More by Jesse Owens
It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it's close.
Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)
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. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.
Interview (1971)
We used to have a lot of fun. We never had any problems. We always ate. The fact that we didn't have steak? Who had steak?
Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)
We'd get into these little towns and tell 'em to get out the fastest guy in town and Jesse Owens would spot him ten yards and beat him.
Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)
It dawned on me with blinding brightness. I realized: I had jumped into another rare kind of stratosphere — one that only a handful of people in every generation are lucky enough to know.
Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)
I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn't a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.
I Have Changed (1972)
I decided I wasn't going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.
Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)
Joe Louis and I were the first modern national sports figures who were black... But neither of us could do national advertising because the South wouldn't buy it. That was the social stigma we lived under.
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