James Cleveland Jesse Owens (September 12, 1913 – March 31, 1980) was an American track and field athlete and four-time Olympic gold medalist in the 1936 Games.

Owens 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.[2] His achievement of setting three world records and tying another in less than an hour at the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has been called the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport[3] and has never been equaled. At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, Owens won international fame with four gold medals: 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4 × 100 meter relay. He was the most successful athlete at the Games and, as a black man, was credited with single-handedly crushing Hitlers myth of Aryan supremacy, although he wasnt invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.[4]

The Jesse Owens Award is USA Track and Fields highest accolade for the years best track and field athlete. Owens was ranked by ESPN as the sixth greatest North American athlete of the twentieth century and the highest-ranked in his sport.[5] [6] In 1999 he was on the six man short list for the BBCs Sports Personality of the Century.[7]

Owens was the youngest of ten children, three girls and seven boys, born to Henry Cleveland Owens (a sharecropper) and Mary Emma Fitzgerald in Oakville, Alabama, on September 12, 1913. J.C., as he was called, was nine years old when the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, for better opportunities, as part of the Great Migration, when 1.5 million African Americans left the segregated South. When his new teacher asked his name (to enter in her roll book), he said J.C., but because of his strong Southern accent, she thought he said Jesse. The name stuck, and he was known as Jesse Owens for the rest of his life.[8]

As a youth, Owens took different jobs in his spare time: he delivered groceries, loaded freight cars and worked in a shoe