Maconites honor Ahmaud Arbery with 2.23 mile run
When Andrea Glover saw a video of Ahmaud Arbery being shot and killed, it brought her to tears.
“These individuals, because of their stature and who they are, they were able to bypass all of the judicial laws that are in place, and not one person can do that in other places, and definitely not people of color,” Glover, a life coach and community educator, said. “That made me extremely emotional.”
Glover joined other Maconites and people across the country to walk 2.23 miles on Friday to honor Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was fatally shot on Feb. 23 near Brunswick as he was jogging through a neighborhood.
Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis McMichael, 34, who are white, were arrested on warrants for felony murder two months after they fatally shot Arbery. The case received more attention after a video was released of the shooting.
“We’re out walking in honor of Ahmaud who was killed. He was an unarmed black man, and he was gunned down in Georgia, and he would have been 26 years old today,” said Nancy Cleveland, founder of Macon Head Space, which provides mental health resources to the Macon community. “This was an initiative that started worldwide. It’s a virtual run that people are doing, and we just decided to come here and do it ourselves.”
Cleveland announced on Facebook that she would be participating in #IRUNWITHMAUD at noon on Friday in Amerson River Park. Charise Stephens led a group in downtown Macon at 8 a.m., and Jerome Owens also led a group in Tattnall Square Park at 6 p.m.
Macon-Bibb County mayor and commissioner candidates attended the run at noon, including Marc Whitefield, Erion Smith, Paul Bronson and Weston Stroud.
Cleveland wanted to participate in the group run because she said she realized that stories like Arbery’s impact people’s mental health, and she could have an impact on social issues through Macon Head Space.
“I recently just started running myself to get fit, and it’s hard to show up and be your best self in different settings of your life when you feel like you’re under constant threat,” Cleveland said. “I think that we have to not only recognize what happened and honor his memory but show that we care, and that we’re concerned and that we’re going to unite to fight injustice.”
Dsto Moore, a photographer in Macon, said he has been in situations where he didn’t feel safe, and he thinks it’s crazy that this happened again in 2020.
“Hopefully, it’s going to be a wake up call for a lot of people,” he said. “Nobody should be getting murdered.”
Alexis Chambliss, a speech therapist, said the list of black men being killed for no reason continues to get longer.
“You would think that in a situation like this, ‘Okay, someone kills someone, they’re going to jail,’ but that’s not the case. We’re all crossing our fingers that justice is served, but this still is America, so we don’t know whether justice is going to be served or not,” she said. “I’ll just take my stand by walking.”
Glover said she tries to encourage people in the black community to get positions, such as legislators and police officers, where they can make a difference for other people of color.
“If you can’t legitimately change the laws, then really, honestly and truly we’re only constantly setting ourselves up to be disappointed and traumatized on a regular basis,” she said. “There’s this saying that my rights end where your rights begin, and that statement is so baffling to me because it’s not true for black and brown people in this country. … It’s just sad because it doesn’t, it doesn’t always feel like there’s hope.”
This story was originally published May 9, 2020 at 11:24 AM.