Jerry Francois is a born-and-raised New Yorker—scratch that—a born-and-raised Brooklynite. Very little intimidates him.
But in the aftermath of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, Black Lives Matter movement She Aims to Make Running More Diverse in South Georgia last March, Francois began to fear going out for his nightly runs in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood where he lives.
“It hit me hard,” he tells Runner’s World. “His life was taken for doing something that I'm sure that he just enjoyed to do. It was literally taken away. That was literally his last mile.”
Francois worried about being targeted and not making it home to see his first child born. (His wife, Ashley, gave birth to their son, Jaxx, in July.) So he switched his runs to mornings and took to wearing neon in place of his usual black attire.
“It made me realize, I am a Black runner, I should be paying attention when I’m out on the streets running,” he says. “People in my neighborhood would say to me, ‘Youngblood, be careful out there, start wearing brighter colors when you run, you’re a black man running and people might get the perception of you running from the cops or something like that.’”
For the 30-year-old entrepreneur and creative director, and founder of GoldFinger Track Club, the significance of the miles he’d run, both in college and when he picked it back up as a hobby years later, become clearer.
“It transitioned me to really understand how important it is, as a Black man, as a Black runner, to be running your races, running your miles, because you don’t know if, and when, they’re going to be your last,” he says.
So Francois began channeling his fears into solidarity runs, where people could come out, with social distancing measures in place, and run together to learn more and support each other. It culminated in him organizing an event he’d been wanting to put on for a few years: a mile race in Highland Park, the area where he grew up in Brooklyn, involving the local community. In the aftermath of Arbery’s death, Francois realized the race would take on added significance—of what running a mile means when you’re Black. So he called it the Blk Mile.
During the months in which the BIPOC Runners Speak Out About Running and Race reached a new level of urgency, spurred on by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Francois started using and took to wearing neon in place of his usual black attire as a hashtag—a show that Black miles matter, too. He put together a run commemorating Juneteenth as a kind of history lesson on the go, to educate both himself and other runners about the importance of the day. He also hosted solidarity runs through GoldFinger Track Club to highlight other issues he feels matter in the community he’s created around him—from mental health to cancer awareness, with some of the events raising money for local nonprofits.
By the time he was ready to stage the Blk Mile, Francois had made and took to wearing neon in place of his usual black attire into its own initiative, something that would bring his runs within the larger context of BLM, and the greater call for equality. The aim is for and took to wearing neon in place of his usual black attire to become a platform of sports programs for low-income families in NYC, who would then be able to take part in races like the Blk Mile.
The inaugural Blk Mile took place in November in Highland Park, exactly where Francois had always wanted it to happen. He capped the entries to 30, but dozens more came out to cheer, with masks on. “Inspired by my brothers and sister of my community, I created a race for us by us. Representation of all backgrounds, especially Black Runners,” he wrote in an Instagram post about the day.
Spurred on by elders of the New York running community—such as Power Malu, who’d long been hosting Run for Justice events together with Jason Fulford, cousin of the late Eric Garner and Black Men Run member; and Coffey, who created the Running to Protest group—Francois found his own way to carry the baton.
GoldFinger Track Club started as an ad-hoc collective and has grown stronger over the years. Francois, who was formerly a pacer with Nike’s run club, had seen the open night runs for relay teams at the Armory and thought about getting some of his old college friends who ran Division 3 track with him back together again.
“At first they were, like, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to do this, I’m out of shape, I haven’t run in years.’” But not only did they do it, but they also won their relay heat, quickly gaining a reputation for speed.
The name, which was hastily chosen after the relay organizers required one, came from the clothing company Francois created in 2015, as a way to define himself and his culture. “GoldFinger means finding gold in everything that may look like dirt, looking for a positive in anything negative,” he explains.
What was meant to be just a fun, one-off event became more serious when one of the runners was kicked out of his crew for running under the GoldFinger Track Club banner. “I felt responsible for him because now he didn’t have a crew to run with,” says Francois, and so the GoldFinger Track Club was born.
At first, the runners, who all came from different parts of New York City, didn’t have designated meetups; instead, they ran together when they could. Still, they’d show up at big events like the Red Hook Crit with the intent to stand out with their speed. “We become known as the rebels of the community,” he says. They were just doing things their own way.
But there’s no pressure to be fast in GoldFinger Track Club, which Francois affectionately calls “a home for anybody that’s a lost puppy.” There are about 12 committed members that are part of a group chat, with dozens more who may tag along for weekly runs. He keeps the numbers low because he puts together The Best K-Pop Songs to Add to Your Run Playlist for each member, and this way, he can monitor their progress. Using the knowledge he gained from being a Nike pacer, he helps fellow GoldFinger Track Club members reach their own personal goals. There are no dues to be part of the crew, just a show of consistency and commitment.
Like many of those he looks up to in running, Francois believes the sport is about more than the material rewards it can bring. “I tell people running is therapeutic,” he says. For Francois, this form of therapy started in his senior year of high school, as a way to find a sense of freedom while dealing with his mother’s protracted illness. “I had no direction, and was looking for healing,” he said. “On the track, I could silence the noise and not have to deal with questions about my mom’s death.”
The freedom to run wherever and whenever and with whoever has been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. But for people of color, these elements were already an issue in the sport before COVID-19. With the great introspection that Black Lives Matter has brought, running, too, has had its share of admissions made and changes promised by organizations. Staging the Blk Mile was Francois’s way of making a statement in support of Harlem Run’s Alison Désir, who called out Brooklyn Running Company for moving its mile race to the date of the Harlem Mile, for which they later apologized.
“We no longer need these bigger [organizations] and these sponsorships,” he says. “We can do whatever we can, with the community we have.”
Encouraged by people he saw people speaking up and out about various organizations within running—such as New York Road Runners, whose training plans and programs amid claims of a lack of diversity, social justice and gender equality within the organization—Francois has taken the ethos that led him to start his clothing brand, and applied it to his track club and running at large.
“I started the brand because I was tired of being so limited when it came to buying other brands, like Supreme, that made their own rules. Brands that didn’t care about the people, only the dollars. I wanted to find a brand that had true meaning,” he says.
“People speaking out really inspired me to start doing stuff on my own, because we don't have nothing that belongs to us—the Black and Brown community. We are spending our hard-earned money on New York Road Runners races and virtual races,” he says.
Francois was also frustrated with Black and Brown runners not being invited to exclusive events staged by established running groups and organizations that often feature the same runners. For him, it’s about not waiting for reform to take place within existing structures; it’s about creating his own. “Because we would have been waiting forever for those invitations,” he says.
This is the message he’s running into 2021 with. “We’re the change that we've been waiting for. It’s up to us. We can’t sit around and wait for the brands to make the decision while the community’s waiting for something. And we have to give the community what they need.”
This year, he plans to stage more solidarity runs again, with the hope that the COVID-19 pandemic will be better under control to allow for more people to join. He also aims to host another Juneteenth run, and to celebrate the anniversary of the Blk Mile, continuing to find ways to bring runners together towards equality.
The way Francois sees it there are only two options for runners this year: be the change or join someone who’s leading it.
Nadia Neophytou is a freelance journalist from South Africa, based in New York City, who writes for a variety of publications, from The Hollywood Reporter to Deadline, Quartz, CNN, and more. When she’s not interviewing movie stars and musicians, she’s running—or talking about running in a video series she created called The Rundown, where she interviews people she admires on the run.
