Where did Jesse Owens grow up and live?

📍Jesse Owens Birthplace, Oakville, Alabama, USA

1913 – 1930

“I was born in Oakville, Alabama in 1913, the seventh of ten children of a sharecropper family, and I grew up in conditions of poverty that most Americans of later generations would find difficult to imagine. The red clay of Lawrence County, the cotton fields, the one-room schoolhouse — this was my world until I was nine years old and my family joined the Great Migration north to Cleveland. I did not run competitively until I was in high school in Cleveland, but the Alabama countryside had given me legs and lungs built by years of physical work, and a competitive spirit built by years of having nothing and wanting everything. My four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — won in front of Adolf Hitler, who had built those Games as a showcase for Aryan supremacy — remain one of the most powerful statements sport has ever made.”

👍 LovedThe physical foundation that a rural Alabama childhood of hard work built in my body without my knowing it. The fierce desire that poverty produces in those it does not defeat. The family bonds that sustained us through conditions that should have broken us.

👎 DislikedThe crushing poverty of sharecropping Alabama. The racial violence that was always close in the Deep South of the early twentieth century. The knowledge that my country valued my athletic performances more than my humanity.

Map showing where Jesse Owens lived — Jesse Owens Birthplace, Oakville, Alabama, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Jesse Owens's home at Jesse Owens Birthplace, Oakville, Alabama, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Baker, W. Jesse Owens: An American Life (1986), Free Press; Owens, J. with Neimark, P. Jesse: The Man Who Outran Hitler (1978), Fawcett Gold Medal; Schaap, J. Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics (2007)