Jesse Owens was one of the greatest athletes and track stars to ever live. He has been dead a long time, but everyone still knows who he is. He was born poor, but he went to college and been to the Olympics. James Cleveland Owens was born in Alabama in 1913 to Emma and Henry Owens. They had s eleven children, and Jesse was the seventh child. He was too sick and weak to help his family’s work in the cotton fields. Owens's father was a sharecropper. The family lived in a little house that did not have any heat. Most of the time they did not have anything to eat. Owens's mother wanted a better life for her children. She thought they should move to the North, where blacks could get jobs. When Owens was seven, his father moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio (‘’Jesse Owens’’). …show more content…
C.," and the teacher wrote down "Jesse." The name stuck for the rest of his life. Owens went to school during the day and performed odd jobs in the afternoons and evenings."There was, even then, something unique about Jesse Owens," wrote Bennett."He didn't run, he floated, seeming, as one of his coaches said later, `to caress the ground.' There was beauty, poetry even, in the fluid, effortless, `velvety smooth' glide which made him a formidable foe." Charles Riley, the track coach at Fairview Junior High, was astounded when Owens ran the 100-yard dash in ten seconds flat. Riley took special interest in Owens, working with the youngster in the mornings before school.Coach and student became fast friends, and their relationship continued when Owens went on to East Technical High School in Cleveland. Throughout his junior high and high school years, Owens held part-time jobs to help his pay the bills (“Jesse