400
700
900
Who Was Jesse Owens?
James Buckley

Who Was Jesse Owens?

Grosset & Dunlap (Aug 11, 2015)
9780448483078
| Paperback
112 pages | 7 x 200 mm | English
Dewey 796.42092
LC Classification GV697.O9 .B83 2015

Genre

  • Biographies
  • Biography
  • Juvenile Works

Subject

  • African American Track And Field Athletes
  • African American Track And Field Athletes - Biography
  • African Americans
  • African Americans - Biography
  • JUVENILE NONFICTION - People &
  • JUVENILE NONFICTION - Sports &
  • Places - United States
  • Recreation
  • Track And Field Athletes
  • Track And Field Athletes - Biography - United States
  • United States

Plot

At the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, track and field star Jesse Owens ran himself straight into international glory by winning four gold medals. But the life of Jesse Owens is much more than a sports story. Born in rural Alabama under the oppressive Jim Crow laws, Owens's family suffered many hardships. As a boy he worked several jobs like delivering groceries and working in a shoe repair shop to make ends meet. But Owens defied the odds to become a sensational student athlete, eventually running track for Ohio State. He was chosen to compete in the Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany where Adolf Hitler was promoting the idea of “Aryan superiority.”  Owens’s winning streak at the games humiliated Hitler and crushed the myth of racial supremacy once and for all.