Ahmaud Arbery's Killing Shows Running Has Long Excluded Black People

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Born in lily-white Oregon, it’s a sport that’s long claimed to be for everyone — even as African-American joggers have been persistently subjected to harassment and worse.

By Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Dr. Petrzela is a historian and marathon runner.


Free! Easy! Relaxing! That’s how jogging was marketed in the late 1960s, when the idea of heading out on a regular run was unfamiliar to most Americans. Unlike other physical fitness programs that required heavy, expensive gear, jogging was accessible to all, boosters claimed.

But history shows how untrue that is, and how long the sport of running has maintained this fiction.

When video surfaced of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the young black jogger gunned down in South Georgia, distance runners became a new voice among the usual chorus of social justice activists who grimly parse such tragedies. But among runners, reactions largely differed by one important factor: race.

Black runners recounted their own routines, intended to deflect the sort of suspicions that turned deadly for Mr. Arbery: steering clear of certain neighborhoods, going out only in daylight, wearing an Ivy League sweatshirt to broadcast respectability. Many white runners, by contrast, were aghast that the sense of peace they feel when hitting the open road reflected their racial privilege.


This disparity should come as no surprise: Running has been a pastime marketed primarily to white people ever since “the jogging craze” was born in the lily-white Oregon track and field world of the late 1960s. Black people have not only been excluded from the sport — one survey by Running USA found under 10 percent of frequent runners identify as African-American — they’ve also been relentlessly depicted as a threat to legitimate, white joggers.

The most apparently egalitarian exercise of all, running, is anything but — especially when it comes to race.

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Let’s start at the beginning, which is 1967: That’s the year a University of Oregon track coach named Bill Bowerman, together with cardiologist Waldo Harris, published a slim volume titled “Jogging,” which became a best seller.

Most Americans then thought of exercise as weight lifting or military-style calisthenics, but the book made a radical proposition: that a “steady, easy-paced run, alternating with breath-catching periods of walking,” was a suitable exercise for everyone, ages 7 to 70. Best of all, this simple activity required “no special skills,” no ”expensive clothing,” and no “health club membership.” All you needed, these running apostles promised, were rubber-soled shoes, a commitment to your health, and the will to head outdoors a few times a week.

Celebrity endorsements and new scientific research on “aerobics” made jogging a craze that spread far beyond the “jogging capital of the United States”: 99 percent white Eugene, Ore.

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Yet the new national pastime never delivered on its promises of universalism. Women complained of being harassed by male passers-by. And at a time when a white middle class exodus to the suburbs had sapped big cities of a vital tax base, many black Americans who lived in these cities could not safely “just go outside” to jog in parks or on the street.


The image of American jogging in 1977.Credit...Time Inc.
Marketing and media didn’t help: From the cover of People magazine to ads for Nike, which Bill Bowerman co-founded, the joggers were almost uniformly depicted as white. Black Americans pushed back, eager to embrace an activity that would combat the heart disease prevalent in their communities. The black press recommended jogging as a free antidote to “the sedentary trap,” and in Ebony, one full-page color ad for a phone company featured a smiling middle-age couple playfully competing over their five-mile pace. Some took on the stereotype of the white jogger head on: in 1979, a headline in Jet magazine proclaimed, “Jogging Not Harmful to Black Women; It’s Dangerous to White Women, Says Expert.”

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