Jesse Owens was an American athelete who specialized in the sprints and the long jump and was recognized in his lifetime as “perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history“.
In 1936, Jesse Owens arrived in Berlin to compete for the United States at the Summer Olympics. Owens’s success at the games represented a counter to Adolf Hitler, who was using the games to show the world a resurgent Nazi Germany.He and other government officials had high hopes that German athletes would dominate the games with victories. Meanwhile, Nazi propaganda promoted concepts of “racial superiority” and depicted others, including those of African descent, as inferior. Owens countered this by winning four gold medals.
He had to be smuggled out of Berlin immediately after the medal ceremony because Hitler planned on assassinating him for being a beam of hope to black people who he labelled as inferior beings.
