Jesse Owens
10 Things You May Not Know About Jesse Owens
1. Owens captured four gold medals at a single Olympiad. Although Adolf Hitler intended the 1936 Berlin Games to be a showcase for the Nazi ideology of Aryan racial supremacy, it was a black man who left the biggest imprint on that year’s Games. In one of the greatest ...read more
Jesse Owens wins 4th gold medal
At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, African American track star Jesse Owens wins his fourth gold medal of the Games in the 4×100-meter relay. His relay team set a new world record of 39.8 seconds, which held for 20 years. In their strong showing in track-and-field events at the XIth ...read more
Jesse Owens wins long jump–and respect–in Germany
On August 4, 1936, American Jesse Owens wins gold in the long jump at the Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. It was the second of four gold medals Owens won in Berlin, as he firmly dispelled German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler’s notion of the superiority of an Aryan “master race,” for ...read more