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| People's Olympiad Invitation, Montjuïc, Barcelona |
Today, The Grandma has visited Montjuïc, the Olympic mountain, in Barcelona.
Montjuïc is referred to as Jewish Mountain in medieval Latin and Catalan documents, and remains of a mediaeval Jewish graveyard have been found there also.
Montjuïc, because of its strategic location at the foot of the Mediterranean, and alongside an important river communication channel such as the Llobregat River, was the birthplace of the city of Barcelona. In recent years, archaeological discoveries that have been carried out have changed the vision of the history of Barcelona. Montjuïc became since the Iberian period, and especially Roman, the main quarry of Barcelona, which meant a drastic change in the mountain's physics.
Barcelona's Montjuïc is a broad shallow hill with a relatively flat top overlooking the harbour, to the southwest of the city centre. The eastern side of the hill is almost a sheer cliff, giving it a commanding view over the city's harbour immediately below.
The top of the hill, a height of 184.8 m, was the site of several fortifications, the latest of which -the Castle of Montjuïc- remains today. The fortress largely dates from the 17th century, with 18th-century additions. The castle was also the site of numerous executions.
In 1936, The People's Olympiad, in Catalan Olimpíada Popular, was a planned international multi-sport event that was intended to take place in Barcelona, Catalonia conceived as a protest event against the Summer Olympics being held in Berlin, which was then under control of the Nazi Party.
Despite gaining the support from some athletes; and most significantly Soviet Union support; the People's Olympiad was never held, as a result of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
More information: Ajuntament de Barcelona
The President of the Catalan government, Lluís Companys, was executed there in 1940, having been extradited to the Franco government by the Nazis.
Montjuïc was selected as the site for several of the venues of the 1992 Summer Olympics, centred on the Olympic stadium. Extensively refurbished and renamed the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, the 65,000-seat stadium saw the opening and closing ceremonies and hosted the athletic events.
The Grandma has visited the Olympic Stadium and she has remembered MHP Lluís Companys and the People's Olympiad.
She has also established a connection with other person and other event, Jesse Owens and the 1936 Summer Olympics being held in Berlin. The same event and two men fighting against Nazism, Francoism, racism and segregation two symbols of the struggle of the minorities against tyranny and fascism.
Jesse Owens won the 100 metre dash, defeating Ralph Metcalfe, at the Berlin Olympics on a day like today in 1936.
Before visiting Montjuïc, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.
James Cleveland "Jesse" Owens (September 12, 1913-March 31, 1980) was an American track and field athlete and four-time gold medalist in the 1936 Olympic Games.
Owens specialized in the sprints and the long jump, and was recognized in his lifetime as perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history. He set three world records and tied another, all in less than an hour at the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan -a feat that has never been equaled and has been called the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport. He achieved international fame at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany by winning four gold medals: 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4 × 100 meter relay.
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| Jesse Owens |
He was the most successful athlete at the Games and, as a black man, was credited with single-handedly crushing Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy, although he wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.
The Jesse Owens Award is USA Track and Field's highest accolade for the year's best track and field athlete.
Owens was ranked by ESPN as the sixth greatest North American athlete of the 20th century and the highest-ranked in his sport. In 1999, he was on the six-man short-list for the BBC's Sports Personality of the Century.
Jesse Owens, originally known as J.C., was the youngest of ten children -three girls and seven boys- born to Henry Cleveland Owens and Mary Emma Fitzgerald in Oakville, Alabama, on September 12, 1913. At the age of nine, he and his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, for better opportunities, as part of the Great Migration, when 1.5 million African Americans left the segregated South for the urban and industrial North.
When his new teacher asked his name to enter in her roll book, he said J.C., but because of his strong Southern accent, she thought he said Jesse. The name stuck, and he was known as Jesse Owens for the rest of his life.
More information: Jesse Owens
As a youth, Owens took different menial jobs in his spare time: He delivered groceries, loaded freight cars and worked in a shoe repair shop while his father and older brother worked at a steel mill. During this period, Owens realized that he had a passion for running. Throughout his life, Owens attributed the success of his athletic career to the encouragement of Charles Riley, his junior high school track coach at Fairmount Junior High School. Since Owens worked in a shoe repair shop after school, Riley allowed him to practice before school instead.
Owens and Minnie Ruth Solomon (1915–2001) met at Fairmont Junior High School in Cleveland when he was 15 and she was 13. They dated steadily through high school. Ruth gave birth to their first daughter, Gloria, in 1932. They married on July 5, 1935 and had two more daughters together -Marlene, born in 1937, and Beverly, born in 1940. They remained married until his death in 1980.
Owens first came to national attention when he was a student of East Technical
High School in Cleveland; he equaled the world record of 9.4 seconds in
the 91 m dash and long-jumped 7.56 meters at the 1933 National High
School Championship in Chicago.
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| Jesse Owens |
Owens attended Ohio State University after his father found employment, which ensured that the family could be supported. Affectionately known as the Buckeye Bullet and under the coaching of Larry Snyder, Owens won a record eight individual NCAA championships, four each in 1935 and 1936.
The record of four gold medals at the NCAA was equaled only by Xavier Carter in 2006, although his many titles also included relay medals. Though Owens enjoyed athletic success, he had to live off campus with other African-American athletes. When he traveled with the team, Owens was restricted to ordering carry-out or eating at blacks-only restaurants. Similarly, he had to stay at blacks-only hotels. Owens did not receive a scholarship for his efforts, so he continued to work part-time jobs to pay for school.
On December 4, 1935, NAACP Secretary Walter Francis White wrote a letter to Owens, although he never actually sent it. He was trying to dissuade Owens from taking part in the Olympics on the grounds that an African-American should not promote a racist regime after what his race had suffered at the hands of white racists in his own country.
In the months prior to the Games, a movement gained momentum in favor of a boycott. Owens was convinced by the NAACP to declare If there are minorities in Germany who are being discriminated against, the United States should withdraw from the 1936 Olympics. Yet he and others eventually took part after Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee branded them un-American agitators.
More information: Olympic
In 1936, Owens and his United States teammates sailed on the SS Manhattan and arrived in Germany to compete at the Summer Olympics in Berlin. Owens arrived at the new Olympic stadium to a throng of fans, according to fellow American sprinter James LuValle, who won the bronze in the 400 meters, many of them young girls yelling Wo ist Jesse? Wo ist Jesse?
Owens's success at the games represented an unpleasant consternation for Hitler, who was using them to show the world a resurgent Nazi Germany. He and other government officials had high hopes that German athletes would dominate the games with victories.
Just before the competitions, Adi Dassler visited Owens in the Olympic village. He was the founder of the Adidas athletic shoe company, and he persuaded Owens to wear Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik shoes; this was the first sponsorship for a male African American athlete.
More information: My Black History
On August 3, he won the
100 m dash with a time of 10.3 seconds, defeating a teammate and a
college friend Ralph Metcalfe by a tenth of a second and defeating Tinus
Osendarp of the Netherlands by two tenths of a second.
On August 4, he
won the long jump with a leap of 8.06 m. He later credited this
achievement to the technical advice that he received from Luz Long, the
German competitor whom he defeated.
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| Jesse Owens |
On August 5, he won the 200 m sprint with a time of 20.7 s, defeating teammate Mack Robinson, the older brother of Jackie Robinson.
On August 9, he won his fourth gold medal in the 4 × 100 m sprint relay when head coach Lawson Robertson replaced Jewish-American sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller with Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, who teamed with Frank Wykoff and Foy Draper to set a world record of 39.8 s in the event.
Owens had initially protested the last-minute switch, but assistant coach Dean Cromwell said to him, You'll do as you are told.
Owens' record-breaking performance of four gold medals was not equaled until Carl Lewis won gold medals in the same events at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Owens set the world record in the long jump with a leap of 8.13 m in 1935, the year before the Berlin Olympics, and this record stood for 25 years until it was broken in 1960 by countryman Ralph Boston. Coincidentally, Owens was a spectator at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome when Boston took the gold medal in the long jump.
The long-jump victory is documented, along with many other 1936 events, in the 1938 film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl.
On August 1, 1936, Hitler shook hands with the German victors only and then left the stadium. International Olympic Committee president Henri de Baillet-Latour insisted that Hitler greet every medalist or none at all. Hitler opted for the latter and skipped all further medal presentations.
Owens
first competed on Day 2 (August 2), running in the first (10:30 a.m.)
and second (3:00 p.m.) qualifying rounds for the 100 meters final; he
equaled the Olympic and world record in the first race and broke them in
the second race, but the new time was not recognized, because it was
wind-assisted.
More information: Timeline
Later the same day, Owens's African-American team-mate Cornelius Johnson
won gold in the high jump final, which began at 5:00 p.m., with a new
Olympic record of 2.03 meters. Hitler did not publicly congratulate any
of the medal winners this time; even so, the communist New York City
newspaper the Daily Worker claimed Hitler received all the track winners
except Johnson and left the stadium as a deliberate snub after
watching Johnson's winning jump.
Albert Speer wrote that
Hitler was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous
colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from
the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques
were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be
excluded from future games.
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| Jesse Owens |
In Germany, Owens had
been allowed to travel with and stay in the same hotels as whites, at a
time when African Americans in many parts of the United States had to
stay in segregated hotels that accommodated only blacks.
When Owens
returned to the United States, he was greeted in New York City by Mayor
Fiorello LaGuardia.
During a Manhattan ticker-tape parade in his honor
along Broadway's Canyon of Heroes, someone handed Owens a paper bag.
Owens paid it little mind until the parade concluded. When he opened it
up, he found that the bag contained $10,000 in cash.
Owens's wife Ruth later said: And Owens didn't know who was good enough to do a thing like that. And with all the excitement around, he didn't pick it up right away. He didn't pick it up until he got ready to get out of the car.
After the parade, Owens was not permitted to enter through the main doors of the Waldorf Astoria New York and instead forced to travel up to the event in a freight elevator to reach the reception honoring him.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) never invited Jesse Owens to the White House following his triumphs at the Olympic Games.
When the Democrats bid for his support, Owens rejected those overtures: as a staunch Republican, he endorsed Alf Landon, Roosevelt's Republican opponent in the 1936 presidential race.
More information: Entrepreneur
Owens joined the Republican Party after returning from Europe and was paid to campaign for African American votes for the Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential election.
Speaking at a Republican rally held in Baltimore on October 9, 1936, Owens said: Some people say Hitler snubbed me. But I tell you, Hitler did not snub me. I am not knocking the President. Remember, I am not a politician, but remember that the President did not send me a message of congratulations because, people said, he was too busy.
Owens returned home from the 1936 Olympics with four gold medals and international fame, but there were no guarantees for his future prosperity.
Racism was still prevalent in the United States, and he had difficulty finding work. He took on menial jobs as a gas station attendant, playground janitor, and manager of a dry cleaning firm. He also raced against amateurs and horses for cash.
Owens was a pack-a-day cigarette smoker for 35 years, starting at age 32. Beginning in December 1979, he was hospitalized on and off with an extremely aggressive and drug-resistant type of lung cancer.
He died of the disease at age 66 in Tucson, Arizona, on March 31, 1980, with his wife and other family members at his bedside. He was buried at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago.
Although Jimmy Carter had ignored Owens' request to cancel the Olympic boycott, the President issued a tribute to Owens after he died: Perhaps no athlete better symbolized the human struggle against tyranny, poverty and racial bigotry.
More information: International Documentary Association
I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible.
From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.
One chance is all you need.
Jesse Owens
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