Deborah Riley Draper - Olympic Pride, American Prejudice: The Untold Story of 18 African Americans Who Defied Jim Crow and Adolf Hitler to Compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics

African American going in colored entrance of Crescent movie house on a Saturday afternoon in Belzoni, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi, October 1939.

Saying good-bye to the shackles and shadows of Jim Crow, the Brooks, Albritton, and Owens families are among many who refuse to settle for separate seating and even different Bibles from their white counterparts. The laws down South require African Americans to attend segregated schools and churches, to enter for colored only bathrooms, to eat in a designated area of a restaurant, and to always sit at the back of a bus.

By 1936, despite escaping the racism in the South, these families will be in a country grappling with the Great Depression. There is real worry for thousands of African Americans that they will never be able to obtain the American dream. The country, still many years before the civil rights era, does not consider African Americans as full citizens.

Hope is often found in athletes like John Brooks, David Albritton, and Jesse Owens. They are among the eighteen black athletes who journey to Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympics. They will eventually grow up to become soldiers, scientists, principals, and politicians. Sixteen men and two women who take their memories and their medals from Berlin and allow them to become a springboard to combat segregation and racism back home in America.

At the most notorious sports event ever staged, eighteen African Americans challenge discrimination on the world stage. Their presence in Berlin is a blow to racial prejudice on both sides of the Atlantic. The unprecedented effort is largely unknown, and their stories forgotten.

The most unlikely of figures foreshadow Hitlers defeat and a shift in American civil rights in the most spectacular of ways. Yet the world remembers only one of them, by the name of Jesse Owens.

This is the story of the others.

1923

F OR MANY AMERICANS in 1923, times are good. The United States and the rest of the Western world roar through the twenties with their moving vehicles and motion pictures. The New York Yankees play their first game against the Boston Red Sox in The House That Ruth Built, the newly opened Yankee Stadium. Bessie Smith, The Empress of the Blues, sings her soulful hits on the radio. Magician Harry Houdini mesmerizes crowds with his stunts and tricks. The country unexpectedly inherits a new leader when President Warren G. Harding has a fatal heart attack on August 2 and Vice President Calvin Coolidge becomes the thirtieth president.

Yet amid an economic boom that doubles Americas wealth from 1920 to 1929, racial unrest only intensifies as Jim Crow laws take hold of the country, spurring the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership grows to 5 million people. The public becomes accustomed to Klan members, adorned in their hooded white robes and carrying American flags, marching down main streets in parades, proudly included as part of the festivities.