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Who Was Jesse Owens?
In rural Alabama, Jesse Owens sprinted across farmland and ran along dirt roads. He ran to the fields where he picked one hundred pounds of cotton a day. He ran to the orchards where he and his large family picked fruit from the trees. He ran with friends, playing games when they were not working alongside their parents.
Jesse ran because it made him feel free.
“I always loved running,” he later said. “It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet.”
“Jesse would run and play just like everyone else,” his cousin Mattie Taylor said of those days of playing in Alabama. “But you could never catch him.”
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Excerpted from "Who Was Jesse Owens?"
by .
Copyright © 2015 James Buckley.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Young Readers Group.
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