‘He’s a black panther…That negro’s dangerous!…The negro’s got him!’ So runs the newsreel commentary on the 400 metres final in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The surprise is that the ‘panther’ in question is not the celebrated Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals in Berlin, but Archie Williams, one of the seventeen other black athletes who helped make up the US team and who brought back medals of their own. Deborah Riley Draper’s film seeks to restore the balance of this much-misremembered event, using contemporary footage, interviews with some of the seventeen athletes’ descendants, current black medal-winners saluting their predecessors’ achievements, and social historians making a persuasive case for the Games’ significance. The documentary is conventionally put together, but the story it tells is devastating in its impact.
Even before Hitler’s less than subtle attempts to use the 1936 games as propaganda to establish Aryan supremacy, African-Americans had struggled to make their way in international athletics. 1932, when the previous Olympics were held in Los Angeles, was a time of dire poverty and persecution: lynchings pictured in stills were attended by laughing white children enjoying a day out. Two black women members of the US track team, Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes, were unceremoniously dropped after enduring humiliations from white male athletes en route to LA; by 1936 they were automatic choices though friends and neighbours still had to raise the money for them to go to Berlin and join the US squad (‘Tracksters and Boxers Total 18 Sepias’ a headline of the time put it).
That the US would be represented at all was a close-run thing, only two votes separating the pro- and anti- members of the Olympic committee, under pressure not to be seen to be condoning the persecution of Jews now rife on German streets. To counter this a carefully orchestrated visit to Berlin was arranged for Avery Brundage, the almost pathologically pro-Games President of the committee, and a token Jewish athlete, Gretel Bergmann (still alive at the age of 102 and interviewed in the film) was forced to abandon hopes of competing for Great Britain at the high jump and join the German team. Setting a high jump record just before the Games, Bergmann was promptly dropped from the team and her record expunged.
While its centre-piece is 1936 (the German boxer Max Schmeling knocked out local US hero Joe Louis earlier that year at Madison Square Gardens, handing Hitler another propaganda coup), OLYMPIC PRIDE, AMERICAN PREJUDICE smartly points up the many cruel ironies that followed the Games, particularly in the interviews with the athletes’ families: Hitler famously refused to shake hands with Jesse after his triumphs; less famously, President Roosevelt refused to greet the triumphant black athletes on their return, lest it offend voters in the South. Of the eighteen, several went on to become teachers, scientists and in sprinter Ralph Metcalfe’s case, a Congressman. While after turning professional, Jesse Owens wound up in stunt races running against horses.
Olympic Pride, American Prejudice is screening in the Cinemobile on Parker’s Piece on Monday 24th October at 8pm.
httpvh://youtu.be/97Icc35DJPM