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August 9, 1936
Jesse Owens wins four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics as well as breaking world records (individually as well as part of a team). He is the first American track and field athlete to win 4 golds at one Olympics.

His run in the 100-meter dash (10.3 seconds) became an Olympic record and tied the then-current world record. He set an Olympic record in the long jump (8.06 meters – over 26’) which was not broken until 1968 (New York Times, April 1, 1980). His run in the 200-meter dash (20.7 seconds) set another world record as did his team’s run in the 4 x 100-meter relay (39.8 seconds).

In the 200-meter dash, the silver medalist was Mack Robinson, older brother of 17-year old Jackie Robinson. Owens’ 200-meter and 100-meter run times were Olympic records until 1964 (NY Times).

Just one year before, at the Big Ten Conference Championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Jesse Owens broke 3 world records in 45 minutes.

While that was on the track, off the track things were very different. Because of his race, he was not allowed to stay at the “whites only” hotel with his other teammates. In fact, he could not even enter the hotel through the front door.

At the Berlin Olympics, Hitler refused to shake hands with any of the black Olympian medalists. In fact, he actually left the stadium after three black Americans, Owens included, swept all the high-jump medals.

On the other hand, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt also did not acknowledge the conquering hero when the team returned home. While a phone call or White House invitation would not have been unusual, Owens received neither.

Presidents Ford and Carter redressed the situation with the Presidential Medal of Honor (1976) and the Living Legends Award (1979).

Owens died in 1980 of lung cancer. Yes, he was a smoker. When he won that first Olympic medal, he was a new father, married to his high school sweetheart.

In 1984, a street in Berlin was re-named in his honor, Jesse-Owens-Allee.

Link:
http://library.osu.edu/…
http://www.jesseowens.com

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Thus begin the dogged days of August:

On August 4, 1936, Jesse Owens wins the long jump in the Olympics, the Berlin Olympics presided over by Adolph Hitler and the politics of racism. This win was the first of four gold medals for Owens this week. (More to come.)

Jesse Owens is African American but he is, first and foremost, a superb athlete, one who could break world records even under this kind of intense political and psychological pressure.

Today in 1964, the bodies of three civil rights workers are found in a shallow grave in Mississippi:

• Michael Schwerner, 24, nicknamed “Goatee” and “Jew-Boy” by the KKK.

• Andrew Goodman, 20, like Schwerner, also from New York.

• James Chaney, 21, an African American from Mississippi.

Schwerner and Goodman had traveled to Mississippi on behalf of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). They were helping to register African American voters. Chaney was a local man and recent CORE volunteer.

The three men disappeared June 21 after being released from jail on trumped up charges related to a recent church burning.

Given the violence accompanying efforts to register the black vote and organize citizens in support of civil rights, the disappearance of these men was national news and the subject of an FBI manhunt.

The code name for the investigation was MIBURN. It stood for “Mississippi Burning”, also the name of a movie about this same event

• Seven men were eventually convicted of the murder. These included a local police officer and the local KKK Imperial Wizard.

• Nine men were acquitted. The jury never could decide on the guilt of three others.

• The sentences for these convicted murderers ranged from 3-10 years.

The verdict, for the time, was considered a victory. The longest prison time anyone actually served was 6 years.

Judge Cox, the local judge responsible for the sentencing, said this after the trial:

“They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them what I thought they deserved.”

On a happier note, and just to add balance to sports and politics, the birthday babes today are poets and musicians:

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792

Louis Armstrong, 1901

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Ah! Dreams…“We are the stuff that dreams are made on,” said Shakespeare and it is true.

This is a very special dream week. It is a week of wonder in terms of the creative as well as the courageous. Fair Reader, read on!

All I Have to Do Is Dream, the Everly Brothers, 50 years ago this week, released that fabulous song.

Ten years later, Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay was on top of Billboard.

In 1964, The Beatles had just released A Hard Day’s Night which was followed, just one year later, by that ode to teenage angst, The Rolling Stones’ (I can’t get no) Satisfaction.

Check out this weird musical medley of hits from the 1970s:
On the one hand is The Commodores’ Three Times a Lady sharing radio space with Debby Boone’s You Light Up My Life, while on a totally different third hand are Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson asking, Mammas, Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Cowboys.

That, in a clef note, was America in the late 1970s.

Some other high notes of the week:

Happy Birthday!
Wyoming (1890);

And happy birthday to the original raging bull, Jake la Motta (1921); to that heart-warming comedian Bill Cosby (1937); to tennis great Arthur Ashe (1943) … and to Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland (1274). That last one may be pushing it but ‘twas a great movie now, wasn’t it?

But! More important than Classic Coke’s return in 1985, or the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team winning the World Cup in 1999…

More important than Etch-a-Sketch making its happy debut in 1960…

Even of greater note than Geraldine Ferraro’s historic 1984 vice presidential nomination is the fact that…

On July 11, 1925, the Scopes Trial had just begun its second day of putting the freedom to teach evolution on trial.

Clarence Darrow would represent John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher who was accused of breaking a state law, the Butler Act, by teaching evolution in his science class.

The state was represented by that great orator and presidential aspirant, William Jennings Bryan.

Scopes was found guilty on July 21 (short trial) and fined $100.

It was, however, the Butler Act that was really on trial. Was it a fair law? (See the link below for the full text of the law.) It was repealed September 1, 1967.

On day 2 of the trial, Darrow argued that this law was, indeed, unconstitutional saying:

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools… At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant [sic], and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. … After awhile, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed.

The trial became the inspiration for the play, Inherit the Wind. The title, by the way, comes from a Bible verse:

He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart. (Proverbs 11:29)

Be well!
Concord Star

Related links courtesy of UMKC Law School:

Full text of the Butler Act (Tenn. HB 185, 1925) and its repeal: www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/tennstat.htm

Background on the trial:
www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm

Transcript of the trial:
www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes2.htm

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