Jesse Owens won 4 Olympic gold medals and then was paid to campaign against FDR

Owens stood on the podium before the 110,000-strong crowd and saluted. “My eyes blurred as I heard the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ playing faintly, then loudly, and then saw the American flag slowly raised for my victory,” he later recalled. To his right, a German Olympic official gave the Nazi salute.

The German dictator did not shake hands with Owens or most of the other winners. “Hitler snubs Owens” was the headline in American newspapers. Owens later had his own version: “Hitler didn’t snub me — it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”

Owens made the statement during his campaign against Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and for Republican Governor Alf Landon of Kansas. To support Landon, Owens had been given $10,000, more than $225,000 today.

On Friday in Paris, Olympic athletes will begin competing for the world records and fame Owens set 88 years ago when he won four gold medals. Back home aboard the Queen Mary, the 22-year-old Owens vowed to cash in on his gold. Contrary to popular belief that he was living in poverty right after the Olympics, he initially did fantastically well with promotions.

But “as the months went by, no one offered me a job,” Owens later recalled of the racism he faced as a black American. “When I got back to my homeland, after all the Hitler stories, I couldn’t sit in the front of the bus. I couldn’t live where I wanted.”

Owens grew up in Cleveland, one of 10 children of former Alabama sharecroppers. He worked odd jobs and attended Ohio State University, where he became known as the “Buckeye Bullet” and won track and field competitions. In 1936, he and 17 other black athletes traveled to Berlin with the U.S. team for the “Nazi Olympics,” overseen by a dictator who preached Aryan racial supremacy.

At the Games, Owens won his second gold after the 100 meters with a record jump. “Jesse exploded more than 26 feet as he flung himself through space,” sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote. “The black student appeared to leap from Germany. The American cheers began long before Jesse was in the air.” Shirley Povich of The Washington Post wrote in her column. “Hitler declared Aryan supremacy by decree, but Jesse Owens is proving himself a liar as he goes along.”

Owens won his third gold medal in the 200 meters in record time, ahead of Mack Robinson, brother of future baseball legend Jackie Robinson. Owens’s run was “a sight to behold, a sight to behold” and “one of the most astonishing feats in the ancient art of running,” the New York Times reported. Owens won his fourth gold medal in a four-man relay.

Back in the United States, after a ticker tape parade in New York City, Owens went to the Harlem apartment of aging vaudeville dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who introduced him to an agent. The two men arranged, in part, for the Olympic hero to perform at exhibitions and events and with a traveling jazz band for thousands of dollars.

Both political parties tried to persuade Owens to win over black voters in the election. Democrats offered him a house in Ohio, but a Sun Oil executive paid him a large sum to campaign for Landon, William J. Baker wrote in his 1986 book “Jesse Owens: An American Life.” Owens was also angry that Roosevelt had not congratulated any black Olympic athletes.

“The president of this country hasn’t even sent me a congratulatory message,” Owens told a campaign rally of 10,000 black people in Baltimore, the Baltimore Sun reported. “People said he was too busy. But Governor Landon sent me one.”

Roosevelt crushed Landon, but Owens continued to live a successful life.

“I’ve made $65,000 (more than $1.4 million today) since the Olympics, by personal appearances, demonstrations, political meetings and supporting various causes,” Owens told the International News Service in early 1937, as he prepared to go on tour with his jazz band. He was a wealthy American in the Great Depression. He bought a new Buick, an 11-room house in Cleveland for his parents, and a home for himself, his wife, Ruth, and the first of their three daughters. He opened the Jesse Owens Dry Cleaning Company with a large sign that read, “Speedy 7 Hour Service by the World’s Fastest Runner.”

By 1940, the runner’s fame and fortune had faded. “The world has changed for the Alabama-born speed demon who began picking cotton at age 6 to help out at home,” the United Press reported. The “world’s fastest man (has) weathered the bitterness of bankruptcy in four short years and is now quietly building a life for his wife and child in relative obscurity.”

To earn money he sometimes traveled with a black baseball team and raced against horses in the outfield. “I was no longer a proud man who had won four Olympic gold medals,” Owens later said. “I was a spectacle, a freak who made a living competing — unfairly — with dumb animals. I hated it.”

In the 1940 election, Owens supported Roosevelt, declaring that he had “done more for the advancement of the colored people than any President since emancipation,” the St. Louis Argus reported. He challenged boxing champion Joe Louis, who was supporting Republican Wendell Willkie, to a debate. FDR won an unprecedented third term, but Owens was not invited to the White House. (Owens finally received presidential recognition in 1955, when Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him “Ambassador of Sports.”)

Owens was relatively moderate on civil rights. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, he supported the removal of sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith from the U.S. track and field team because they held their gloved fists up in a “Black Power” sign while accepting medals. When Owens spoke to the team, “the black athletes nearly spat in his face,” Jeremy Schapp wrote in his 2014 book “Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and the Hitler Olympics.”

Owens supported Republican President Richard Nixon and was welcomed into the White House in 1972. At a White House ceremony in 1976, President Gerald Ford awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter presented him with a Living Legacy Award. When Owens died of lung cancer the following year at age 66, the New York Times described him as “perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in the history of track and field.”

In 2016, President Barack Obama hosted the families of the 16 black men and two black women from the 1936 U.S. Olympic team that Roosevelt had not invited to the White House. “It wasn’t just Jesse,” Obama said.

But as this year’s Olympics begin in Paris, the image of Owens’ svelte figure running around a Berlin racetrack lingers, raising eyebrows in the faces of Nazis who proclaimed an Aryan “master race.”

Ronald G. Shafer is a former political features editor at the Wall Street Journal in Washington.