This article is part of the People’s World 100th Anniversary Series.
With the 2024 Olympic Games opening in Paris this week, we pulled this article from our archives. Written by Daily Worker columnist Joseph North on August 11, 1936, it takes a look at the Berlin Olympics then underway in Nazi Germany.
Adolf Hitler hoped the Games would be a chance to showcase the Aryan racial superiority of German athletes, but the Fuhrer was repeatedly embarrassed on the world stage by Black athletes from the U.S. Track and field competitor Jesse Owens—the son of Alabama sharecroppers—won four gold medals.
Hitler infamously refused to meet with or congratulate Owens and the other Black athletes. Instead, every time a Black competitor won an event, the fascist dictator would immediately jump from his seat and high-tail it out of the stadium.
In this article, North takes a humorous approach to Hitler’s speedy sprint to make a very serious point: The Nazi racism on display at the Olympics was the same as Jim Crow segregation and violence in the U.S., and just as fascist discrimination had to be beaten internationally, white supremacy at home also had to be defeated.
That Sprinter, Hitler
Daily Worker—August 11, 1936
By Joseph North
It’s not, I admit, on the best of authority, but I hear that Hitler will be asked to compete in the Olympics—in the 100-meter sprints. His dashes out of the stadium when the Negro athletes stride in with championships have been noticed all over the world. The Fuhrer’s fast. Jesse Owens romps In with another championship, and presto! Hitler spurts the other way. They say the dictator can do the 100-meter dash in close to nothing flat whenever a Negro crosses the line.
Hitler, the heir of Thor and other thunder-gods of the Teutons, can’t take it when an American Negro proves he too is a descendant of the gods on high. Adolf grabs that paunch of his and departs in as swift a time as Thor ever threw a thunderbolt from Valhalla.
The Nazi press is doing some tall explaining these days. With true fascist genius for Gleichschaltung*, they steamroller the truth, their headlines feature the great victories of the Aryans. The Negroes are disposed of in a few lines down near the bottom of page seven. The Germans that place anywhere, anywhere at all, herr bitte, get all the publicity.
The German people themselves are giving the Negro Americans a great big hand. A letter received from one of the athletes by a member of the Daily Worker staff says, “We are welcomed by the German people, but Hitler doesn’t seem to like us much, as you may have noticed.”
Nothing more completely exposes the phony Nazi theories of race superiority than the victories of the Negro athletes at Berlin. And nothing shows up the dishonest, four-flushing, monomaniac that Hitler is than his sprints out of the box when the Negroes come forward after their victories.
Oh, these magnificent Nazi; sportsmen: Hitler; Goering, Goebbels, Thyssen, all these, the patrons of Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy),.These are sportsmen! A healthy mind in a healthy body. Fair play. Fun for the sake of fun—you know the whole kit and caboodle of slogans the Nazis proclaim. Well, all of that went by the board when Hitler turned tail and fled the Negro champions.
Now the whole wretched business is clear for the world to see. The truck driver who would have nothing to do with the Reds last year today sees the Reds’ analysis of fascism is correct. The chap who sat in the right-field bleachers watching the Yankees understands now what fascism stands for.
These are days of naked class struggles; in such times practically every human endeavor reveals class alignments. The 100-meter dash is a political document. Its lessons are manifold and of vital importance.
A soccer game is a forum at which fascism spouts its ideals. The Italian team, sponsored by Mussolini, practically bound and gagged the referee in order to win their set-to with the Americans. That’s Mussolini’s sport; it gives a fairly good idea of what they do in war. Raining mustard gas on men, women, and children in Ethiopia is fair play, too, according to the standards of the swastika and the fasces.
The whole wretched business is clear for the world to see. Physical training—not for fun, as it is in the Soviet Union, as it has been for decades in the United States—but for war. Not for a “healthy mind in a healthy body.” No indeed. The Nazis are training their young to become A. No. 1 corpses on some No-Man’s Land. It takes a deal of training to make a swell cadaver out of a stalwart, six-foot, blond lad who can throw a javelin over the grandstand.
How beautifully the whole business of this Olympics has worked out: The truth will pop up no matter how much cement the Nazi gangsters tie around its ankles to sink it in the harbor. The American team has shot far into the lead because of the peerless quality of its Black athletes. Jesse Owens, John Woodruff, Cornelius Johnson, and Williams, have taken six out of the eleven championships won by the Americans. What a magnificent showing!
The insult that Hitler levels at the Negroes is an Insult to the entire American people. It’s fascism slapping democracy’s face.
But that’s not to say all of America accepts the slap as an insult. There are some Americans who say it’s raining when Hitler spits in their eye. There are plenty, unfortunately, who like that man called Hitler. These are the Americans who feel the Negro’s place is behind the stairs, or in the cotton field.
Hitler’s action does the heart of the Black Legionnaire good. The sportsmen of Michigan who took a Negro out and shot him dead just for the fun of it are Hitler-sportsmen. They’re Mussolini-athletes. The Southern landowners who “love their ‘n—–s’ when they keep their places, suh,” agree with Hitler. They, too, know what to do when a Black man gets “uppity” and dares to compete with a white man in any type of race. They use a rope. Hitler does, too, when the world’s back is turned. Peek into his concentration camps. (We’ve got a big concentration camp in the U.S.A., too, only we call It Dixie.)
Yes, America can well point the finger of scorn at Hitler, the run-out artist. But we must do more than that. We must take a look at the Yankee Hitlers in our midst.
Incidentally, we might ask, why are there no Negroes in the Big Leagues? There are plenty of lads with dark pigmentation who can wield the willow like Babe Ruth in his prime, but they never went to bat for the Yankees. No, indeed. Why?
“Black man stay out.” That’s the slogan of the Big Leagues. It’s the slogan of the Liberty League. It’s the slogan of the Brown House. It’s the idea in Hitler’s brain.
We in America must snap out of it. What’s happening in the Olympics must galvanize us to take a good look at the home scene.
We’ve got to put an end to all the color bars in the U.S.A. The time to do that is now, to work on it today. We scorn Hitler for something which is happening in many parts of the U.S.A. now.
An end to lynching and discrimination! Hitler has turned out to be a fancy sprinter. The job now is to make him a good long-distance runner, set him on a course running a good long race into eternity.
* Gleichschaltung – or “Coordination,” was the propaganda term used by the Hitler government to describe the process of “Nazification” that was forced on all of German society. It was the campaign by which all of German social, political, and cultural life was brought into line with the Nazi Party ideology.
** The Black Legion was a white supremacist terrorist group active in the Midwestern U.S. in the 1920s and ’30s. It was a more violent breakaway group from the Ku Klux Klan.
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