There were eighteen African-American athletes on the U.S. Team in the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin, Germany. They won 14 medals — eight of them gold: a quarter of the 56 medals won by the entire U.S. team. Most of them have been all but forgotten.
“It was easier to tell the story of one African-American because that was an anomaly,” said Deborah Riley Draper, who wrote, directed and produced a new documentary called Olympic Pride, American Prejudice. “But eighteen stories was more than the Jim Crow newspapers wanted to report on.”
This is the story of the other seventeen.
