African American Sports History Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics Reissued 1977

Jesse Owens

Photograph

Owens, Jesse. 1977 press reissue of Owens sprinting at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, preserving an image of the four time gold medalist whose victories in Berlin directly contradicted Nazi claims of Aryan racial superiority before an international audience. Owens won the 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4 x 100 meter relay at Games deliberately used by the Nazi government to promote its racial ideology. His success also exposed a central contradiction in American sport: an African American athlete could become the United States’ most celebrated performer at the Berlin Games while returning to a country governed by Jim Crow segregation and widespread racial discrimination.

Black and white glossy press photograph, ca. 1977, measuring 8 x 10 inches, reproducing Owens during his historic 1936 Olympic performance. Owens is shown immediately after the start, leaning low and forward in acceleration, his right knee raised and left arm driving as he looks down the track. An attached typed caption on the verso identifies him as “shown here in the 1936 Olympics and now acclaimed as the ‘Athlete of the Century’” and promotes his appearance as inspirational speaker at the May 16, 1977 Wayzata Gopher Sportacular – Williams Fund. The caption also names University of Michigan athletic director Don Canham and former football star Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch among the event’s participants.

The 1977 caption gives the photograph a second historical context beyond the image it reproduces. More than forty years after Berlin, Owens was being presented to a fundraising audience through the public memory of his 1936 victories, demonstrating how those performances remained central to his later career as a speaker and public figure. The combination of an Olympic action image and a dated promotional caption documents both Owens’s athletic achievement and the way his reputation was invoked in American sporting culture during the 1970s. Light handling wear, otherwise fine.

Item #22515

Price: $275.00