NARRATOR: In the 800-meter event, Uncle Sam's hope is John Woodruff, overtaking Phil Edwards
of Canada, who is running his heart out trying to match the withering pace of the husky Negro
heavyweight who is running him into the ground.
JOHN WOODRUFF: It was very definitely a special feeling in winning the gold medal and being
a black man. Here I was doing something, and this particular event had not been won by
an American in 24 years. So I was very happy for myself as an individual, for my race,
and for my country.
DR. DAVID WIGGINS: In the latter stages of the nineteenth century, there were a large
number of African-American athletes who established not just a national reputation but an international
reputation for their athletic performances. Athletes such as Marshall "Major" Taylor,
one of the great bicyclists in American history; Isaac Murphy, the first jockey ever to win
three Kentucky Derbies; Moses "Fleetwood" Walker, who was the first African-American
ever to play major league baseball when he signed with the Toledo Mud Hens in the mid-1880s.
And what happens around the turn of the century, particularly by the last decade of the nineteenth
century, because of a variety of different factors, including the Jim Crow laws and the
Black Codes, the most famous being the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, you begin to
have segregation. You saw African-American athletes being eliminated from predominately
white organized sport around the turn of the century.
DR. CLAYBORNE CARSON: This was still an era of segregation, but one of the things that
had changed before the 1936 Olympics was the urbanization of African-Americans, moving
to especially the urban North. They were able to go to high schools where there were sports
teams, which wasn’t available in the schools in the South, which barely had any facilities.
That put them in a position where they could participate in sports, particularly in the
individual sports, like boxing or track and field events. You had the legacy of Jack Johnson,
the person who did succeed in boxing and became world champion, but didn't conform to the
role that was assigned to black Americans. He was attacked, and ultimately his prestige
and his money were taken away. That served as a lesson for subsequent generations of
black athletes: that you could have power in the society to a certain degree, but you
have to be very careful how you exercise it.
JEREMY SCHAAP: You know, the fact of the matter was that blacks were being kept out of baseball,
they were being kept out of football, and although I’m not sure how many people really
believed this, one of the arguments was that, well, they might be faster, they might be
stronger, but they don’t play the game smart. You know, all these ridiculous lies. But they
were widely accepted. In track and field, unlike in team sports, you could measure performance
empirically. Jesse Owens is running a 9.9 100 yards, he’s just faster than any white
man on the planet, and you can't argue against that and it would be foolish to try to argue
it. On May 25, 1935, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the Big Ten track meet, he sets world records
in four events in the space of less than an hour. This is all with an injury—he’d
suffered - a back injury horsing around with some of his fraternity brothers the week before
— and all of a sudden he is America's greatest hope for the Berlin Olympics.
DR. CLAYBORNE CARSON: Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe were definitely heroes in the black
community. Even though they might have limitations in terms of training, and resources, and all
of these sorts of things, once they were able to compete they were able to do it and they
were able to do it well. There was much more ambivalence in the black community over whether
to participate or not in the 1936 Olympics. Americans were painting the Nazis as super-racists.
We had our own experience with racism at home and it was hard to imagine something worse
than Jim Crow in the South. That notion of American democracy versus Nazism was blurred
a bit for African-Americans. I think that in the end it came down to there was going
to be U.S. participation in the Olympics and there were some talented black athletes who
wanted to go. Even if the black press had been totally opposed to going they wouldn’t
have been able to influence the decision anyway. The individual athletes made their own decisions
and they wanted to go.
[music]
JOHN WOODRUFF: When we went to the Olympics, we weren't interested in politics. We were
only interested in going to Germany, participating in our events, and trying to win as many gold
medals as we could win, see, and come home. That was our interest. I made the team when
I was 20 and before I got to Berlin, Germany, I had a birthday and I was 21. So we were
young. All of us were young. The opening ceremonies were all these Olympic athletes representing
all these various nations marching in. We came in with our white trousers, blue jackets,
and straw hats with the red, white, and blue band. And of course right after they march
in and the Games are declared open, they release all these pigeons, and they all fly. And that’s
the opening of the Games.