Renewable Revolution

Tell me, dear readers, do you honestly believe the ultimate fate of Jesse Owens would have been the same if he had not been Black? I don't. Jesse Owens was a man of stern discipline and a level of strong willed determination that few humans have.


Yet the the racist society he lived in, which normally goes out of its way to care for great athletes, eroded his self confidence and consistently undermined his economic opportunities. Learn about the sad story of Jesse Owens  below.

Four months after winning an unprecedented four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Jesse Owens found himself in Havana, Cuba, for a race that promoters were calling the "Race of the Century." This time, though, the heroic 23-year-old American sprinter was lined up against a horse as halftime entertainment at a Cuban soccer match.

Owens was given a 40-yard (37 m) head start in the 100-yard (91 m) sprint, and when the gun went off to start the race, Julio McCaw hesitated before galloping toward the finishing line. Owens exploded from the blocks and ran a 9.9-second race, edging out his hard-charging, four-legged challenger.

A talented athlete, down on his luck: 

Soon after the 1936 Olympics, Owens lost his amateur status after accepting some lucrative endorsement deals. He would contend with economic uncertainty for the rest of his life.

In the years following the "man vs. horse" stunt, Owens raced trains, cars, motorbikes, baseball players -- even a dog. “Those races made me sick,” Owens later said. “I felt like a freak.”


Owens later ran a dry cleaning business and worked as a gas station attendant just to earn a living. He was a pack-a-day cigarette smoker for 35 years and died in 1980 at age 66, succumbing to an aggressive type of lung cancer.
.
http://www.wisegeek.com/can-humans-outrun-many-animals.htm

Agelbert COMMENT: Down on his "LUCK"?

Throughout the turbulent social changes of the civil rights era, Owens was invoked by the white establishment as the one of the movement's trailblazers. Owens espoused the message of his longtime hero, Booker T. Washington, promoting gradualism and individualism as the path toward racial equality.

Regarded by a new generation of civil rights activists as racially naïve, Owens continued to endorse the promise of American egalitarianism, even leading the charge against advocates of black power who protested racism in the United States at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. During the 1960s Owens remained a conservative Republican, rejecting the Democrats' "Great Society" programs. 

While he admired Martin Luther King Jr.'s principles, he opposed King's tactics of confrontation in the civil rights struggle. Owens had no patience with more radical elements of the struggle, condemning Muhammad Ali for refusing induction into the military and only referring to the boxer by his Christian name, Cassius Clay.

He vociferously condemned the Black Power movement as out-of-touch with the "silent black majority" in a 1970 book entitled Blackthink, which was praised by the Nixon Administration and much of the white press.

Now you know why the propagandists pushing the clever cold war pretense of 'liberty, justice and equal economic opportunities for all' had this nice stamp made:   

A few supporters in the African American community lauded Owens for his position but the vast majority, even his fellow moderates, condemned his claim that racism no longer kept blacks from achieving success in American society.

Responding to the criticisms that African Americans heaped on Blackthink, in 1972 Owens offered a mild retraction in I Have Changed.

He belatedly gave credit to the civil rights movement for changing the American racial landscape, reluctantly recanted his claim that all forms of activism were inherently flawed, and briefly admitted that racism fundamentally hampered access to equal opportunities.

Long after the marches and protests in Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery had remade the Alabama of his birth, Owens finally expressed admiration for the courage of those who took on segregation directly.

http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1259