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I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.
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On a warm day in August 1951, a helicopter appeared in the sky above the Berlin Olympic Stadium. 75,000 people had gathered there to watch a Harlem Globetrotters basketball game. The crowd looked up. The chopper circled three times and landed on the field. The loudspeaker announcer called out, attention, attention.
A black man in a white suit stepped out onto the Red Cinder Track. Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest runner in the world returns to Berlin. Jesse Owens was back in Germany to take a victory lap. I had many thoughts as I made the symbolic run of victory around the same Red Cinder Track that I'd run so many years before. As I passed each section, there was a bridge to the past.
The Second World War had ended only six years earlier, and Germany, along with the rest of the world, was still reckoning with it all. Whatever was left of the Nazi leadership had been grilled at the Nuremberg trials. Berlin was rebuilding after Allied bombing campaigns. About 80% of the city's center had been flattened. Yet the stadium the Nazis had built for the Olympics was still standing. And that day, at the Globetrotters game, Jesse Owens was back to take his victory lap and to give a speech.
Words often fail on occasions like this, he told the German crowd. But I remember the good that happened here. I remember the fighting spirit and sportsmanship shown by German athletes on this field. And here we reach the important part. He says, especially by Lutz Long of Germany, the man I managed to beat in the bra jump. The crowd came forth with a tremendous roar and the cheers are with me today.
Owens stood for an ovation that one of the Globetrotters said lasted a full 15 minutes. And I think maybe it was then, standing there, watching how hungry that crowd was for even this mention of a good German, that he decided to tell an even bigger story about what happened between him and Lutz Long at the 1936 Olympics. It was the start of the great long jump to All Tale.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. Throughout this series, we've been looking at how people tried to rationalize their participation in Hitler's Olympics. And in this episode, we've reached the most enduring and, I think, heartbreaking rationalization of all. Jesse Owens' story about befriending a Nazi. A story that, it seems, Owens made up. But why?
Why did Owens need to tell a lie? Our home was in Alabama, and my parents were sharecroppers on this particular place. In 1961, Jesse Owens sat down with an interviewer to record an oral history. She, a white woman in cat's-eye glasses and pearls. Owens wore a suit. The two sat in mid-century modern armchairs so close their knees were almost touching. The curtains were drawn. The room was filled with smoke.
They spoke for six hours, starting at the very beginning. What about the people that owned the big house where your father was a sharecropper? Was this a Negro individual or he was a white? The first tape is mostly about Owens' early life. Growing up one of the youngest of 10 brothers and sisters in Alabama, he was a sickly kid with a sunny disposition. His parents had him late, called him their gift child.
It can be hard to know things for certain about Jesse Owens' life. His biographer William J. Baker once wrote of him, Jesse Owens was always strong on imagination, weak on literal truth. But whatever the facts, I believe his tone of voice in this tape, its warmth and its weariness. You hear about the setbacks, the time he saw his mother crying while folding the laundry because she couldn't afford clothes for him. And then...
You hear about the triumphs. "That's where it all began, isn't it?" "Yes." "In junior high school." "I was the captain of the basketball team, captain of the track team, captain of the baseball team. I was president of the student council, captain of our guards." I was impressed the first time I heard him list all those accomplishments. He was obviously great from the start. But the second time I listened, I noticed just how worn out he sounds going through that list.
That tone has a lot to do with how I came to understand Jesse Owens. He's telling the story of his life in this oral history. But really, he just keeps talking about one idea. She'd get tired of this sometimes. Oh, yes, she'd get tired of living in a glass bowl. Living in a glass bowl. But it's a...
It's a wonderful thing to have people to recognize you, people to admire you for your ability, but sometimes people forget you're a human being. People were looking, everybody's eyes were upon you, and they would scrutinize everything that you did. And so therefore you had to be very, very careful of the things that you did. And it's a tough thing sometimes.
By the time he taped this interview, people had been telling stories about Jesse Owens, mythologizing him for decades. You can even hear the interviewer doing it.
How did all this make you feel? Now, remember, you're a youngster from the cotton fields of Alabama. This is all relatively new to you. And suddenly you're the captain of so many things. And you're a good student and people like you. Well, you felt like you were somebody. And that, I think, is at the heart of why Jesse Owens made up that story about Lutz Long helping him during the broad jump qualifying rounds.
and about their friendship all those years afterwards. First, being an athlete made him somebody. Then, when that was done, telling stories about it kept him a somebody.
But he was Black in early 20th century America, which meant that as soon as he started to be somebody, he had to play to two crowds. The white people giving him opportunities and the Black people who wanted him to use his status to change things. If you're the first to come along or you're a pioneer, you represent not just yourself, but you represent your category. And he's being asked to represent his category in a way that
No, obviously no white athlete is being asked to represent their category. Yeah, and I actually think what's striking looking at Jesse Owens' life is how early that starts for him. I mean, it's really, he's sort of a superlative athlete from a very young age. And then this just keeps happening to him.
It was the same when people started boycotting the 1936 Olympics, wondering if he would too. He's at the time how old? I think he's 22. So we have this kid who is being asked to parse one of the most complicated kind of moral and political questions of the time. And he's being torn in two directions.
At first, Jesse Owens seemed to see the situation in Germany clearly. The violence and the discrimination. And he supported the boycott. He knew what it was like living in the United States under Jim Crow and segregation. He said in a radio interview that, quote, "...if there is discrimination against minorities in Germany, then we must withdraw from the Olympics."
to which his white coach, Larry Snyder, responded, basically, "Suit yourself, but if you skip the Olympics, you're gonna be," and this is his exact phrase, "a forgotten man, the opposite of a somebody." In the end, 18 Black athletes went to Berlin with the U.S. Olympic team that year. Each of them had to wrestle privately with the question of whether or not to participate. But because of the glass bowl, Jesse Owens had to do it in public.
There were endless opinions about what he should do. Even the secretary of the NAACP, Walter White, had an opinion, best represented in a letter to Owens that he drafted but never sent, which now sits in the archives. I fully realize how great a sacrifice it will be for you to give up the trip to Europe and to forego the acclaim which your athletic prowess will unquestionably bring you.
On the other hand, it is my firm conviction that the issue of participation in the 1936 Olympics, if held in Germany under the present regime, transcends all other issues. Participation by American athletes, and especially by those of our own race, which has suffered more than any other from American race hatred, would, I firmly believe, do irreparable harm.
The very preeminence of American Negro athletes gives them an unparalleled opportunity to strike a blow at racial bigotry and to make other minority groups conscious of the sameness of their problem with ours. If the Hitlers and Mussolinis of the world are successful, it is inevitable that dictatorships based upon prejudice will spread throughout the world.
White never sent that letter, but it captured how a lot of people understood the stakes of the choice that Jesse Owens had to make. Deny his Olympic dreams for the good of Black America, or go to the Games at their expense. But you could have given up at this point. You didn't have to go on with it if the recognition and the status...
hadn't been as important to you as it was, you could have said, I'm through with this nonsense. I'm going to finish my education and go on and become a lawyer or something else. Well, this you could have done. But yet and still you feel that here you are where people have made it possible for you to start. Why at this point become, see, you're not any greater than the people will make you. You can do a number of things.
But if the people are not with you, then who knows about it? Leave the glass bowl, become a forgotten man. So Jesse Owens went to the Olympics with everyone watching. And he made a miracle happen. He's a yard and two out in front. Matt Kapp is coming second up on him. The world's most superb runner makes the others look as if they're walking. He won gold medals in each of his events. The 100 and 200 meter dashes, the 100 meter relay, and that legendary broad jump.
And for a lot of people, all those medals seemed to validate his choice to go. He'd proven Hitler wrong with every step, so much for Aryan supremacy. That's where the story of Jesse Owens usually ends. But there's so much more to it.
After the track and field events in 1936, the athletes toured Europe for a series of track meets. Avery Brendage, newly a member of the International Olympic Committee, had organized it with the Amateur Athletic Union. The organizations would pocket their cut of the ticket sales. But the athletes couldn't make money from the meets, remember? The games were for amateurs, no money for sport.
Jesse Owens once said, all we athletes get out of this Olympic business is a view out of a train or airplane window. It gets tiresome. It really does. Staring out those windows, I think he had started to contemplate his future. And I don't think he liked what he saw. They were expected to keep training, compete for a few more years until their bodies started to fall apart. Maybe there'd be another Olympic Games, but then what?
Owens didn't come from a rich family. He barely had the time to get an education with all his training. What kind of job could he do once his athletic career was over? After the Berlin Games, he was really famous. Offers had started to come in. $25,000 for two weeks with an orchestra in California. $40,000 for 10 weeks of shows with the entertainer Eddie Cantor. Now that's serious money. In 1936, that was a fortune.
He began to think about leaving the tour and going home. He could be rich. But going professional would be violating Olympic rules, and missing the rest of the tour would too. He could never compete at the Olympics again. Those were the rules. Rules enforced by Avery Brundage, who took amateurism extremely seriously.
After the Berlin Games, a reporter asked him about rumors that Owens was going to quit the post-Olympics tour. Have I to understand, Mr. Brundage, that you've received information that Owens will not go to the start of Stockholm? He will not appear? I hope that Owens will keep his engagements. He's been one of the finest boys we've had, and I hope that there will be nothing to mar this record.
These were crocodile tears. By the time he gave that interview, Avery Brundage already knew that Jesse Owens had a ticket for a steamer back to the United States, leaving before the end of that tour. Well, let us hope that all these are just rumors. Jesse Owens was banned for life from amateur sport. The 1936 Games would be the last act and the pinnacle of his athletic career. He went to the press with a rare complaint.
I came over to Europe with only $10 in my pocket. To make matters worse, I've lost six pounds being pushed around and circused all over Europe. They sent me to Prague from Cologne without a cent, and I had to run a race in Prague without having had an ounce of food for 10 hours. I am turning professional because I'm busted and know the difficulties encountered by any member of my race in getting financial security. I want to get some money while I'm in the spotlight.
He tried to make the most of it. He became an entertainer, even tried tap dancing. And along the way, he was working to keep up with sports too. But it was like everything had gone a little sour. He was supposed to race against another amateur in Cuba, a sprinter, until Avery Brundage caught wind and said he'd ban that sprinter from American amateur sport if he went through with the race. So they replaced the guy with a horse.
Cuba. Jesse Owens, the ebony streak of Olympic Games, celebrates turning professional by racing against a horse. Jesse had a start of 40 yards and 100, and he won by inches. So what? So when Jesse Owens went professional, that essentially was the choice he made, to spend the rest of his life reliving those two weeks in August 1936. He was trapped, as if he'd jumped into that broad jump pit and sunk to his knees in quicksand.
Which is not to say that it wasn't also a good life. He had three daughters. He was involved in presidential campaigning. He ran a fitness program during the war for the US Office of Civilian Defense. He led a big life.
But in order to do all the other stuff, he had to keep the dream of those two weeks alive. You can even hear this in that oral history. When they start on that third tape, Jesse Owens is in the middle of talking about his actual life now in the 1960s. He's complaining about some business deal that went south. So again, this was a guy with a life. But the interviewer is like, yeah, sure, sure.
What about the Olympics though? What else is new? Jesse, let's go way back now to 1936.
His job was telling the story of the Olympics. And once she asks...
He gets right to it. I remember it was in July, July the 4th of 1936 when we had the final tryouts for the Olympics at Randall's Island. And that was the fourth and the... But the thing about telling one story for your entire life is that the meaning of that story has to keep changing with the times to stay marketable, to keep enough eyes on that glass bowl. And in 1951, at that halftime speech during the Harlem Globetrotters game,
he discovered its most powerful addition, Lutz Long. We'll be right back. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. Brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection.
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I was joking with my producer Jacob the other day, who's one of Pushkin's most valuable employees. I hired him to be my assistant years ago in the most random manner possible. I think he saw a message board posting somewhere and I interviewed him for basically 10 minutes and said, go for it. I made a wild gamble on someone and got incredibly lucky.
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I guess first, can you tell me about that Globetrotters game in the Berlin Stadium in 1951? Sure. I'm talking to Damien L. Thomas, curator of sports at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He's the author of the book Globetrotting, African American Athletes and Cold War Politics.
The Harlem Globetrotters were just starting to travel internationally, and they had played a game in Frankfurt a couple of days before. And one American official had asked them to play this game in West Berlin.
Because at the time, the Soviets were doing a lot of festivals, a lot of exchanges, and they wanted to ensure that the U.S. and the West was able to tell their own story. In the Cold War, the U.S. and the USSR were fighting for the hearts and minds of the rest of the world, which led them bizarrely straight to the Harlem Globetrotters.
The Harlem Globetrotters, basketball wizards extraordinary. Their patented blend of brilliant play and zany capers has made them the most popular team in the history of the sport. Before the NBA was a big deal, before black people played even college basketball in any great numbers, the Harlem Globetrotters were a kind of traveling basketball circus. True to the name, they were all over the place.
It was a major operation run by one of the most infamous and ruthless sports promoters of all time, a white guy named Abe Saperstein. How many miles to go, Abe? Twelve. Come on, let's push again, fellas. You've probably seen footage of them playing a lot of fake passes, improbable shots, and goofing around. Except they're totally incredible at basketball. Even in slow motion, their magical hands fool you. I was talking to Damien Thomas, though.
Because underneath the goofiness, there was something more sinister going on. The Harlem Blowtrotters were also so deeply tied to minstrelsy, which was the dominant form of entertainment in America from the 1880s through the early 1950s. The players, almost all Black Americans, were often referred to as clowns.
Meet the most colorful comedy act in present-day sport. Purists say they make a mockery of the game. They clown, they juggle, they fool. But where some people might see a kind of basketball circus, the State Department saw the perfect propaganda weapon. People often didn't think of sports as having ideological content.
And so whereas other forms of American culture would be resistant, sometimes Coca-Cola, sometimes blue jeans, rock and roll and American movies were shunned. People often welcomed basketball because they didn't think of it
as having a propagandistic function, but it did. And it's one of the things that made it very important is that people didn't see it as containing hidden messages. - A lot of Soviet propaganda during the Cold War called out the lie of American equality.
The U.S. might talk about all people being equal, but the country was segregated, and really only white people had a shot at a decent quality of life. It was true, and a particularly useful message for the USSR trying to get African and Asian countries to ally with them instead of the U.S.,
So the United States responded with a big hidden message about the Globetrotters. A message with two parts. First part, hey look, we have wealthy black people in this country. And the second, much more sinister part, look at these clowns. Don't you see why we're segregating them? Number 50 is Goose Tatum, a clown with the longest arms in the sport. With his seven foot overall reach, he rakes in 7,000 a year from a team which grossed a million last season.
You would see these situations where maybe Goose Tatum, who was the lead clown, would lay on the floor and read the newspaper while the game was going on on the other end of the floor. Designed to stress that African-Americans were lazy and then were unresponsive or weren't mentally engaged in the games.
And so you saw all of these various ways where these stereotypes played out in some of the comedic routines of the Globetrotters. It allows the State Department to make the argument that African-Americans don't have full equality, don't have all of the opportunities that are available to white Americans.
Because they are lazy, they're not as intelligent, they are not ready to occupy a space of full equality. The State Department needed Black success stories that also made segregation look okay. Enter the Globetrotters and Jesse Owens.
And how did Jesse Owens become involved in all this? All throughout the 1940s, Jesse Owens had traveled sporadically with the Harlem Globetrotters, and he would serve a variety of functions. He would serve as the press secretary, the announcer during the game, and also as halftime entertainer.
Typically, when he performed during halftime, they would set up hurdles around the court and Jesse Owens would jump over the hurdles around the court as a halftime entertainment spectacle.
At one of the Globetrotters promoters events, he ran a race against another black athlete on his hands and knees, even worse than that horse race in Cuba. He writes about that and he writes about how he felt humiliated and felt as if he was being treated less than. But then he also writes, well, what else was I supposed to do? What were the other options available?
And that is how, in 1951, Jesse Owens returned to the Berlin Stadium at the behest of the State Department as the Black superstar with a story to tell about a kind Nazi. Jesse Owens had spent much of his life in the glass bowl. He knew the rules. And so, during his second visit to Berlin, he focused on the part of his story the Americans and the Germans most needed.
The part about Lutz Long, a good white German who'd embraced a black man. Just the day before that Globetrotters game, Owens had finally met Lutz Long's widow and his son Kai. It seems he told them that untrue story about the qualifying round and how Lutz Long had helped him keep from fouling out.
And maybe he'd seen how much the story of Long's kindness had touched Kai too. It was another story with two messages. Hey look, the US and Germany can be friends again too. And also, how bad could segregation be if this black superstar could still see the humanity in a white Nazi?
And it was a smash success. Owens stood outside that stadium for hours after that game, signing autographs. The U.S. State Department's office in Berlin sent home a report. Appearance, Harlem Globetrotters with Jesse Owens in Olympic Stadium, August 22, even more successful than anticipated.
And this became one of the most requested stories that Jesse would tell on the speaker circuit. After that trip to Germany, Owens began to tell increasingly elaborate stories about Lützlong. By the 1960s in public, the story had grown to Lützlong helping Owens to qualify. Later came the apocryphal letters. But with each version of that story, Owens was masterfully navigating the complexities of Cold War U.S. racial politics.
It's somehow an apology for his own excellence because the premise of the story is that he, a person who holds the world record in broad jumping, needs to be instructed on how to approach the pit by a Nazi. No, but actually, Ben, it's worse than that because the story itself has its own kind of implied meaning.
which is he's not just being instructed about how to conduct the long jump. He's lost control of his own emotions. Yes, he's being instructed about how to control his emotions. Yeah, actually, he's not being told how to control his emotions. He's being told how to...
how to handle the fact that he will continue to be unable to control his emotions. Yes, it's worse. It's worse. It's not like Luzon comes up and is like, here's a transcendental meditation that I think you could do to really get this under control. Yeah. I mean, the meta story in that story is so kind of like weird and distasteful. And Jesse Owens is forced to play along with this guy.
kind of deeply offensive narrative. Oh, but that's the really sad part, though, is he's not forced to play along with it. Like, he generates the narrative. Like, there's many people that I'm suspicious of who play several meaningful white co-writers on this story,
But I really think that Jesse Owens is the first mover. So he's so internalized. Yeah. He knows enough about what it means to be a black man in 1936 that he knows that that's the story. That's the plausible version of the story. We almost always tell the story of Jesse Owens' gold medals as a story of triumph.
Actually, "Triumph" is the title of a best-selling book about him. It's the name of a Jesse Owens History Channel documentary that just came out. And I'm not saying that Jesse Owens didn't triumph, or that he didn't enjoy the fame or the money. But look at what two weeks of triumph cost him. A life behind glass, playing a version of himself in a story of racial reconciliation that he must have on some level known was just not true.
And it was a story that worked like magic until all of a sudden it didn't. We'll be right back. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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I was joking with my producer Jacob the other day, who's one of Pushkin's most valuable employees. I hired him to be my assistant years ago in the most random manner possible. I think he saw a message board posting somewhere and I interviewed him for basically 10 minutes and said, go for it. I made a wild gamble on someone and got incredibly lucky.
But let's be honest, you can't rely on getting lucky when it comes to hiring people. Lightning's not going to strike more than once. You need a system and you need tools. And that's why LinkedIn is so important. LinkedIn is more than just a job board. They help connect you with professionals you can't find anywhere else. Even people who aren't actively looking for a new job.
In a given month, over 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other leading job sites. So if you're not looking on LinkedIn, you're looking in the wrong place. Hire professionals like a professional and post your job for free at linkedin.com slash gladwell. That's linkedin.com slash gladwell to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.
Jesse Owens had been telling one version or another of the Lützlong story for nearly 20 years when it finally went mainstream in 1968. That was the year Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin came out, the film by the legendary Olympic documentarian Bud Greenspan. It builds up to that Globetrotters trip in 1951, the jog around the track, the standing ovation. But the heart of the piece is Lützlong's son, Kai.
Remember, Kai was still a kid when his dad died. He didn't know his father. And in the film, Jesse Owens tells him a story about how his dad helped Owens qualify for the broad jump.
Carl, you probably don't know it, but your father was greatly responsible for my winning the broad jump in 1936. It all happened on the other side of the field here where we had the preliminaries for the running broad jump. And on the first two jumps, I fouled on one and didn't go far enough on the other. And your father came to my assistance.
and he helped me measure a foot back of the takeoff board and he held the tape until I measured a foot back as far as my takeoff was concerned. And then I came down and I hit between these two marks and therefore I qualified and that led to the victory in the running project. He seemed to say, "Sure, your dad would go on to fight with the Nazis, but he was a good man." Kai asked Owens if he'd like to recreate the famous photograph of his father. They laid down in the grass together.
The film was a huge, huge hit.
The first time Jesse Owens really got his Olympic glory back. The 1936 games were before people had televisions in their homes. So Americans hadn't really seen the footage of the games before that movie. Hadn't seen just how incredible Jesse Owens' Olympic achievement was. I haven't watched a lot of track and field, but it still takes my breath away. The long jump especially. It just looks like he's running on air.
And as he leaps, he raises his hand above his head, and he just soars. It was a new Olympic record. 26 feet 5 and 1 third inches. The first one to greet me was Lux Long, an athlete of special courage. He put his arms around me, and we walked down the broad jump runway directly in front of Chancellor Hitler's box.
The Bud Greenspan documentary meant that Jesse Owens finally had it all again. His fame, his financial security, and his Olympic glory back. And all that had come just in time for another Olympic Games, Mexico City 1968. By that point, Avery Brundage had become the first American president of the International Olympic Committee ever.
And decades after suspending Jesse Owens, Olympic leaders had seen the power of the Owens story and welcomed him back to the Olympic movement as a kind of figurehead. In Mexico, Jesse Owens was a guest of the government, an adjunct of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and a radio commentator. But once again, the games were about something more than sports that year.
It was the summer of 1968, the height of the civil rights movement. And like in 1936, there was talk of Black American athletes protesting the Games. Specifically, the track athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos. Everyone was on eggshells. One day during the Games, Jesse Owens was walking through the Olympic Village when he ran into Carlos. I know this because Owens' radio co-host was with him, and later he wrote about it in his memoirs.
Carlos apparently confided in Owens that he was planning some kind of protest the next day. Owens got anxious and told him not to do anything public. And then, apparently, Carlos got frustrated. And in the middle of the Olympic Village, he pointed a finger at Jesse Owens and yelled, You goddamn Uncle Tom. Owens was stunned. The next day, John Carlos won bronze in the 200-meter sprint, and Tommy Smith won the gold.
Owens was in the radio booth high above the field watching. According to that radio co-host Les Keider, Owens said, boy, I hope nothing happens when they play the national anthem. They might refuse to accept the awards. Instead, something much more dramatic happened. They accepted their medals, but then they took the podium shoeless and raised glove fists in a black power salute. The image was broadcast across the world.
Yesterday, they came in first and third in the 200-meter dash and then stood on the victory platform with bowed heads wearing black socks and gloves in a racial protest. Kiter said that when Jesse Owens learned what Smith and Carlos had done, he sat there and repeated three words to himself. Oh. My. God. They were also breaking a very important rule.
unwritten rule in America, which is you don't criticize the United States in foreign land. And so Jesse Owens was aware of that rule in the 30s and in the 40s, and he was certainly someone who abided by that. That's Damian Thomas again, Smithsonian sports curator. Jesse Owens is from an era where
where it was important for you to be a credit to your race. And so the way in which you advance African-American opportunity access was through good behavior. It was through embodying these middle-class values, chastity, thrift, temperance,
But by 1968, African-Americans are half of the players in the NBA, a third in the NFL, and a quarter in Major League Baseball. And so the mere presence of African-American athletes is no longer seen as progressive in and of itself. It's seen as now the status quo, 30 years after Jesse Owens died.
Jesse Owens won gold. And so athletes in the 1960s are now saying that the country needs to do more, that you need to be more engaged with solving racial problems and racial issues. And so athletes by 1968 are willing to confront America, and they're willing to confront America before a worldwide audience.
Avery Brundage was apoplectic, and in one of the most deeply cynical twists of fate, Brundage and the International Olympic Committee asked Jesse Owens, whom they'd previously banned for life, to go see Tommy Smith and John Carlos to ask them to apologize and promise not to protest again. And he did. He was received the way you might expect. They would not be apologizing.
Tommy Smith and John Carlos were kicked out of the Olympic Village and banned from future games. They had faced a conundrum a lot like Jesse Owens had 32 years earlier, but they made the opposite choice. Jesse Owens must have felt as if his whole life was on trial. I mean, just listen to Tommy Smith. Had I been a good boy in Mexico, I could have probably been monetarily richer, and I would have probably been a bigger figure than I am right now.
But yet and still, I would have to fight myself from the inside. The day after their protest on air, Owens' radio co-host asked him to compare the Black Power salute with being snubbed by Adolf Hitler in 1936. Another story about something that had never happened. Owens was taken aback. He just spent the whole night trying to get the athletes to apologize. He paused for a second and said, "'The two are not similar, but I guess I was the only one involved in both.'"
And then he talked about the night before, and he began to weep. It all hit Owens extremely hard. So hard that he wrote a book-length response to the Black Power movement. He titled it Blackthink, one of a series of books he wrote at the end of his life with a white co-author. And here we find ourselves again at Lutz Long. That book came out just two years after the Mexico City Games, but it's almost written like he's still there. There's a kind of urgency to it.
It's like what he wishes he'd said in that conversation with John Carlos and Tommy Smith. And what did he wish he'd told them? A story about a good German, Lutz Long. About how his friendship across racial lines was even bigger and even more improbable than anyone ever could have imagined. At Black Think's climactic moment, Jesse Owens wrote, Don't pass up your Olympics and your Lutz Long. Don't let the Black thinkers sell you out.
The significance of that brief interaction just kept growing in Jesse Owens' life story until two years before he died. In 1978, with that co-author, Jesse Owens published a book called Jesse, a spiritual autobiography. This is the one with the letter Lutz Long supposedly sent right before he died in the deserts of North Africa, a place in truth he never fought. It's kind of a beautiful letter, though.
Even knowing it's not true, I still get choked up when I read it. But it's the dedication on spiritual autobiography that really gets me. Owens dedicates the book to two unmatchable teammates. My wife of almost 50 years, Ruth, and the Nazi who fought Hitler with me, Lutz Long. Tom, can you hear me okay? I can, yes. Okay, fantastic. I had one last question. How did Jesse Owens feel about making this story up?
Did he ever talk about it with anyone? So I called Tom Ecker.
Once a great track and field coach, he trained Sweden for the 1968 Games. He's something of an Olympic historian. He's 89 now. He was born the year before the 1936 Games. I met with Jesse Owens a few times, and then I brought him to Cedar Rapids, where I live. And he came here and spoke to a group. And he slept in your daughter's bed? Tom's wife, Carol. Yeah, he slept in our house. Wow.
So you guys actually had a good relationship. Yeah, we got along really well. He told a lot of the same stories that I love to hear. One of those stories, of course, was the Lutz Long broad jump. Tom had heard the story before, but it didn't quite add up. He'd never seen any official account of an interaction between Owens and Long during that qualifying round.
He knew the famous sports writer Grantland Rice had been watching the event through his binoculars. And in a detailed account of that day, Rice described how calm Jesse Owens looked when he made that final jump. He didn't say anything about Lutz Long. Decades later, in Cedar Rapids, Tom says he asked Jesse Owens about the jump himself. Oh, yes. Yeah, we talked about Lutz Long and the fact that
that most of that was made up. He admitted to it? Oh, yeah. Why did he make it up? Well, he wanted to tell good stories. He told me that, that he wanted to just be able to tell good stories and that that was a good story. We all know what's true.
I'm left with this image of Jesse Owens falling asleep in a little girl's bed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he's once again been called to tell his great story. And what dream could visit him then? That one day, he woke up alone in a strange land and stepped out onto a great field in a big glass bowl to fight for a country that didn't want him, against the people who were most supposed to hate him. And then, all of a sudden, one of them reached out
and touched him. Under the circumstances, who's telling the truth?
We posed as his father and I did on the grass of the stadium. And though it may seem a little childish, doing it brought back memories of a warm interlude in my life. When a fellow athlete showed a special grace and a special courtesy when I needed help. I've experienced many moments in the sun, but perhaps the most rewarding was to have Lutz Long beside me on the winner's platform.
Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Natafafri, Tali Emlin, and Nina Bird-Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact-checking on this episode by J.L. Goldfein. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Jake Gorski. Engineering by Nina Bird-Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Special thanks to Karen Shakerji, Wendy Martin, J.D. Landis, and Lee Haffrey for translation help. I'm Ben out of Haffrey.
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