What Jesse Owens’s Story Tells Us About Sports and Politics

The 1936 summer Olympics took place in Nazi Germany, where Adolf Hitler was perpetrating the first stages of what would become the Holocaust. Hitler and the Nazi Party hoped to showcase the superiority of their Aryan athletes. But Jesse Owens, an African American track and field star, quickly disproved Nazi racial ideology of Aryan supremacy by winning four Olympic gold medals. Owens’s success in Berlin led to international acclaim, but at home, Owens continued to face discrimination because of his race.

The story of Jackie Robinson, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and more recently Colin Kaepernick, offer a lens through which to explore the complex relationships between sports, civil rights, and broader social and political change.

Sports and the ongoing fight for equal rights is well documented. This short film can launch further investigation into historical or contemporary examples of athletes who used their platform to raise awareness and effect change. Some examples are Muhammad Ali and Vietnam War protests, the Black power salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the equal pay campaigns spearheaded by tennis star Billie Jean King in the 1970s and more recently by the United States Women’s National Soccer Team.