would be permitted to try out for the German team. In fact, only two Jewish athletes were named to the 1936 German Olympic team, and both were of mixed religious backgrounds. They were ice hockey player Rudi Ball and the 1982 Olympic fencing champion Helene Mayer. This was unfair to the Jews and to the whole world, the Jew’s could’ve had someone that was faster than Owens. The Jew’s could’ve showed Hitler that he was wrong, and that Germans weren’t superior. I think that if Jew’s participated in the 1936 Olympics, a lot of things could’ve been prevented. The world missed out on seeing a lot of unborn talent. When Owens won the Olympics and “defeated” Hitler, he wrote “In the early 1830’s, my ancestors were brought on a boat across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to America as slaves for men who felt they had the right to own other men. In August of 1936, I boarded a boat to go back across the Atlantic Ocean to do battle with Adolf Hitler, a man who thought all other men should be slaves to him and his Aryan armies.”Jesse Owens was a national hero when he returned home, despite the fact that he was black there were parades in New York and in other cities that honored him. But even though a black man was an Olympic hero, in many states laws still segregated the blacks and whites. So Owens’s victories at the 1935 Olympics didn’t help all that much to change the course of German History. But it did help push the United States a step closer toward achieving equality for all Americans. At the end of the Olympics Hitler was pleased to see that the German athletes had won more medals and team points than any other country. The Americans were second, the Italians third. Owens left the 1936 Olympics with warm memories. He had met athletes from all over the world. He had made new friends, like Luz Long. The athletes had competed. They also laughed, cried, eaten, an...
