Biography:

Track and field athlete. Born James Cleveland Owens, on September 12, 1913, in Danville, Alabama. The seventh of 11 children born to Henry and Emma Owens, he was sickly and thin, often too frail to help his older brothers and father in the cotton fields. Owens' father was a sharecropper. The family lived in a small, unheated house, and there were times when there was not enough food to feed them all. Owens' mother dreamed of a better life in the North, where blacks were finding jobs and a degree of prosperity. Finally, when Owens was seven, his father sold the family tools and the mules, and they moved to Cleveland, Ohio.
The family's circumstances did not improve much in Cleveland, but the move was very important for their gifted young son. Entering a city grade school, Owens gave his name as "J. C.," and the teacher wrote down "Jesse." The name stuck for the rest of his life. Owens went to school during the day and performed odd jobs in the afternoons and evenings. He had little spare time, but he managed to find moments to race with his friends on the schoolyard and through the alleys of his neighborhood. By the age of 12, he had developed into a promising sprinter. Charles Riley, the track coach at Fairview Junior High, was astounded when Owens ran the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds flat. Riley took special interest in Owens, working with the youngster in the mornings before school. Coach and student became fast friends, and their relationship continued when Owens went on to East Technical High School in Cleveland. Throughout his junior high and high school years, Owens held part-time jobs to help his parents pay the bills.

As a member of the East Technical track team, Owens set national records by running the 100-yard dash in 9.4 seconds and the 200-yard dash in 20.7 seconds. He also set a new broad jump (now called long jump) record with a leap of 24 feet, nine and five-eighths inches. A number of universities recruited him actively, but Owens felt that college was just a dream. He could not leave his struggling family and his own young wife—he married in 1931—when his paycheck was in such demand. Finally, Charles Riley and the track coach at Ohio State University were able to entice Owens. The authorities at Ohio State used their influence to find steady work for Owens's father with the state of Ohio. Only then did Owens agree to enter Ohio State, where he paid his tuition by working three jobs in addition to his studies and track activities. Owens also became acquainted with northern bigotry while a student at Ohio State. He lived in a house with the other black members of the track team and took most of his meals there. Black team members could not dine in restaurants or use the restroom facilities when the team stopped on the road while travelling to or from meets. On one occasion, an angry cook from a rural diner refused to serve the men even in their car. Such incidents were permanently burned into Owens's memory and gave him extra motivation to excel.
On May 25, 1935, Owens traveled to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to take part in the annual Big Ten Track and Field Championships. At the time he was recovering from a painful back injury, and he and his coach talked about missing the meet.

He could not practice for a week before the event, but when the hour approached for the 100-yard dash, he decided to try to participate. New York Times columnist Arthur Daley called Owens' performance at Ann Arbor "the greatest day in track history." Within a space of 45 minutes, the young athlete tied the world record for the 100-yard dash, broke the world record with a long jump of more than 26 feet, broke the world record in the 220-yard dash, and broke yet another world record in the 220-yard low hurdles. With the Olympic Games only a year away, Americans began to pin their hopes for track and field victories on the star from Ohio State.
The 1936 Olympic Games were held in brand new facilities in Nazi Germany's capital, Berlin. Adolf Hitler made little effort to hide his views that the event would be a showcase for Aryan athletes such as track star Lutz Long. In his first event against Owens, Long set an Olympic record with his long jump. Owens, racked with nerves, missed on his first two jumps, but then he bested not only Long's new record but his own former records as well. His gold medal-winning long jump of 26 feet, five and a quarter inches stood as the world record for the next 25 years. As Hitler angrily left the stadium, Lutz Long embraced Owens while the mostly German crowd chanted the new champion's name as if he were the hometown hero.

Owens won a total of four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. He took gold in the 100-meter sprint, the 200-meter sprint, the jump, and the 400-meter relay. Ironically, he ran in the relay as a substitute for a Jewish runner.

Axthelm wrote of Owens's feat: "He didn't merely run and jump to four gold-medal victories in the Berlin Games of 1936. He took flight, soaring far above a world of athletic competition, enlarging the possibilities of sport itself. [Owens remains] the most famous and symbolic hero of the modern Olympic games."
Symbol and reality began to clash when Owens returned to America. Throngs at a ticker tape parade in New York greeted him, but within months he was unable to find a job in order to pay for the rest of his college work. Years later, Owens told Ebony, "I came back to my native country and I couldn't ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn't live where I wanted.... I wasn't invited up to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either."

Owens was more or less forced to turn professional. He ran a series of races against horses, cars, and motorcycles, earning enough to pay for his last year at Ohio State. After graduation he became a partner in a Cleveland dry-cleaning business that proved lucrative at first but eventually went bankrupt. By 1940, Owens was deeply in debt and had three daughters to support. He worked briefly as the national director of physical education for Negroes, then, in 1942, he became personnel director for minority employment at Ford Motor Company.

Eventually, Owens realized that he wanted to work more with children. He moved from Detroit to Chicago in 1950 and became a member of the board of directors of the South Side Boys Club.

Also during this time he began to trade upon his celebrity, touring with the Harlem Globetrotters and making speeches on goodwill tours in America and abroad. In 1956 he organized the Junior Olympic Games for youngsters in Chicago between the ages of 12 and 17.
Later in his life, Owens opened his own public relations firm, becoming a celebrated speaker at business and professional conventions. He came under fire in 1968 for opposing a black American boycott of the Olympics, and for a time was derided as an "Uncle Tom" and a toady to white people. The charges stung Owens. He attempted to defend himself in a 1970 biography, Blackthink, but two years later he became more militant and published another book, I Have Changed.

Forty years after he won his gold medals, Owens was finally invited to the White House to accept a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter honored Owens two years later in 1979 with a Living Legend Award. The highest honor Owens ever received, however, came a full 10 years after his death. Congressman Louis Stokes from Cleveland lobbied tirelessly to earn Owens a Congressional Gold Medal. President George Bush finally gave the award to Owens’s widow, Ruth, in 1990. During the ceremony, Bush lauded Owens as "an Olympic hero and an American hero every day of his life."

The official recognition by three American presidents was a slight honor indeed compared to the warmth felt for Owens by blacks all over the world. His victory served as the most eloquent testimony against any sort of discrimination based on the idea of racial inferiority.

As for Owens himself, he told The New York Times that his gold medals changed his life. "They have kept me alive over the years," he said. "Time has stood still for me. That golden moment dies hard." He added: "Any black who strives to achieve in this country should think in terms of not only himself but also how he can reach down and grab another black child and pull him to the top of the mountain where he is. This is what a gold medal does to you."
It is estimated that Owens earned around $100,000 per year in the 1970s, mostly from personal appearances and speeches. He moved his business from Chicago to Phoenix, but as the 1970s progressed, his health deteriorated. A longtime cigarette smoker, he developed inoperable lung cancer. He died on March 31, 1980, after a long stay in a Phoenix hospital, and he was buried in Chicago several days later.

Source: A&E Biography