HISTORY COURSE
Running crew taking February to celebrate Black culture on foot
A little past 8 a.m. on a recent Sunday, a group of Baltimore runners stopped partway through their route, near the intersection of Pennsylvania and North avenues, in the newly christened Black Arts District.
They posed for a picture at the Arch Social Club, where a mural honors such Charm City artists as Billie Holiday and Ta-Nehisi Coates. One of the leaders talked about Baltimore’s famous entertainers and the city’s authors while pointing out Everyone’s Place, a Black-owned mom-and-pop bookstore.
The crew was there to mix some history with their workout.
Every Sunday in February, the group, called RIOT (Running Is Our Therapy) Squad, has been running to or from a different Black historical landmark in Baltimore. In
this, their 2nd annual Black History Month tour, they’ve run all over the campus of Morgan State University, as alumni shared their experiences and pointed out the
historically Black university’s architectural history. The squad has looked through the windows of the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum and learned how the place is one of few in the nation dedicated to preserving African American history.
“We’ve been doing that for the last few months, especially in the pandemic, taking pictures in certain places in Baltimore that promote either Black history or Black art or entrepreneurship,” said Jowanna Malone, 30, who joined RIOT Squad in 2019.
Malone, who grew up in rural Georgia and has lived in Charles Village since 2017, discovered the sport as an adult and loves the effort the group makes to combine
educational city tours with running.
“There is this perception of Baltimore being some type of dangerous, bad kind of place,” Malone said. “I do appreciate the effort that the group makes and having us run through all different parts of Baltimore and showing us all the beauty of the city.”
Founded in 2015, RIOT Squad is among a network of Baltimore-based running crews using social media to coordinate meetups, share routes, uplift community and promote grassroots activism. This past year, founder Rob Jackson changed up the routes after noticing the crew was running mainly in the Inner Harbor area.
“We have a lot of transplants in the group,” said Jackson, 39. “We run all over the city now. I wanted everybody to get a piece of this history and see parts of Baltimore that they normally wouldn’t see.”
Running routes have highlighted artwork like the Black Lives Matter Mural in front of City Hall and the Black-owned businesses of RIOT runners like Mess in a Bottle and Good Part & Co., whose founder was featured in photographer Devin Allen’s Under Armour campaign for Black History Month.
Jackson turned to running to process anxiety and stress from post-traumatic stress disorder after returning home from serving in the U.S. Army. Now a contracting officer, he started inviting his peers for runs, and six years later, the running crew has grown to over 30 members who meet up three times a week.
Jackson said growing up in Northeast Baltimore, the sport was foreign to him. Before he joined the military, he didn’t see distance running or Black-led run groups at all.
Others agreed.
“When you’re driving around different places, you may not see as many Black runners, we’re not as represented on television or just internationally in the sport,” said Tuan “Riley” Davis, who is from East Baltimore and joined RIOT Squad in 2019. “When I saw a group of runners that were Black, and they look[ed] around my age, all different shapes and sizes, I [knew] I could fit in with these guys.”
RIOT Squad is sponsored by Under Armour. Between this past October and Election Day, RIOT joined the Run to Vote initiative, where participants were encouraged to log 11.3 miles to show a commitment to civic engagement. Under Armour also provided product for the Black History Month tour, pre-race tips from its Human
Performance team, as well as highlighting RIOT Squad on its social media.
Other Baltimore-founded groups like A Tribe Called Run are combining fitness with activism, organizing a three mile run-raiser for residents in Baltimore’s 12th district facing food insecurity. The Black Running Organization, also known as BRO, has combined running with service learning and college access. National groups like Back on My Feet, which uses running to combat homelessness, Black Men Run, and Black Girls Run have local chapters in Baltimore.
RIOT Squad membership has increased during the pandemic.
“People are just looking for a way to get out of the house, a way to still have a sense of community, a way to stay healthy and stay
active,” said Alison Staples, 38, a RIOT Squad co-leader, who is from Woodlawn.
Jackson said he uses the group’s social media platform for conversations on mental health and fitness in addition to sharing the timing and routes for runs.
The sport also teaches you to be mentally fit, said Davis, 33.
“Running is more like a mental test,” said Davis, who has run consecutively for more than 270 days. “Do I have the mental strength to get up and keep going? Even on days when the weather may not be so nice, or I might not feel like it or I might be short on time.”
Malone said RIOT Squad has been a lifeline for her.
“That’s probably the only sense of communication that I have with people that’s in real life, on a regular basis, [and] that I feel safe doing,” she said. “It’s been this great feedback loop of positive energy that has sustained me mentally throughout the pandemic.”
This Sunday, the squad will meet at 8 a.m. at the Rusty Scupper Restaurant & Bar on Key Highway. They’ll be visiting the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park.
WASHINGTON — U.S. health advisers endorsed a one-dose COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson on Friday, putting the nation on the cusp of adding an easier-to-use option to fight the pandemic.
The Food and Drug Administration is expected to quickly follow the recommendation and make J&J’s shot the third vaccine authorized for emergency use in the U.S. Vaccinations are picking up speed, but new supplies are urgently needed to stay ahead of a mutating virus that has killed more than 510,000 Americans.
After daylong discussions, the FDA panelists voted unanimously that the benefits of the vaccine outweighed the risks for adults. If the FDA agrees, shipments of a few million doses could begin as early as Monday.
The company has said it can deliver 20 million doses by the end of March and a total of 100 million by the end of June. Johnson & Johnson announced in April that it had contracted with Gaithersburg-based Emergent BioSolutions to produce vaccine in its factory in East Baltimore
J&J’s vaccine protects against the worst effects of COVID-19 after one shot, and it can be stored up to three months at refrigerator temperatures, making it easier to handle than the previous vaccines, which must be frozen.
The two-dose Pfizer and Moderna shots were found to be about 95% effective against symptomatic COVID-19. The numbers from J&J’s study are not that high, but it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. One dose of the J&J vaccine was 85% protective against the most severe COVID-19. After adding in moderate cases, the total effectiveness dropped to about 66%.
Some experts fear that lower number could feed perceptions that J&J’s shot is a “secondtier vaccine.” But the difference in protection reflects when and where J&J conducted its studies.
J&J’s vaccine was tested in the U.S., Latin America and South Africa when more contagious mutated versions of the virus were spreading. That wasn’t the case last fall, when Pfizer and Moderna were wrapping up testing, and it’s not clear if their numbers would hold against the most worrisome of those variants.
The FDA reported this week that, like its predecessors, the J&J shot offers strong protection against the worst outcomes, hospitalization and death.While J&J is seeking FDA authorization for its singledose version, the company is also studying whether a second dose boosts protection.
Panel member Dr. Paul Offit warned that
launching a two-dose version of the vaccine down the road might cause problems.
“You can see where that would be confusing to people thinking, ‘Maybe I didn’t get what I needed,”’ said Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “It’s a messaging challenge.”
J&J representatives said they chose to begin with the single shot because the World
Health Organization and other experts agreed it would be a faster, more effective tool in an emergency.
Cases and hospitalizations have fallen dramatically since their January peak that followed the winter holidays. But public health officials warned that those gains may be stalling as more variants take root in the U.S.
“We may be done with the virus, but clearly the virus is not done with us,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said, speaking at the White House on Friday. She noted that new COVID-19 cases have increased over the past few days.
While it’s too early to tell if the trend will last, Walensky said adding a third vaccine “will help protect more people faster.”
On Sunday, a CDC panel is expected to meet to recommend how to best prioritize use of the J&J vaccine.
Other parts of the world already are facing which-is-best challenges. Italy’s main teachers’ union recently protested when the government decided to reserve Pfizer and Moderna shots for the elderly and designate AstraZeneca’s vaccine for younger, at-risk workers. AstraZeneca’s vaccine was deemed to be about 70% effective in testing. Canada became the latest country Friday to allow use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine.
Individuals do not fit comfortably onto a straight line from left to right, liberal to conservative, because their positions on specific topics may differ from others sharing the label, based on personal experience, research and negotiation. Even on that convenient linear construct of political difference and voting tendencies, there is no place for lawbreakers (“Takeaways from Congress’ first hearing on the Capitol riot,” Feb. 23).
Conservatives who refuse to align themselves with rabble-rousers, vandals and murderers do not deserve to be sullied by sharing a label with them. Threatening speech and destructive acts do not conserve — they destroy. Those who want to “slaughter” the representatives of legal authority have no right to be identified as “conservative.”
Neither are they revolutionaries talking and acting from political conviction. Anger is their only connection to the political and human consequences of their mythology, language and actions. They have no structured aftermath. The only plan is to fight.
Many angry people lack positive ways to express or enhance diminished personas, so they bully and hurt others, imitating their childish heroes. Anyone can talk and act badly when thwarted, even actual children.
When my loud, strong 3-year-old tried to get his way by throwing a kicking and screaming tantrum, we both nearly went down a flight of stairs. The next time, I turned him around and put him face down over my hip, gently restraining him until he tired. He tried a third tantrum, confirming it would not get him what he wanted, nor could he hurt me for not giving in. As a loving family, we moved on with guidance toward specific good behaviors such as effective displacement, negotiation and sharing, and by first grade, calling on his innate empathy to imagine how his actions affected others’ feelings. These days, he is an emergency room doctor dedicated (at a personal risk that became reality) to the healing of others.
Many have acted to begin to heal our damaged national political structure using firm restraint — the secure isolation of the bad actors — and moving on to the repair of the political and broad human consequences of their leaders’ tantrums.
To prevent further damage, the media can take responsibility for restraining messaging designed to elicit the worst in their
audiences. We deserve nothing less than the prompt correction and deletion of fraudulent claims and conspiracy theories: no false cries of “Fire!” Threats and target images also have no appropriate public stage. Hopefully, we can expect the permanent silencing of speech and images that are deceiving, hurtful or threatening on privately-owned but very publicly disseminated media.
Each of us can abandon hate-talk and ugly labels. We can dismiss claims involving aspersions on individuals or groups. We can politely correct misinformation. We can sympathize with and help those who hurt. We can support campaigns and vote to keep bad actors and bad talkers out of positions of authority.
With tantrums sidelined, we can come to accept what other loving, practical guidance or legislation is needed to enable our better selves.