Jesse Owens *1913, 1980†
Owens was the youngest and tenth child of sharecroppers in Alabama. After WWI they went north to Cleveland. As a student at East Tech, he tied the world record for the 100 yard dash at the 1933 National High School Championship.
The 1936 Olympics was in Nazi controlled Germany. Hitler wanted to showcase Aryan supremacy. Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, was considering a boycott in 1933. In '34 he opposed the boycott, and later called it "a Jewish-Communist conspiracy". Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletic Union, led the case for a boycott. Brundage won, and though some Jewish athletes from several countries refuse to participate. It was an active question if black, and some other Americans would boycott. NAACP wanted a boycott by black athletes, Brundage called them "un-American agitators". Eventually, no country boycotted. Owens did go. He won four gold medals, and was the most heralded athlete at the Berlin Summer Games. This was a sports story that was a political history event.
Jesse's almost exact contemporary, Joe Louis, was born in Alabama, his family migrated to a northern city (Detroit). Louis was a heavyweight boxing champion who defeated the champion boxers from fascist Italy and Germany. Both, Louis and Owens, were examples of pride for all Americans, especially black Americans; and they showed Aryan/Nordic/white supremacy as a fiction.
Over this summer, Angelica Pozo installed the Jesse Owens Olympic Oak Plaza in Cleveland's Rockefeller Park. She is an artist that specialises in ceramic tiles. There is a 200 meter loop, and a podium bench/wall around a grafted sapling from one of the four trees given to Owens from Germany to plant. The distances symbolises the distances Owens ran, and jumped.
Well, that was the issue then too. Getting the idea from a quote of Owen's, Pozo had people write notes, which she put on tiles.
from Jesse Owens
#1 100 meters
#2 long jump
#3 200 meters
#4 4x100 relay
Karma and Argos going into the lists.
There is a fishing pond that has been there for years.
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