Damion Thomas presents on Jesse Owens and the 1936 Olympics

By Raena Hunter Doty Arts & Features Editor Damion Thomas, sports curator at Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, delivered a lecture called “Jesse Owens and the Complicated Legacies of the 1936 Olympics” Oct. 3. The lecture was one event in a series of events accompanying the Smithsonian exhibition on display in the Henry Whittemore Library called “Americans and the Holocaust.” Thomas began the lecture by telling the audience the process it took to build the National Museum of African American History and Culture and a brief explanation of what the museum itself looks like. He said the first attempt to build a museum for African American history was in 1915, 50 years after the end of the American Civil War and slavery, but they were unsuccessful. Thomas added every event after that was stopped by some unprecedented circumstance - momentum in the ’20s came to a halt during the Great Depression, momentum during the Civil Rights Era stopped after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and it took until Congressman John Lewis devoted years of campaigning for the museum starting in 1988 for the museum to get built in 2016. Thomas said since the museum opened, it has seen approximately 12 million visitors, and the staff was not prepared for the volume of people coming through the museum - they expected visitors would stay for 75 minutes, as in the Smithsonian Museum, but most people in the National African American History Museum were staying about 5.5 hours. Thomas then explained why he chose to become a historian. He said he was a first-generation college student who didn’t understand why other students rushed to go to orientation before their first semester at school. Because he waited until one of the last orientation periods, he “ended up with the schedule of death, which included colonial U.S. history at 8 o’clock in the morning on Monday. “Fifteen minutes into being a college student, my life changed,” Thomas added. He said when he walked into this history class, Professor Gary Nash said, “‘Whoever controls the present will use their power to change the past in hopes of controlling the future,’ and in that one sentence, I learned two life-changing lessons. “The first is that history is not about memorizing a bunch of facts and figures,” Thomas said. “History is about power. It’s about the power to define what matters and why it matters, and the way we typically tell history in the United States is as a narrative of progress - things are always getting better.” He said this form of teaching history “normalizes and naturalizes our present inequalities,” and discourages people from trying to change the present for the better. “The second lesson is that history is not actually about the past - it is about the future, because if you can influence what people believe is right, what people believe is possible, what people believe is fair, you can potentially influence how much they can push back against the system and the social order,” Thomas said. He added with this context, the fights many states are waging against fair teaching of history make a lot of sense. “One of the fundamental lessons of the African American History and Culture Museum is that change - profound change - is possible,” Thomas said. He began the discussion of Jesse Owens by explaining where Owens came from, which was a sharecropping family in Alabama. Thomas explained sharecropping was a system put into place after the end of slavery, and it kept primarily Black Americans dependent on rich white landowners, often the very same ones who had owned slaves before the Civil War. After the end of World War I, many Black Americans left the South to the North and Midwest during the Great Migration, which is when Owens’ family went to Ohio, Thomas said. There, Owens attended Ohio State University, and Thomas said it was still “pretty rare for African Americans to go to universities.” While there, Owens had what Thomas called “arguably the greatest performance in sports - certainly in track and field history,” where he set three world records and tied another within an hour. Thomas said his outstanding performance in the U.S. contributed greatly to the pressure Owens faced in his decision to go to the 1936 Olympics, which were hosted in Germany after the 1916 Olympics were moved out of the country during WWI. He added Hitler took over power in 1933 and began using the Olympics as a way to promote supremacy of the Aryan race, causing a lot of people to boycott the entire event. “We got to back up and think about why someone like Jesse Owens and other African Americans want to go and participate,” Thomas said. He added sports are tied to education in the U.S. in ways not seen in other countries, and at the time of these events, there was a prevailing belief that physical ability was linked to intellect - that people who were smarter would be better physically, and vice versa - so a Black American competing in the Olympics would do a lot to tear down stereotypes. “African Americans have a lot of incentive to compete at the Olympics because it has all this cultural meaning,” Thomas said. He said Owens made the decision to compete in the Olympics, and when he did, his performance impressed America like no other. “Owens wins four gold medals, sets four records,” Thomas said. “We’re still talking about it almost 100 years later,” and added when he did interviews after the recent Paris Olympics, he got asked about Owens more than any other topic. Thomas said that upon returning home, Owens was made the first Black national “hero” - which he put in quotes, because the U.S. did not treat Owens like a hero. Rather, he was banned from amateur athletics because he didn’t want to tour through Europe on a grueling schedule where he had to compete every few days. Instead, he had to become a professional athlete, Thomas said, which he noted was looked down upon compared to amateur athletics at the time. To make ends meet, Owens had to put on running performances during basketball games and racing horses, Thomas said. He said the dominant narrative about Jesse Owens today is that his performance in the 1936 Olympics disproved the growing sentiments about Aryan supremacy, but in fact, Germany won more gold medals that year than any other country, and their torch lighting ceremony - the very first one, which brought the flame all the way from Athens to Berlin - symbolized the passing of the dominant culture from Greece to Germany. Thomas said after the Olympics, the narrative about how people of color could compete with white - Aryan - people shifted to biological determinism and biological supremacy, the theory that certain races are better at certain actions than others. “If you buy into this biological supremacy notion, it comes at a cost - and the cost is that if that’s biologically determined, other things are biologically determined. And it is going to be argued that if you are physically superior, you are intellectually inferior,” Thomas said. He added this was reflected in the way that racial integration happened in sports - oftentimes, people of color could join sports, but not in positions that involved decision making. Thomas said the legacy of Jesse Owens was incredibly complicated. “On one hand, we have still the most talked about, the most important, the most powerful sporting moment arguably in world history, juxtaposed with his reality as being an African American man in a segregated America.” He said during the 1968 Olympics, Owens was asked to - and did - speak to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, 200-meter dash athletes, to try to convince them to accept their medals without protesting the Olympics, adding to Owens’ conflicting legacy. Thomas said people have to understand that Jesse Owens is not the only Black American athlete of his time, but there were few others, and he had to strike a balance that would improve society for Black people while also not causing white society to close their doors to Black people further. “It’s only because of Jesse Owens in his generation and their ability to tolerate some of the abuses that the later generation will not be able to tolerate … that creates that narrative of progress,” Thomas said.