Today in 1913, Jesse Owens was born in Oakville, Alabama. Two decades later, in Hitler’s Berlin, he won an Olympic 100m Gold which put a stake through the heart of Nazi racial ideology for all the world to see.

For one of the most politically significant athletes of the early-20th century, Jesse Owens wasn’t an especially political guy.

Where the likes of Muhammad Ali combined sporting greatness with sustained activism, Jesse focused for the most part on his running.

And man, was he good at it.

On 25th May 1935, a 21-year-old Jesse Owens broke three world records (220 yards, 220-yard hurdles, and the long jump) and equalled a fourth (the 100-yard dash) – all in the space of just 45 minutes at a track-and-field meet in Michigan.

Owens was the fastest man in America, so when the Berlin Olympics – staged by Adolf Hitler’s Germany – came round next summer, the American Olympic Committee came knocking on his door.

From Alabama to Berlin

Now let’s get one thing straight – the United States, along with most other nations, was shameful for even participating in Berlin 1936.

The Games were clearly being used by Hitler as a massive PR job for Nazism.

Faced with this, socialist Spain showed the way by boycotting Berlin and holding its own, anti-fascist ‘People’s Olympiad’ instead. The US failed to follow suit.

What’s more, the US Olympic Committee (under Avery Brundage – a brutish right-winger who at times was just outright anti-Semitic) bullied American athletes who were considering a moral boycott into falling in line.

This group included Owens, who’d been seriously considering calls from the NAACP to boycott Berlin.

Then, once the team had arrived in Germany, the American authorities continued their feeble complicity in Hitler’s fanfare.

Just before the 4x100m final, they swapped out of the US line-up (which was pretty much guaranteed to win) Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, both Jewish-Americans, almost definitely with an eye to sparing Hitler the ‘embarrassment’ of having Jews win gold.

But amidst all this shamefulness, there was one American moment at the Berlin Olympics which stands up in history with pride – Jesse Owens’ moment.

Jesse Owens Embarrasses Hitler in Front of His Home Crowd

On 3rd August 1936, with Adolf Hitler in the crowd, Jesse Owens – the African-American son of a sharecropper – won 100m Gold.

Here, in the crucible of 1930s white supremacism, a working-class black man from Alabama had become the fastest person and greatest athlete in the world.

Jesse went on to win three more golds in Berlin, but, politically, his work was done when he crossed the 100 metre finish line.

In doing so he left Hitler’s racist worldview, with all its absurd babbling about Aryan ‘Übermenschen’ and pseudoscience, shattered in the dirt.

The Stupidity of Racism

Of course, Jesse Owens’ victory in Berlin didn’t beat European fascism. That was done by tough struggle – like that of his fellow Americans who fought Franco in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.

Nor did it conquer racism back home in the States (despite his phenomenal performance in Germany, Owens was snubbed by the White House upon his return).

But his win did demonstrate to the world how utterly absurd racist ideology was – and that was no small thing at a time when deranged demagogues were trying to mislead people with it all over the globe.

After Berlin, Jesse Owens lived out the rest of his days with his childhood sweetheart, Minnie Ruth Solomon, until his death in 1980.

His memory burns eternal, though – as a reminder of just how stupidly wrong racism really is.