Director says Olympian helped to ‘jump-start’ civil rights conversation
When actor Stephan James was setting off to make the civil rights-era drama “Selma,” director Stephen Hopkins gave him some advice. “I told him, ‘Don’t come back from “Selma” thinking you’re in the same era,’ ” said the director of “Race,” which opens Friday. “In 1936, black Americans were never going to get their rights.”
But 1936 was also the year that the man whom James portrays — Olympic legend Jesse Owens — went to the Berlin Games, won four gold medals and scored a public-relations coup against the Third Reich’s “corporately branded Olympics,” as Hopkins described them. Owens, arguably, changed the world.
“There wasn’t a civil rights movement at that time,” the British director said, “but in many ways Jesse’s success, especially in such a racist arena, helped jump-start the conversation.”
Owens also very globally debunked the Nazis’ theories of Aryan supremacy in what would have been considered, today, to have been a PR triumph. But despite what he accomplished in Berlin, Owens never even got a congratulatory telegram from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The movie shows a postGames Owens having to get to a dinner — in his honor — through a restaurant’s back door. The film, said co-star Jason Sudeikis, “is a nice reminder how far we’ve come as a country, and how far we need to go.”
Waning awareness
James said there’s “totally a lot of pressure” playing such icons as Owens and the great civil-rights activist John Lewis, whom he played in “Selma.” But he said he’s not sure whether young people are familiar with the Owens story the way earlier generations may have been.
“I don’t know if older people know him any better,” the actor said. “I had to learn about him, too.”
Some people, Hopkins said wryly, think Owens was one of the athletes in Mexico City who gave the black power salute (actually Tommie Smith and John Carlos). And Owens’ daughters Beverly Owens Prather and Marlene Owens Rankin said there’s a disparity in awareness about their father and his accomplishments: Many young people of, say, Stephan James’ age, have little idea about Jesse Owens. But at the Owens Foundation, which they run with their older sister, Gloria Owens Hemphill, they get many requests from young kids, seventhand eighth-graders, researching their father’s life. “I can’t account for it,” Owens Rankin said.
“Race” should bring everybody up to speed. Owens was the grandson of a slave, and the son of a former sharecropper. His gifts at track and field brought him from Depressionera Cleveland to Ohio State University, where he had a fateful meeting with the man who was going to guide him toward Berlin: Larry Snyder, a former track star himself and the coach of what was, at the time, a losing team.