名人轶事:Jesse Owens

Broadcast: August 8, 2004 (MUSIC)

((Note: This is a almost repeat report of PEOPLE IN AMERICA - June 9, 2002:

Jesse Owens))

VOICE ONE:

This is Gwen Outen.

VOICE TWO:

And this is Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Every

week we tell about a person who was important in the history of the United

States.

Today we tell the story of athlete Jesse Owens. He once was the fastest

runner in the world.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

Jesse Owens on a United States Postal 1 Service stamp.

In the summer of nineteen-thirty-six, people all over the world heard the

name of Jesse Owens. That summer, Owens joined the best athletes from fifty

nations to compete in the Olympic games. They met in Berlin, Germany. There

was special interest in the Olympic games that year.

Adolf Hitler was the leader of Germany. Hitler and his Nazi 2 party believed

that white people -- especially German people – were the best race of people

on Earth. They believed that other races of people -- especially those with

dark skin -- were almost less than human.

In the summer of nineteen-thirty-six, Hitler wanted to prove his beliefs to

the world. He wanted to show that German athletes could win every important

competition. After all, only a few weeks before the Olympics, German boxer 3

Max Schmeling had defeated the great American heavyweight Joe Louis, a black

man.
VOICE TWO:

Jesse Owens was black, too. Until nineteen-thirty-six, very few black

athletes had competed in the Olympics for the United States. Owens was proud

to be on the team. He was very sure of his ability.

Jesse Owens preparing to run.

Owens spent one week competing in four different Olympic track and field

events in Berlin. During that time, he did not think much about the color of

his skin, or about Adolf Hitler.

Owens said later: "I was looking only at the finish line. I thought of all

the years of practice and competition, and of all who believed in me."

VOICE ONE:

We do not know what Hitler thought of Jesse Owens. No one recorded what he

said about this black man who ran faster and jumped farther 4 than any man of

any color at the Olympic games. But we can still see Jesse Owens as Hitler

saw him. For at Hitler's request, motion 5 pictures were made of the Berlin

Olympic games.

The films show Jesse Owens as a thin, but powerfully-built young man with

smooth brown skin and short hair. When he ran, he seemed to move without

effort. When he jumped, as one observer 6 said, he seemed to jump clear out of

Germany.
Jesse Owens won the highest award -- the Gold Medal -- in all four of the

Olympic competitions he entered. In the one-hundred meter run, he equaled the

fastest time ever run in that Olympic event. In the long jump and the two-

hundred meter run, he set new Olympic records. And as part of a four-man

team, he helped set a new world record for the four-hundred meter relay 7 race.

He was the first American in the history of Olympic track and field events to

win four Gold Medals in a single Olympics.
VOICE TWO:

Owens's Olympic victories made him a hero. He returned home to parades in New

York City and Columbus, Ohio, where he attended the state university.

Businessmen paid him for the right to use his name on their stores. No one,

however, offered him a permanent job.

For many years after the nineteen-thirty-six Olympic games, Jesse Owens

survived as best he could. He worked at small jobs. He even used his athletic 8

abilities, but in a sad way. He earned money by running races against people,

motorcycles and horses. He and his wife and three daughters saw both good

times and bad times.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

Poverty was not new to James Cleveland Owens. He was born in nineteen-

thirteen on a farm in the southern state of Alabama. He was the youngest of

thirteen children. His parents did not own the farm, and earned little money.

Jesse remembered that there was rarely enough food to eat. And there was not

enough fuel to heat the house in winter.

Some of Jesse's brothers and sisters died while still young. Jesse was a

sickly child. Partly because of this, and partly because of the racial hatred 9

they saw around them, Jesse's parents decided 10 to leave the South. They moved

north, to Cleveland, Ohio, when Jesse was eight years old. The large family

lived in a few small rooms in a part of the city that was neither friendly

nor pleasant to look at.

Jesse's father was no longer young or strong. He was unable to find a good

job. Most of the time, no one would give him any work at all. But Jesse's

older brothers were able to get jobs in factories. So life was a little

better than it had been in the South.