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How Olympian Cornelius Johnson’s Legacy Lives on Through an 87-Year-Old Oak Tree.
| Cornelius Johnson won gold in the high jump for the United States at the 1936 Olympics, held in Nazi Germany. Along with his medal, he took home an oak sapling and planted it in the yard of his family’s Los Angeles home. Though Johnson died just 10 years later, at age 32, the oak tree still stands tall — a physical representation of his legacy as one of the many Black American athletes who took the podium during those Games and resisted the then-ethos of the country that hosted them.
“Him planting his tree was a way of saying ‘I beat you, we won,’” Susan Anderson, a curator at the California African American Museum, told CBS News. Johnson’s tree is one of about two dozen oaks left standing from the 1936 Olympics, and it has now been designated as a historical monument in LA. That designation is due in part to the work of Christian Kosmas Mayer, a Vienna-based artist with a particular interest in trees with historical significance. He lobbied to save this one when the land was bought by a developer and, thankfully, he was successful. “Now it grows in what we call Koreatown in Los Angeles, a very diverse, multiethnic, multi-language area, absolutely the opposite of what the Nazis would have dreamed of as their future,” Mayer told CBS. “So I think it’s a beautiful symbol for how things can turn out much better.” |
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https://www.cbsnews.com/video/los-angeles-oak-tree-carries-legacy-of-forgotten-1936-olympic-athlete/
