When the AAU and AOC make the decision to attend the games, the NAACP asks Jesse to refuse to enter. The story of The Amateur Athletic Union(AAU) and the American Olympic Committee(AOC), struggling with the decision to attend or boycott the games, runs parallel to Jesse's trials, tribulations and his ultimate success. The movie moves from Jesse's life and troubles to Nazi Germany and back again. Snyder recognized greatness in Jesse the first time he watched him run and let Jesse know that he would be able to compete and win in the 1936 Olympic Games. A prominent high school track athlete, Jesse entered The Ohio State University in 1933 and began his NCAA track career under the tutelage of legendary track coach Larry Snyder(Jason Sudeikis). This mistake led to JC being known as Jesse for the rest of his life. It was in Cleveland where one of his teachers, unable to understand his thick southern accent, thought he was saying his name was Jesse when in fact he had been saying JC. James Cleveland Owens was born in Alabama and at age 9 moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio. "RACE" is the story of Jesse Owens(Stephan James) from 1933 through 1936. Not only as an athlete, but as a human being. Kenneth Chisholm not as prominently remembered as he once was, Jesse Owens, was one of those men in history who was able to overcome the many barriers in his life to exemplify greatness. Upon resolving that issue, Owens and his coach travel to Berlin to participate in a competition that would mark Owens as the greatest of America's Olympians even as the German film director, Leni Riefenstahl, locks horns with her country's Propaganda Minister, Josef Goebbels, to film the politically embarrassing fact for posterity. When the American envoy finds a compromise persuasive with the Third Reich to avert a boycott, Owens has his own moral struggle about going.
However, as Owens struggles both with the obligations of his life and the virulent racism against him, the question of whether America would compete at all at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany is being debated vigorously. Going to Ohio State to train under its track and field coach, Larry Snyder, the young African American athlete quickly impresses with his tremendous potential that suggests Olympic material. In the 1930s, Jesse Owens is a young man who is the first in his family to go to college.