Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes

7. Jesse Owens: Leading Man in Modern American Tales of Racial Progress and Limits

Jesse Owens taking an early morning run in London with some of his admirers in 1936. Owens four gold medal winning performances that year in the Berlin Olympic Games would garner him instant celebrity status. (Getty Images) 1WIGGINS_pages_i-132.qxd 9/12/06 11:46 AM Page 110 7 Jesse Owens Leading Man in Modern American Tales of Racial Progress and Limits M A R K D Y R E S O N Captured in motion by Leni Riefenstahl’s cameras at Berlin in 1936, Jesse Owens has ever after embodied the story of human speed.1 Owens also embodied other stories. His life served as an American epic about triumph over racism and poverty. He symbolized American hopes that the nation’s venerated ideals might be realized. His life was also told as a tragic tale of American hypocrisy. The man who beat Adolf Hitler and Nazi racial theories to become an American hero returned to a nation gripped by an awful apartheid that condemned him to second-class citizenship. This alternative narrative cast Owens as a victim of racial exploitation condemned to eke out a meager living running humiliating races against horses. In still another version of the Jesse Owens story, the sprinter became the most important specimen in scientific studies of racial difference . The awesome acceleration captured in the frames of Riefenstahl’s movie became evidence in popular mythologies of African athletic “genes.”2 Decades after the 1936 Olympic Games Owens continued to play a central character in American tales. Some later twentieth-century chroniclers portrayed him as a key figure in the story of the civil rights struggle, a racial pioneer who stood with such luminaries as A. Phillip Randolph, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marian Anderson in the pantheon of heroes who paved the way for future victories in the war for equality. A related rendering of Jesse Owens made him an international ambassador for American goodwill during the cold war and the globe’s leading apostle of modern sport as the great reconciler of peoples, races, and nations. In an altogether different interpretation Owens was cast in the role of “Uncle Tom,” chastising the revolutionary prophets of black 1WIGGINS_pages_i-132.qxd 9/12/06 11:46 AM Page 111 power in his role as overseer of the “athletic plantation” run by white America.3 Reading athletes and their feats as texts has become a popular strategy for scholars interested in deciphering the meanings of sport in modern cultures.4 The Owens text, in its many translations, resides at the heart of twentieth-century American discourses about color lines and the limits of opportunity. Jesse Owens became a canonical text in the history of American race relations in part because he constantly told stories about himself and his victories. In part, the storytellers of modern society molded Owens into a racial icon. Newspapers, magazines, radio shows, newsreels, television, film, adolescent literature, and history books spun his life story into a rich set of parables that ranged in tone and meaning from boundless optimism to unreconstructed cynicism .5 As a New York Times reporter marveled nearly thirty years after Owens, as legend proclaims, beat Adolf Hitler in Berlin, the sprinter “remains one of the most magnetic of all sports heroes.” In the same article Owens himself testified that “‘I came along at a time when the Negro in America needed an image.’”6 The structure of this New York Times story reveals a crucial detail about the many American narratives that swirled about Owens. If “the Negro” needed an image then Owens and the American media were willing to supply it. Both he and his chroniclers crafted these stories. While he hardly possessed complete power over how his life was rendered, he constantly provided his own translations of the Jesse Owens story. As Owens’s most insightful biographer, the historian William J. Baker, amply demonstrates, Owens continually told and retold his life story in public forums. The media and the public were captivated by his stories and fashioned and refashioned them for their own purposes.7 Since the 1930s the Jesse Owens story has been required “reading” for grappling with the complexities of twentieth-century American culture.8 His story began in 1913 in Alabama. James Cleveland Owens was born in the hamlet of Oakville, the youngest of ten surviving children of Henry Cleveland Owens and Mary Emma Fitzgerald. Henry Owens was the...