Sports, black athletes and Olympic memories of Jesse Owens.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
It’s that time of year again. The Summer Olympics, this year in Rio, is on the nation’s tv screens and in the headlines. For many black families, the summer Olympics takes pride of place in our history and lore. That doesn’t mean we ignore the winter events—it is just that all that snow whiteness has never been peopled with as many black athletes (though it is changing) as the summer games which feature track and field events and more —which showcase black athletes—winning. A wealth of heroes and sheroes galore.
My earliest memories of family discussions centering on the Olympics are of Jesse Owens. Though I wasn’t even dreamed of by my parents in 1936 (they were not even married then) I remember the pride with which his name was mentioned. He showed Hitler something. He was “our champion” against the hateful Nazi’s.
1936 Berlin Summer Olympics
In 1936, Owens arrived in Berlin to compete for the United States at the Summer Olympics....
On August 3, he won the 100 m sprint with a time of 10.3 s, defeating teammate college friend Ralph Metcalfe by a tenth of a second and defeating Tinus Osendarp of the Netherlands by two tenths of a second. On August 4, he won the long jump with a leap of 8.06 m (26 ft 5 in), later crediting his achievement to the technical advice he received from Lutz Long, the German competitor whom he defeated. On August 5, he won the 200 m sprint with a time of 20.7 s, defeating Mack Robinson (the older brother of Jackie Robinson). On August 9, Owens won his fourth gold medal in the 4 × 100 m sprint relay when coach Dean Cromwell replaced Jewish-American sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller with Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, who teamed up with Frank Wykoff and Foy Draper to set a world record of 39.8 s in the event. This performance was not equaled until Carl Lewis won gold medals in the same events at the Soviet-boycotted 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. In 1935 (the year before the Berlin Olympics), Owens set the world record in the long jump with a leap of 8.13 m (26 ft 8 in), and this record would stand for 25 years (a very rare length of time for a track and field record), until it was finally broken by countryman Ralph Boston in 1960. Coincidentally, Owens was a spectator at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome when Boston took the gold medal in the long jump.
I was surprised to find out that Owen’s autobiography, “Jesse: The Man Who Outran Hitler,” is out of print —I remember reading it decades ago. There are quite a few others on the market, among them are several children’s books. In 2015 a biopic was released on Owens — which got mixed reviews.
From his official website:
Jesse Owens, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave, achieved what no Olympian before him had accomplished. His stunning achievement of four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin has made him the best remembered athlete in Olympic history.
The seventh child of Henry and Emma Alexander Owens was named James Cleveland when he was born in Alabama on September 12, 1913. "J.C.", as he was called, was nine when the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where his new schoolteacher gave him the name that was to become known around the world. The teacher was told "J.C." when she asked his name to enter in her roll book, but she thought he said "Jesse". The name stuck and he would be known as Jesse Owens for the rest of his life.
His promising athletic career began in 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio where he set Junior High School records by clearing 6 feet in the high jump, and leaping 22 feet 11 3/4 inches in the broad jump. During his high school days, he won all of the major track events, including the Ohio state championship three consecutive years. At the National Interscholastic meet in Chicago, during his senior year, he set a new high school world record by running the 100 yard dash in 9.4 seconds to tie the accepted world record, and he created a new high school world record in the 220 yard dash by running the distance in 20.7 seconds. A week earlier he had set a new world record in the broad jump by jumping 24 feet 11 3/4 inches. Owens' sensational high school track career resulted in him being recruited by dozens of colleges. Owens chose the Ohio State University, even though OSU could not offer a track scholarship at the time. He worked a number of jobs to support himself and his young wife, Ruth. He worked as a night elevator operator, a waiter, he pumped gas, worked in the library stacks, and served a stint as a page in the Ohio Statehouse, all of this in between practice and record setting on the field in intercollegiate competition.
Life after the Olympics was a rocky road for Owens.
After the games had finished, the Olympic team and Owens were all invited to compete in Sweden. He decided to capitalize on his success by returning to the United States to take up some of the more lucrative commercial offers. United States athletic officials were furious and withdrew his amateur status, ending his career immediately. Owens was angry, saying, "A fellow desires something for himself." Owens argued that the racial discrimination he had faced throughout his athletic career, such as not being eligible for scholarships in college and therefore being unable to take classes between training and working to pay his way, meant he had to give up on amateur athletics in pursuit of financial gain elsewhere. Prohibited from amateur sporting appearances to bolster his profile, Owens found out that the commercial offers had all but disappeared. Finally, friend and former competitor from the University of Michigan, Willis Ward, brought Owens to Detroit to work at Ford Motor Company in 1942 as Assistant Personnel Director, later becoming Director, where he worked until 1946.
In 1946, Owens joined Abe Saperstein in the formation of the West Coast Baseball Association (WCBA), a new Negro baseball league; Owens was Vice-President and the owner of the Portland (Oregon) Rosebuds franchise. He toured with the Rosebuds, sometimes entertaining the audience in between doubleheader games by competing in races against horses. The WCBA disbanded after only two months. Owens helped promote the exploitation film Mom and Dad in African American neighborhoods. He tried to make a living as a sports promoter, essentially an entertainer. He would give local sprinters a ten- or twenty-yard start and beat them in the 100-yd (91-m) dash. He also challenged and defeated racehorses; as he revealed later, the trick was to race a high-strung thoroughbred that would be frightened by the starter's shotgun and give him a bad jump. Owens said, "People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals." On the lack of opportunities, Owens added, "There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway."
Owens ran a dry cleaning business and worked as a gas station attendant to earn a living; he eventually filed for bankruptcy. In 1966, he was successfully prosecuted for tax evasion. At rock bottom, he was aided in beginning his rehabilitation. The government appointed him as a US goodwill ambassador. Owens traveled the world and spoke to companies such as the Ford Motor Company and stakeholders such as the United States Olympic Committee. After he retired, he owned racehorses
He died of lung-cancer at age 66, in 1980.
Thinking back over the summer Olympic moments in time that have captured me over the years, I realized there were far too many to write about today. I am sure that 2016 will provide even more. The Root has a handy guide, “40 Black Athletes to Watch at the Rio Olympics.” which highlights a really diverse group, representing many nations, and covering multiple sports.
What are your top black Olympic moments?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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“For us, that’s where dignity and self-respect starts … with the ability to stay clean and be presentable,” says one of the founders of Live FRESH Palm Beach County. The Root: Longtime Friends Start Mobile Shower Facility for the Homeless in Fla.
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Chris Bentley and Carlos Miller, two African-American men who have been friends since middle school, have started an innovative way to help the homeless of Palm Beach County, Fla.
The two started a nonprofit—Live FRESH (Feeling Revitalized Encourages Sustainable Happiness)—and have launched a mobile shower facility, an air conditioned trailer equipped with six private shower/changing area rooms, to assist the area’s transient population.
The Palm Beach Post reports that the two chose showers specifically: “For us, that’s where dignity and self-respect starts … with the ability to stay clean and be presentable,” says Bentley. “Cleanliness is a fundamental need. We actually see it as basic human right and because the homeless population can be hard to reach, we knew we would have to come to them and make ourselves available in areas they could easily reach.”
Miller writes on the website: “To see a human being, living in the United States of all countries, walk inside a store with apprehension over being shunned or offensive to the atmosphere due to their odor or disheveled state grabbed at the core of my heart.”
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In a perfect world, there would be no “bad hair days.” But if the world were actually a perfect place, many more things would also be banished. A few: racism, beauty hierarchies and cluelessness that parades as trendy, fashionable cool.
Sadly, all of those imperfect things collided in an astonishing, abysmal four minutes on NBC's “Today” this week. And any Black viewer trying to enjoy her oatmeal and coffee over a beauty segment was soon recoiling in horror as she watched “60 Second Summer Hairstyles,” which was posted online yesterday (August 3).
This segment wanted to show off that the producers had learned a key beauty buzzword, “inclusion,” so they gathered an assortment of women: one Asian and straight haired, one Black and “curly” (a natural-haired woman with a twist out) one White and blonde. None of these women looked better after falling under the hands of beauty expert Deepica Mutyala. But only one looked like she had been the victim of a beauty drive by: Malia, who host Savannah Guthrie insisted on calling “Miss Malylia.” Malyia’s smile started out wide, but it got smaller, more forced and more deer-in-the-headlights as crimes were enacted upon her head.
Mutyala perkily stressed that perfect hair is not “in.” She then told viewers that side ponytails and bangs were “so ’90s” and also, so in. So she grabbed Malyia’s hair and manhandled it into a high, side ponytail that looked nothing like the ’90s. She did this without the tender touch you’d expect an expert to use when handling another person’s hair—especially on live television.
“Really play with the textures of her hair and embrace it,” Mutyala says as she roughly rakes her fingers through Malyia’s bangs to fluff them, effectively turning the front of her hair into a mess that rivals only her ponytail for sheer awfulness. It was aesthetic violence committed in the name of big hair.
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Mychal Denzel Smith's memoir reckons with racial injustice, and tells the story of his political education. The New Republic: Visible Men
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The space for black writing in America is wider than at any time in the past. It is more firmly entrenched in the public sphere, and wields more power in the shaping of public opinion and taste than ever before. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, a work of unabashedly avant-garde poetry, has had the kind of impact that many people believed a book of poetry simply no longer could. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir,Between the World and Me, already a classic, has cemented his position as a public intellectual, perhaps the most defining voice in letters of the Obama presidency. During this period, Melissa Harris-Perry hosted her own show on MSNBC, Jelani Cobb became a staff writer at the New Yorker, where his colleague Hilton Als is one of the country’s most prolific and polyvalent cultural critics, Roxane Gay’s essays rocked conversations around feminism, and Lin-Manuel Miranda effected a revolutionary take-over of “The Great White Way,” with his smash-hit musical, Hamilton.
As Imani Perry recently observed in an essay for Public Books, the past few years have also seen a resurgence of interest in black memoir. Black autobiography, from the slave narrative to the modern memoir assumes that an individual’s experience can speak for a racial experience broadly shared. This assumption has endured even as black life in America has become increasingly complex and often divergent. The risk with this, Perry writes, is that black memoirs today, “are often read as saying much more than they actually can about the broader experiences and thoughts of Black people.” The burden heaped upon books like Coates’s Between the World and Me, Margo Jefferson’s Negroland or Clifford Thompson’s Twin of Blackness—is always greater than they can be expected to bear.
If we are truly to “acknowledge the widely ranging experiences of Black people across lines of class, gender, identity, region, education, sexuality, and ethnicity,” then no single voice, Perry cautions, “can stand as a singular representation of black life, regardless of how compelling it might be.” Instead, she asks us to imagine black memoirs as hollers in a ring shout, each one “understood as one cry in the ring, a small piece of a mosaic, vast and ever changing.”
Mychal Denzel Smith’s new memoir, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, is a voice entering the ring with fire. With raw urgency, intelligence and blistering candor, it tells the story of a young man’s political education. His story is refracted through the turbulent first decades of the new millennium, a period shaped by the global War on Terror abroad, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at home, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has challenged the nation to end its long history of unchecked and unpunished police brutality in minority communities.
As such, it is an opportunity to reflect on what has changed in our politics over the course of the Bush and Obama years, and in particular on the reemergence of an activist consciousness in black politics (and youth politics more broadly.) If Smith were merely telling that story, his book would make an interesting contribution to contemporary political commentary. But it is his pointed self-examination that makes it rarer and altogether more valuable, a book that gives us stories about how we learn to change, and not just arguments about why we should.
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Casual and seductive on the surface, ingenious and multilayered within — that’s the music of Brazil, which is about to get a new burst of global exposure as the Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro. New York Times: The Essentials of Brazilian Music for Olympic Listening.
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Casual and seductive on the surface, ingenious and multilayered within — that’s the music of Brazil, which is about to get a new burst of global exposure as the Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro. It’s a great moment to discover how much wider and deeper Brazilian music goes, beyond the stereotypes of gaudy carnival parades and suave bossa novas by the beach.
Brazilian music taps into national and regional traditions maintained over generations, with an ever-evolving mix of indigenous, European and African elements. At the same time, some Brazilians proudly describe their culture as anthropophagic or, more bluntly, cannibalistic: ready to swallow and digest whatever arrives. Even as they prize their roots, Brazilian musicians have assimilated jazz, rock, reggae, metal, hip-hop, electronic music and more; they also pack pop lyrics with complexly allusive poetry. Visitors to Rio — physically or virtually — can savor one of the world’s most creative and diverse musical cultures.
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Tanzania’s justice minister has announced controversial new plans to suspend the registration of any charity or NGO that supports homosexuality.
Claiming that he was protecting the “culture of Tanzanians”, Harrison Mwakyembe’s announcement comes just days after the country’s health ministerimposed a partial ban on the import and sale of lubricants to discourage gay men from having sex and “curb the spread of HIV”.
The sudden crackdown has come as a surprise in a country that has until recently been tolerant of its LGBT community. Unlike in neighbouring Uganda – where pride events were disrupted by the police last week – Kenya and Zimbabwe, gay Tanzanians have not experienced the same levels of violence and discrimination, and politicians have until now generally ignored the topic.
James Wandera Ouma, the founder and executive director of LGBT Voice Tanzania, one of the only registered organisations openly promoting LGBT rights, has said the plans are proof that “the environment for the LGBT community is very bad right now and it’s getting worse.”
Ouma said that the political mood shifted in early July, when Paul Makonda, the regional commissioner for Dar es Salaam, the country’s biggest city, told citizens during a religious rally that he had started a crackdown against gay people.
Makonda said he would use social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook to identify and arrest people suspected of being gay.
“If there’s a homosexual who has a Facebook account, or with an Instagram account, all those who ‘follow’ him, it is very clear that they are just as guilty as the the homosexual,” he told a cheering crowd.
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