Making Jesse Owens

<p>Jesse Owens’ four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin is the stuff of legend.</p><p>“A man who's a second class citizen at home, son of a sharecropper, grandson of slaves, going over to Hitler's Germany,” explained ESPN reporter Jeremy Schaap on <i>Making</i>. “And he rose to the occasion in a way that embodies true greatness.”</p><p>But Owens’ journey from Alabama to Ohio to Germany and back again was filled with many highs and lows. His mother used a <a href="https://time.com/4227802/jesse-owens-race-triumph-excerpt/"><u>hot knife</u></a> to excise a tumor from his chest when he was 5. He tied the world record in the 100 yard dash <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1933/06/18/105393426.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&amp;ip=0"><u>as a senior in high school</u></a>. His college years at Ohio State were marked by both racial segregation and <a href="https://olympics.com/ioc/news/jesse-owens-and-the-greatest-45-minutes-in-sport"><u>unparalleled athletic achievement</u></a>.</p><p>And after his return to America following the Berlin Olympics, Owens and other African-American medalists did not receive the same invitation to the White House that their white counterparts did.</p><p>“It was one of the things that really hurt him,” said Marlene Rankin, Owens’ daughter and the co-founder of the <a href="https://www.jesse-owens.org/"><u>Jesse Owens Foundation</u></a>. “Not everything got to him, but I think that did.”</p><p>On this week’s <i>Making</i>, host Brandon Pope leads a conversation on the years that defined Jesse Owens’ life, featuring Rankin, NBCNews.com contributor <a href="https://twitter.com/cecilhauthor"><u>Cecil Harris</u></a>, Owens’ son-in-law and former business partner Stuart Rankin, and Schaap, author of <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/triumph-jeremy-schaap/1100692093"><u><i>Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics</i></u></a><i>.</i></p>