Jesse OwensJesse OwensJesse Owens, Track StarJames Cleveland Owens was born in 1913 in a small town in Alabama. His parents, Henry and Emma Owens, decided to move the family to Cleveland, Ohio when Jesse Owens was eight years old, being the last of ten children. They didn’t have much money, and J.C.’s father was hoping to find a better job. When they arrived in Cleveland, J.C. was enrolled in public school. On his first day of class when the teacher asked his name, she heard Jesse instead of J.C. He was called Jesse from that point on.
Jesse wasn’t as prosperous as Henry and Emma had hoped and the family remained poor. Jesse took on different jobs in his spare time. He delivered groceries, loaded freight cars, and worked in a shoe repair shop. At this time, Jesse realized he enjoyed running. Which had became the turning point in his life. One day in gym class, the students were timed in the 60-yard dash. When Coach Charlie Riley saw how talented Jesse was, the coach immediately invited Jesse to join the track team. Although Jesse was unable to participate in after-school practices because of work, Coach Riley offered to train him in the mornings. At Cleveland East Technical High School, Jesse became a track star. As a senior, he tied the world record in the 100 yard dash with a time of 9.4 seconds, only to tie it again while running in the Interscholastic Championships in Chicago. While in Chicago, he also leaped distance of 24 feet 9 5/8 inches in the broad-jump. But Jesse’s fame only started in High School where it would become even greater as he became more “well known.”
Seeing Jesse’s great talent, many colleges and universities tried to recruit him, he chose to attend Ohio State University because he didn’t want to live well while his parents were almost in poverty. The track coach found a permanent job for Jesse’s father, and arranged jobs for him to pay for his room and board. Here Jesse met some of the fiercest competition. The United States was still struggling to live in a world without segregation in 1933, which led to many difficulties for Jesse. He was required to live off campus with other African-American athletes. When he traveled with the team, Jesse could either order carryout or eat at the “blacks only” restaurants, and he also had to sleep in “blacks only”
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Jesse was raised as a white boy. “I was like, ‘Honey, I’m the best black kid,'” one of Jesse’s parents recalled. Jesse’s first race was black, however. “For me, it felt like it was all my fault, because I had to go back and rejoin my African American family.” The school only offered Jesse the opportunity to come home to Ohio City, Michigan (he’s now in Arizona).
While working in the school’s football gym and working, Jesse visited local black colleges, including the University of Illinois and Harvard University. “I asked myself a few questions that the white guys in our program were really not able to answer,” said one of Jesse’s parents’ sons, Jack. “So I went to Illinois and got a job there. I went to the University of Illinois. As soon as I went there, I got my first job. That’s when I discovered the history of black people. I went to get my first job — at the University of Illinois. And that is because you have to have your whole life lived through, by the African American experience and how your experiences led to the development of your African American identity and your own black identity. So after all the times I got into athletics, in the beginning it became obvious that we went through an African American experience. There was something about African American people that you couldn’t escape, not only through the black experience,” he told Bleacher Report.
Despite the setbacks, Jesse stayed. He married a white woman named Anna L. from Alabama. After graduation, Jesse enrolled at the University of Georgia with a four-year goal of competing in the NFL. He was also working as a cook in a restaurant and playing hockey and soccer. By the end of his life, he had become hooked on race.
However, he never had the opportunity to live outside of school, and in order for him to be successful, he had to follow in the footsteps of the greatest African-American athletes of all time, including John Madden, Ralph Sampson, William Elrod, Al Jefferson, and Charles “the Beast” Beaumont.
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Black athletes in the ’20s and beyond were not without flaws. The U.S. football program was filled with great African-American legends like Johnny Football, James White, and Sammy Hagar, but this wasn’t really as big of an issue in the 1970s. “It really wasn’t a problem until we had people like Al Gore,” said Jayne Robinson, associate athletic director at the University of Georgia. “It was more of a crisis for the black community, when we talked about black people going to the Olympics. If we can