In hearing Adams, I immediately thought of one of the first Black American athletes who had to publicly wrestle with the relationship between their Black identity and their American identity. In 1936, the track star Jesse Owens—the son of sharecroppers and the grandson of people born into slavery—went on to become the first American track-and-field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympic Games. These victories came at a moment when the Nazi Party was ascendant in Germany; Hitler had come to power in 1933 and had laid an ideological foundation on claims of Aryan superiority. Owens’s performance at the Olympic Games in Germany demolished such absurd claims and undermined the phrenological junk science that Nazis were using to ground their burgeoning political project.
Reports soon followed that Hitler snubbed Owens after his win; some in the U.S. press latched on to these stories, though it was later revealed that Owens and Hitler “exchanged waves” in the stadium. Decades later, Owens went on to say that white Americans should be less concerned by how he was treated in Germany and pay more attention to the way he was treated at home in America:
When I came back, after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now what’s the difference?
Shortly upon his return from the Games, in a speech delivered to a Black crowd in Kansas City, Missouri, Owens proclaimed: “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was [Roosevelt] who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”
Owens was correct. Roosevelt did snub him. Following the 1936 Olympics, only white American athletes were invited to the White House. Roosevelt did not want to upset Southern Democrats, whose support he needed in order to maintain his fragile New Deal coalition, and inviting Black athletes to the White House was a nonstarter. Not until 2016, when President Barack Obama invited the 1936 Black athletes and their families to the White House, were those athletes officially recognized by a U.S. president for their accomplishments.
After Owens, there was Muhammad Ali—then known as Cassius Clay—who won a gold medal for the United States as an 18-year-old at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. After he won the medal, the young boxing champion was ecstatic: “I didn’t take that medal off for 48 hours,” he said.
But only seven years later, when Ali was drafted—and refused—to serve in the Vietnam War, he spoke plainly as to why. “I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over,” Ali said in a press conference a week before his scheduled induction ceremony. “If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow.”