NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Four years ago, Shawn Dromgoole was too afraid to go on a walk through his neighborhood on his own.
Now, he is surrounded by hundreds of people every time he slips his tennis shoes on. What’s turned into a national movement all started with a simple post on Nextdoor and a neighbor holding a sign that said, “We Walk With Shawn.”
“I can’t even describe, or understand, or comprehend sometimes what happened,” Dromgoole said. “Instantly, it was not about my fear. It was about making sure that people knew each other.”
He wrote that first post on Nextdoor only about three months after COVID-19 began spreading throughout the country. Dromgoole had been home from his retail job most of that time and said he wanted to start walking to get a little healthier.
However, when he stepped onto his front porch to go on his first walk, something stopped him. In the back of his mind, Dromgoole said he couldn’t stop thinking about Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was killed by his neighbors while jogging near Brunswick, Georgia.
Dromgoole, who had just buried his cousin in Dec. 2019, grew up playing on the same streets where Arbery was killed. Three men claimed that they assumed Arbery was a burglar when they blocked his path and shot him on Feb. 23, 2020, but they were later found guilty of murder.
“That was the realization, that this really can happen to me,” Dromgoole said. “The thought was, I might not be a suspicious looking Black man, but if you say suspicious looking Black man, I’m guilty by association of the color of my skin.”
Every year, Dromgoole’s family would travel down to Brunswick for family reunions, but his mother and much of his immediate family has lived in the 12South neighborhood in Nashville for most of their lives. They all still live within a 10-block radius of each other.
Still, Dromgoole never completely felt safe. Even before Arbery’s murder, Dromgoole had a ritual of talking with someone on the phone anytime he would be walking down the street.
“I never walked without being on the phone. I started that one when Trayvon Martin got killed because I wanted someone to hear my last breath. Literally, it was that serious to me,” Dromgoole said. “That’s a horrible way to look at the world, but that was my security.”
The 12South neighborhood historically belonged to a “sprawling Black community” and has over time become more “gentrified,” Dromgoole explained. But that wasn’t the main thing keeping him from stepping off his porch. He later found out that the problem was he didn’t know his neighbors.
‘America had been awakened in a way that no one could look away’
After his hesitation to leave that day, Dromgoole’s mother inspired him to write a post telling others of how his family had lived in the neighborhood for 54 years and he was afraid to go on a walk.
“I didn’t say in that post, ‘Will someone please go walk with me?’ I read it every year. I read it at least once every six months,” Dromgoole said. “I never say, “Can anybody go walk with me?’ I didn’t even think that.”
He made the post on Nextdoor and went to take a shower. By the time he got out, nearly 50 people had commented saying things like, “We’ll go walking with you” and “Don’t be afraid, you don’t have to feel like that.”
“I think a lot of people reacted to that because they knew, because America had been awakened in a way that no one could look away,” Dromgoole said, recalling the social justice movements at the time. “So, my neighbors say, ‘We’ll walk with you’.”
For the first walk along 12th Avenue, there was no plan, just a post saying when and where to meet. Dromgoole said he was stunned when he saw 75 people in the parking lot waiting to walk with him.
“I had no idea. I promise. It sounds like it should be a movie. It doesn’t make sense. There’s 75 people in this parking lot. I don’t know where we’re walking and I’m nervous,” he said. “By the time we got home, people started responding, like, ‘Can we do it again next week?'”
He organized the second walk about a week later and things quickly began spiraling from there, with several local news outlets coming out to interview him. By that Saturday the news had made it all the way to the Washington Post and People Magazine.
“I was too southern and too green to know that I was getting major press inquiries. In fact, I didn’t even realize what People Magazine was,” Dromgoole said. “By that time, People Magazine had went to copy, my whole life changed.”
Dromgoole laughed recalling how in his interview with People he told the whole world his address and to come to his house and walk with him. However, that became the very essence of the movement as it spread on a national level.
“People from all over the country were like, ‘Hey, this is our story, this is our neighborhood.’ Or, ‘We don’t want our neighborhood to be like this, can you come and walk with us?'” he said. “We ended up starting a foundation called More Than A Walk, just to build community, to help people.”
‘I think being a neighbor is a personal responsibility’
Hundreds of walks have since been carried out in Nashville and across the United States in places as far away as New York and Washington D.C. During those walks, Dromgoole said he’s come to meet people from every walk of life and gotten to know his own neighbors better.
It’s been through that experience that he’s learned to no longer feel afraid.
“I saw people differently from different socioeconomic backgrounds. They were different. They were me. We had one thing in common. That we could walk together,” he said. “I saw that difference. So, I don’t think I have a right to think that way anymore.”
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His own realization is something that he hopes others take away from the walks as the We Walk With Shawn movement continues to spread across the nation, even four years later.
“Unity is such a cliche thing, but also it takes — I look at neighborhoods and communities as quilts or flower gardens,” Dromgoole said. “There are diverse flowers, there are different pieces of fabric. There’s lights and darks, there’s shades of 18,000 shades of pink. All of them make the community, the country better. We need each other.”
Dromgoole will be celebrating the fourth year of the movement on Saturday, June 1 as he walks with Nashvillians at Sevier Park, rain or shine. It will be the first walk of the year, with 99 more planned between now and Jan. 2025.
The walk will begin at noon at the Clayton Avenue entrance. People can follow the We Walk With Shawn Facebook or Instagram pages to find out more information about Saturday’s walk or future events.
“The other thing that was happening in 2020, I realized there was an ugly, fraught presidential election. And we walked through that. So, this year, we’re gearing up to do the same,” Dromgoole said. “I think being a neighbor is a personal responsibility. It’s a celebration of that. We can do this, and I really want this year to show the world again that we can do it.”
