Jesse Owens's 100m Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

On August 3, 1936, Jesse Owens won the 100-meter final at the Berlin Olympics, equaling the world record of 10.3 seconds. It was the first of four gold medals he took that week: he went on to win the long jump on August 4 with a leap of 26 feet, 5¼ inches, the 200 meters on August 5 in an Olympic-record 20.7 seconds, and anchored the first leg of the 4x100-meter relay on August 9, where the American team set a world record of 39.8 seconds that stood for two decades. Owens, a twenty-two-year-old from Alabama by way of Cleveland who had already broken or tied three world records and equaled a fourth in a single 45-minute stretch at a college meet in 1935, became the first American track and field athlete to win four golds at a single Olympics, a feat unmatched for forty-eight years.

The victories carried obvious symbolic weight. Adolf Hitler’s government had staged the Berlin Games as a showcase for Nazi ideology, including the claim that Aryan Germans were innately superior athletes, and Nazi publications had disparaged Black and Jewish athletes in the lead-up to the Games. Owens and seventeen other Black American athletes went on to win a combined fourteen medals in track and field, directly undercutting that propaganda on Germany’s own stage, even as Joseph Goebbels’s press censorship kept German newspapers from openly venting their prejudice, though one Nazi paper still referred to the Black American athletes dismissively as “auxiliaries.”

The most famous story attached to Owens’s win, that Hitler personally refused to shake his hand in a deliberate racial snub, is more complicated than its popular retelling suggests, and historians treat it as a genuinely disputed claim rather than settled fact. What is well documented is that on the opening day of competition, August 2, Hitler personally congratulated several German and Finnish gold medalists in his stadium box. Olympic officials then told him that as a head of state opening the Games in a supposedly neutral capacity, he needed to congratulate all winners or none. Hitler chose the latter, and from that point on he did not personally congratulate any medalist, German or foreign, for the rest of the Games, a detail that predates Owens’s own victories by a day. Separately, on that same first day, Hitler did leave the stadium shortly before medal ceremonies for Black American high jumper Cornelius Johnson, an episode some historians treat as a more clearly deliberate snub than anything involving Owens specifically.

Owens’s own account of the episode shifted over time and adds to the ambiguity. In the immediate aftermath he told American reporters that no snub had occurred and that Hitler had, in fact, waved to him from a distance; he also said the U.S. press had built the confrontation “out of thin air.” In later years, including in his memoirs, Owens gave more pointed versions of the story emphasizing being personally overlooked. Owens’s biographer William J. Baker concluded that the specific “Hitler refused to shake Owens’s hand” narrative, as usually told, was substantially a creation of the American press rather than a precise record of what happened in the stadium. Both readings agree on the larger point: whatever passed between the two men, or didn’t, Hitler’s Games failed to deliver the racial theater he had planned, and Owens returned home a global sports hero, to a country that, notably, gave him no ticker-tape parade at the White House and where he still could not eat in the same restaurants as many of his white teammates.