Perspective: How historians got Nike to pull an ad campaign — in under six hours
The Nike logo is displayed on a window at a Nike store on March 21, 2019 in San Francisco. By Megan Kate Nelson Megan Kate Nelson is writing a book about the Civil War in the Southwest, which won a 2017 NEH Public Scholar Award and will be published by Scribner. April 12 It was still early on March 30 when historian Amy Kohout began scrolling through her Instagram feed. An image caught her eye: an ad by Nike promoting its new line of Trail Running gear, which launched this month.
After the war, historian Karen Cox explains, former Confederates used this narrative in a variety of ways to assert white supremacy across the South. This story “was ingrained in people for over a century,” says Cox, the author of"Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture." “It keeps getting repeated over and over again, and embedded in people’s minds through popular culture.
“Is this for real?” she tweeted, tagging historians of the American South and the Civil War. “Have any #twitterstorians seen this?” Historians were not the only ones protesting. Sports and political commentator Keith Olbermann replied with hashtags: “#ShouldaGoogledIt #FireEverybody.” Some people on Twitter speculated that the Nike “Lost Cause” ad was a dog whistle aiming to appeal to customers they lost with their Colin Kaepernick ad campaign urging people to “believe in something, even it means sacrificing everything.” It is also possible that “The Lost Cause” fits rather well with Nike’s other promotional campaigns that champion the underdog.
By mid afternoon on March 30, just six hours after the first historians began tweeting, the barrage of tweets offering historical context and sarcastic takes on “The Lost Cause” had an effect. Nike Trail had deleted the ad from its Instagram and Twitter accounts. Many of the shoe stores, running organizations and athletes who had originally promoted their “support for The Lost Cause” had deleted their posts as well.
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