Jesse Owens lived on Hilltop, OSU dorms off-limits to Black students

The 200 block of S. Oakley Street on the Hilltop stretches about 210 meters, which was right in Jesse Owens’ wheelhouse. But the world’s fastest human never sprinted that short distance between Broad Street and Sullivant Avenue. He walked it.

Owens lived at 292 S. Oakley while attending Ohio State — Black students were not allowed to live in campus dorms — and often went up and down his street escorting kids to a vacant neighborhood lot to play sports. 

Earl Potts was one of those kids. The Hilltop resident, who passed away in 2021, once recalled how Owens enjoyed getting children involved in athletics. 

“He’d gather the young kids and say, ‘Let’s walk over to the ball field,’ ” Potts said a decade ago during an interview available on YouTube.

Upon arriving at the diamond, all eyes turned to Owens. 

“There used to be softball games between married men and single men … and my uncles used to tell the story of Jesse playing ball,” Potts said. “They’d let him hit and just run the bases without tagging him out because they liked to see how he ran. His stride was so beautiful.”  

Jesse Owens’ life on the Hilltop in the 1930s

Owens was called a lot of things in the early-to-mid-1930s, not all of them complimentary. He was the Buckeye Bullet and the Pied Piper of the Hilltop, but he also heard more than one racial epithet. 

Despite breaking racial barriers during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he won four gold medals to cripple Adolf Hitler’s claims of Aryan superiority, prejudice and bigotry reappeared when Owens returned to the United States. What he experienced after Berlin was no different than what came before — exclusion based on color.

Arriving at Ohio State from Cleveland, Owens had to live off-campus with other Black athletes.

“This was a common practice at Midwest (predominantly white) universities,” said F. Erik Brooks, who co-authored an Owens biography with Kevin M. Jones. “But it was better than what African-Americans were getting in the South.”

A low bar, indeed. Even at Ohio State, Owens could only order carry-out or eat at “Blacks-only” restaurants. He was forced to stay at segregated hotels during travel. 

At least the Hilltop offered some respite from discrimination, though Black residents still were confined to a small area that ran east-west from Clarendon Avenue to Wayne Avenue and north-south from Palmetto Street to Sullivant.