This Day in Black History: Jesse Owens
Track and field athlete Jesse Owens became the first American athlete to win four gold medals during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany.
(Photo: Landov)
On Aug. 3, 1936, Jesse Owens, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave, won the 100-meter dash at the Summer Olympic Games held in Berlin, Germany. Owens went on to become the first American athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympiad, a great feat in the face of Adolf Hitler’s intentions to use the games to promote his ideas of Aryan superiority.
