior High School in Cleveland and Ohio State University. As the first member of his family to finish high school or attend college, Owens was poorly prepared for the academic requirements of his physical education major. Coming from a home bereft of books and a technically oriented high school lacking in academic aspirations, he could scarcely read. James didn't finish the university.
At Cleveland's Fairmount Junior High School, Owens' athletic talent and ambitions were nourished by a dynamic physical education teacher, Charles Riley, who continued to coach Owens in high school. Owens set several interscholastic track records at East Technical High School, and at age nineteen attempted to win a place on the 1932 United States Olympic team. He failed in that endeavor, but in 1933, after a spectacular senior year of high school competition, he accepted a work-study "scholarship" to attend Ohio State University. Guided by coach Larry Snyder, Owens immediately began setting Big Ten and national track records. As a sophomore, on May 25, 1935, at the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he set new world records in the 220-yard dash (20. 3 seconds), the 220-yard low hurdles (22. 6 seconds), and the broad jump (26 feet, 81/4 inches) and tied the world record in the 100-yard dash (9. 4 seconds).
In intercollegiate track meets prior to the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany, Owens' constant nemesis was Eulace Peacock, a strong sprinter and long jumper from Temple University. Before he suffered a hamstring injury at the Penn Relays in the spring of 1936, Peacock beat Owens five of six times in direct competition. Had it not been for the bad hamstring (which became aggravated during the Olympic trials), Peacock might well have seized some or all of the gold medals won by Owens. In the summer of 1936, however, Owens stood beside heavyweight boxer Joe Louis as the most visible of all African-American athletes in the racially segregated nation. Just six weeks before the Berlin games, Louis succumbed to the blows of German Maximilian Schmeling. At the Berlin Olympics in early August, Owens dominated the track and field competitions by winning gold medals and breaking world records in the 100-and 200-meter dashes and the 400-meter relay, in addition to winning the gold medal in the broad jump.
Against an international backdrop of tension and fear, Adolf Hitler ceremoniously attended the games and cheered for German athletes. The emotionally charged scene gave birth to one of the most dramatic of sports myths. Hitler supposedly snubbed Owens, refusing to shake his hand after his victories, and allegedly stormed out of the stadium enraged that Owens's athleticism refuted the Nazi dogma of Aryan superiority. Endearingly simple and morally satisfying, this yarn is untrue; it was largely concocted by American sportswriters. Moreover, German athletes won more medals overall than the American athletes. At the end of the track and field portion of the Berlin Olympics, the American track team departed for exhibitions in several major European cities. Arranged by the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) as a means of paying Olympic travel expenses, the tour quickly turned sour for the athletes. Owens not only felt fatigued and homesick, he also had several stage and screen offers to capitalize on because of his Olympic success. He refused to go on from London with the coaches and athletes to Stockholm, Sweden, and took a steamer back to the United States. The AAU immediately banned him from any further amateur athletic competition in the United States.
Although most of the business and entertainment offers turned out to be bogus, agent Marty Forkins arranged several endorsements in the black press and numerous fee-paying appearances on radio shows and at banquets and ball games. Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon paid Owens to stump for black votes in the autumn of 1936. Shortly after that ill-fated effort, Owens received word of his selection as Associated Press Athlete of the Year. He then left for Havana, Cuba, to run a well-paid race against a horse, creating another facet of the Jesse Owens myth. Years later he would be depicted as a poor boy who achieved Olympic fame only to be unable to find a job back home in racist America; supposedly he had to chase horses in order to survive financially. In truth, Owens made about $20, 000 in the autumn of 1936. He bought himself a new Buick sedan, a complete wardrobe of clothes and jewelry for his wife, and a large, modern, and fully furnished house in Cleveland for his parents.
From 1937 to the onset of World War II, Owens bounced around from one project to another - barnstorming with various musical and athletic groups, supervising recreational activities on Cleveland's playgrounds, and running exhibition races at both major league and Negro League baseball games. One of his projects, a dry-cleaning business in Cleveland, went bankrupt in 1939. Undeterred, he moved his family to Columbus, hoping to finish his undergraduate degree. He assisted Snyder in the coaching of track at Ohio State and opened another dry-cleaning shop. He continued to fail academically, and just a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he gave up hopes for a baccalaureate degree.
During World War II, several brief government jobs led to an assignment as director of black personnel at Ford Motor Company in Detroit, under Ford's powerful head of labor relations, Harry Bennett. Shortly after the war, Owens moved to Chicago, where in 1950 he joined the board of directors of the South Side Boys Club and later served on the Illinois State Athletic Commission and the Illinois Youth Commission. In 1950 he was selected by Associated Press sportswriters as the greatest track athlete of the past half century. In the early 1950's he emerged as a Cold War patriot, hailing the United States as a land of unsurpassed opportunity. He frequently linked athleticism and patriotism in speeches to schools, youth groups, and civic clubs. In 1955 he went to India, Malaya, and the Philippines under the auspices of the Department of State, to make speeches, conduct athletic clinics, and grant interviews lauding the virtues of the American way of life and government.
In 1956 Owens attended the Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, as one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's three handpicked goodwill ambassadors, then served for a time with the president's People-to-People Program on behalf of Americanism. In 1960, Owens joined with Ted West, a former advertising adviser for the Chicago Defender, to create Owens-West and Associates, a sales and promotional agency. While West attended to the business details, Owens brought in clients. The door to mainstream commercial endorsements opened in the 1960's and college youths began rejecting the traditional work ethic and patriotism represented by Owens. Owens spent much of his time on the road, addressing business and athletic groups. He carelessly neglected to file income tax returns for the years 1954 to 1962 and in 1965 was indicted for tax evasion. Liable to a prison sentence and large fine, Owens pleaded no contest. He was found guilty as charged, but federal judge J. Sam Perry leniently required only payment of the back taxes and a small fine because he deemed Owens to be a "good citizen. " Owens, insisted Judge Perry, was tirelessly "supporting our country and our way of life and our democracy, " while others were "running over this country offering their blood and going out to other countries and aiding and abetting the enemy openly. "
Not only did Owens's type of patriotism stand in sharp contrast to the antiwar movement during the Vietnam era, he could not even think kindly of the civil rights movement of the 1960's. Wed to the pragmatic and moderate remedies associated with his childhood hero, Booker T. Washington, Owens thought the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. , too fiery in his speeches and too confrontational in his tactics. Owens could not understand the revolt of black athletes in the 1960's and certainly not the anger expressed by Olympic athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos in their black-power salutes on the awards podium at Mexico City in 1968. Appalled, Owens urged Smith and Carlos to apologize, but they dismissed him as an "Uncle Tom. " In Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man (1970), Owens assaulted "firefanning blackthinkers" as "pro-Negro bigots" and "professional haters" who did not represent the "silent black majority" working for respectability rather than revolution in the United States. Cooperating with ghostwriter Paul G. Neimark, Owens insisted that laziness, more than racial prejudice, condemned American blacks to failure. "If the Negro doesn't succeed in today's America, it is because he has chosen to fail. " Such unguarded statements brought howls of protest from black readers and reviewers, prompting Owens to tone down his message with another book, I Have Changed (1972), also written with Neimark. In truth, he changed little; he merely translated his moderate middle-class prescription into more diplomatic terms. At the Munich Olympics in 1972, two angry black athletes also demonstrated on the victory podium, provoking Owens to engage in another futile effort of mediation.
During the 1970's, Owens fully identified himself with big business. At business conventions and in media advertisements, he regularly represented such corporations as Sears, United Fruit, United States Rubber, Johnson and Johnson, Schieffelin, Ford Motor Company, and American Express. The most lucrative deal was a long-term contract with Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) for the exclusive commercial use of his name and for financial support of the annual ARCO Jesse Owens Games for boys and girls. In addition to athletic and business groups, Owens appealed to conservative religious gatherings in the 1970's. He claimed to be a "born again believer" and in Jesse: A Spiritual Autobiography (1978), again written with Neimark, he charted numerous personal crises through which prayer and the presence of God had sustained him. In print and speeches he "emphasized God, mother, country, hard work, and clean living, " recalled an old track teammate, "and he got it across very well. " He became a "professional good example, " as journalist William O. Johnson, Jr. , put it, and "a kind of all-round super combination of nineteenth-century spellbinder and twentiethcentury p. r. man, glad-hander, evangelistic small-talker. "
Owens and his wife left Chicago in the early 1970's for the sunnier climate of Scottsdale, Arizona. In December 1979 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, probably the result of many years of heavy smoking. After his death in Tucson, Arizona, four months later, memorial statues, plaques, track meets, streets, and paths proliferated from Berlin to Los Angeles and from the Ohio State campus to the roadside of Oakville, Alabama. He was buried in Chicago.
At the Berlin Olympics, Owens dominated the track and field competitions by winning gold medals and breaking world records in the 100-and 200-meter dashes and the 400-meter relay, in addition to winning the gold medal in the broad jump. Jesse Owans was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame (1970) and the Track and Field Hall of Fame (1974). Owens received an honorary doctor of athletic arts degree from Ohio State University in 1972. The National Collegiate Athletic Association gave him the Theodore Roosevelt Award in 1974 for distinguished achievement since retirement from athletic competition. President Gerald Ford honored him with the highest civilian recognition, the Medal of Freedom in 1976, for being "a source of inspiration" for all Americans. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter presented him with the Living Legends Award in 1979 for his "dedicated but modest" endeavors "to inspire others to reach for greatness. "
(The outstanding Olympic athlete, drawing on his experienc...)
(Amazing story on Jesse Owens - a must read for the fan of...)
In the early 1950's Jesse Owens emerged as a Cold War patriot, hailing the United States as a land of unsurpassed opportunity. He frequently linked athleticism and patriotism in speeches to schools, youth groups, and civic clubs. Owens could not even think kindly of the civil rights movement of the 1960's. In Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man (1970), Owens assaulted "firefanning blackthinkers" as "pro-Negro bigots" and "professional haters" who did not represent the "silent black majority" working for respectability rather than revolution in the United States.
James Owens was a member of the Republican party.
In the wake of a highly publicized California romance during a western track tour, Jesse Owens came under legal pressure from the city of Cleveland to marry his high school sweetheart, Minnie Ruth Solomon, with whom he had fathered a daughter three years earlier. They were married in July 1935 and had two more daughters.
