Jesse Owens

Jesse Owens was an African American track and field athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, in the 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump and 4x100 meter relay, a performance staged in Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and widely seen at the time and since as a direct rebuttal of Nazi claims of Aryan racial superiority. His long jump world record, set the year before the Berlin Games, stood unbroken for a quarter of a century, and his sweep of four events remains one of the most celebrated individual achievements in Olympic history. Despite his international fame, Owens returned home to an America still governed by segregation, and he was never invited to the White House by the sitting president of the time and struggled for years afterward to find steady, well paying work, taking part in exhibition races against horses and cars to earn a living. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he remains one of the most enduring symbols of Black athletic achievement in the face of both foreign and domestic racism.