Jesse Owens

Jesse Owens: The Silent Movement When America typically thinks about black athletes, they think of the great ones like Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and others in that category. One athlete that is over looked is the great Jesse Owens. It might be that he did not participate in a popular sport like basketball, football or baseball, but he was an exceptionally fast on the track and overcame racial adversity. Jesse Owens impacted athletic world in a positive way throughout his life. From his time at Ohio State to the Olympics the very next year, he was a positive role model and a humble human being when he won. Jesse Owens came from small town folks and that made him who he was during his lifetime in having a good set of core values. With the help of role models throughout Jesse Owens’s life, he showed restraint in not acting out against the racial prejudice, while still dominating the track and field world in the 1930’s. The childhood of Jesse Owens made him to be the man he was during his college career due to how little Jesse had. Owens was born on September 12, 1913 of Henry and Emma Owens in the little town of Oakville, Alabama. Little did they know that their newborn baby would become one of the greatest track and field athletes to walk the face of the earth. Owens was a sick child and suffered from chronic bronchial congestion because his family was poor and could not properly feed everyone in the family, and they had a lack of heat in the winter. Aside from all the physical problems Owens faced, the racial prejudice that Jesse was born into took a mental toll on him. All of the poverty and destruction that Owens saw made him appreciate and become sensitive to adult success and how important that would become in his life. Later in life Owens would always show a smile when he won and agreed with what the newspapers said about him. Owens once said to an interviewer, “I try awfully hard for people to like me,” This shows that

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