Person · 1913–1980
Jesse Owens
The track star who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, rebuking Nazi racial ideology before Hitler's eyes.
An icon of [[black-sports]].
Jesse Owens's four golds in Berlin made him a global hero and a living refutation of the myth of Aryan supremacy. Yet he returned to a segregated America that offered him little — a contradiction at the heart of Black excellence.