Re Jesse Owens: 25 years after Jesse Owen, Muhammad Ali claims (no one knows for sure) that he threw his Olympic Gold Medal (1960 - Rome) into a river because when he came home an Olympic champion he still couldn't go eat at a "white" diner.
6 years after that Ali famously said, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong." The more famous saying of, "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger" has not been proven.
LBJ on MLK:
“What is that goddamned nigger preacher doing to me?” Johnson reportedly remarked after the speech. “We gave him the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we gave him the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we gave him the War on Poverty. What more does he want?”
The point is, racism was, and still is in many parts of the US, endemic. That FDR would snub Jesse Owens is not at all surprising.
