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Feb 19, 2016 · Born on September 12, 1913, in Oakville, Alabama, James Cleveland Owens was the tenth and last child of Henry and Mary Emma Owens. He sometimes said later in life that his early childhood in...
Jesse Owens, originally known as J.C., was the youngest of ten children (three girls and seven boys) born to Henry Cleveland Owens (a sharecropper) and Mary Emma Fitzgerald in Oakville, Alabama, on September 12, 1913. He was the grandson of a slave.
- James Cleveland Owens
- September 12, 1913, Oakville, Alabama, U.S.
- American
- March 31, 1980 (aged 66), Tucson, Arizona, U.S.
His parents, Henry and Emma Owens, were sharecroppers who, like thousands of other African Americans living in the South in the post World War I era, decided to leave and migrate to one of the industrial cities of the North. By 1922, Henry and Emma and their eight children had moved to Cleveland and were renting a house on Hamilton Avenue near...
Jesse Owens was born as James Cleveland Owens to Henry Cleveland Owens and Mary Emma Fitzgerald in Oakville, Alabama. He was the youngest of the ten children of the couple.
- Part of The Great Migration
- Athletic Success as A Teenager
- Chronology
- Related Biography: Coach Charles Riley
- Star of The 1936 Berlin Olympics
- Checkered Post-Athletic Career
- The Legend of Jesse Owens
- I Have Changed
- Further Information
Jesse Owens was born in the rural hamlet of Danville in northern Alabama on September 12, 1913. He was the youngest of the ten children of Henry and Mary Emma (Fitzgerald) Owens who had survived childhood. Like most of his African-American neighbors, Henry Owens struggled to provide for his family as a sharecropper and barely managed to keep his ch...
Owens enrolled in Cleveland's Fairmount Junior High School around 1927 and quickly attracted the attention of a mentor who would prove crucial in his future athletic success. Charles Riley worked at the school as a physical education teacher and track-and-field coach and immediately realized that Owens was a naturally gifted athlete who had not yet...
As an East Tech track-and-field sensation, Owens became a nationally renown athlete while still in his teens. Although he failed to make the national team in his tryout for the 1932 Olympic Games to be held in Los Angeles, his performance at the June 1933 National Interscholastic Championship, held in Chicago, was stunning. Winning the long jump, 2...
Charles Riley was born in 1878 and grew up in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, where he labored as a miner and mill worker. Although he dropped out of high school to work, Riley later attended Temple University in Philadelphia and eventually secured a job as a teacher and coach at Fairmount Junior High Schoolin Cleveland, Ohio. The job paid so little tha...
Along with boxer Joe Louis, Owens was one of the best-known African-American athletes by 1936. Owens was also one of the most popular athletes for the sportsmanship he demonstrated on the field. In one competition in mid-1936, Owens offered to run a 50-yard dash again when he learned that a competitor, Eulace Peacock, had suffered from a faulty sta...
Owens gave up his amateur status after the 1936 Berlin Games and took on numerous paid speaking engagements, including appearances for Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon in the 1936 election, for which he earned $10,000. Owens put some of his earnings into a dry cleaning business in Cleveland, which soon went out of business. With the Inter...
The last decade of Owens's life brought him renewed acclaim. In 1974 he was inducted into the USA Track and Field Hall of Fame and in 1976 President Carter honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Taking up retirement in Scottsdale, Arizona, Owens suffered from physical ailments brought on by his pack-aday smoking habit. The habit result...
For my whole life was wrapped up, summed up—and stopped up—by a single incident: my confrontation with the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, in the 1936 Olympics. The lines were drawn then as they had never been drawn before, or since. The Germans were hosting the Games and, with each passing day, were coming to represent everything that free people h...
Books
Baker, William J. Jesse Owens: An American Life. New York: Free Press, 1986. Guttmann, Allen. The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Owens, Jesse, with Paul Neimark. Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1970. Owens, Jesse with Paul Neimark. I Have Changed. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1972.
Periodicals
Bennett, Jr., Lerone. "Jesse Owens' Olympic Triumph Over Time and Hitlerism." Ebony(April 1996): 68. Hemhill, Gloria Owens. "Humiliating Hitler." Newsweek(October 25, 1999): 53. Kelley, Timothy. "Stealing Hitler's Show." New York Times Upfront(September 4, 2000): 32. Litsky, Frank. "Jesse Owens Dies of Cancer at 66; Hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympics." New York Times(April 1, 1980). Taylor, Phil. "Flying in the Face of the Fuhrer." Sports Illustrated(November 29, 1999): 137. Sketch by Timothy B...
Apr 1, 2024 · The family initially lived in Alabama, where Owens’s father worked as a sharecropper. When the younger Owens was nine years old, the family moved to Cleveland. At his new school, a teacher misheard his name—he was then known as “J.C.”—and instead began calling him “Jesse.”.
Feb 10, 2007 · Owens was born near Oakville, Alabama, on September 12, 1913, the twelfth child of sharecroppers Henry Cleveland and Mary Emma Owens. Owens, the youngest child, was spared much of the difficult farm work because of his persistent pneumonia which nearly killed him twice in his young life.
