2 min readAhmaud Arbery, a Black man, was murdered by three white men while running in Brunswick, Georgia, on February 23, 2020. Since then, countless runners worldwide have covered 2.23 miles to honor his life and draw attention to the prevalence of racially motivated hate crimes in America.
At Saturday’s second annual Run With Maud 5K race in Atlanta, the Atlanta Track Club and The Ahmaud Arbery Foundation, an organization supporting mental health resources for Black boys, invite runners to join the race. The course begins and finishes in Centennial Olympic Park.
The event comes two days before Arbery’s birthday. He would have been 29 years old this year. “I started doing like a two, three-mile walk,” said Wanda Cooper, Arbery’s mother. “I walked on the trail and I often saw myself as Ahmaud. I was walking but he was running and he had no idea that his life was in danger.”
As of 2020, hate crimes targeted at Black Americans outpaced those of any other racial group with 2,871 incidents in 2020, a 49 percent increase since 2019. Georgia has repealed the citizen’s arrest law that empowered those responsible for Arbery’s death, and there’s now a hate crime law in Georgia. Still, Cooper hopes the annual run will continue to race awareness about the issue.
As Mitchell S. Jackson wrote in the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award for Feature Writing piece for Runner’s World, “Peoples, I invite you to ask yourself, just what is a runner’s world? Ask yourself who deserves to run? Who has the right? Ask who’s a runner? What’s their so-called race? Their gender? Their class? Ask yourself where do they live, where do they run? Where can’t they live and run? Ask what are the sanctions for asserting their right to live and run—shit—to exist in the world. Ask why? Ask why? Ask why?”
Number pickup for Saturday’s race begins at 6:30 a.m. The race starts at 8 a.m. You can still sign up here ($35 for the Atlanta race and $30 for virtual attendance).
Kells McPhillips is a health and wellness journalist living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Runner's World, The New York Times, Well+Good, Fortune, Shape, and others.
