Jesse Owens and the Power of One
Each of us can make a difference in the fight against injustice
The late Olympian Jesse Owens is an American legend.
He won four gold medals, including in the men’s 100-meter sprint, in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany.
Owens, who was Black, was particularly impactful because he dominated the Olympics in front of Aryan supremacist Adolph Hitler, proving before thousands of Nazi onlookers that their worldview was false.
While Hitler’s Nazi machine was hyper-focused on eradicating Jews, Black people also were targeted. You know as well as I do the two typically go hand in hand.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were a few thousand Black people in Germany. Nazis harassed, imprisoned, sterilized or murdered most of them.
Hitler despised everyone who wasn’t straight and white. Who wasn’t pure German, as he and the Nazis put it. That meant Jews, Blacks, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti. It also meant disabled people and mentally ill people.
