Ellison Brown

Ellison Myers Brown, known as Tarzan Brown and among his own people as Deerfoot, was a Native American long-distance runner from Rhode Island who won the Boston Marathon twice, in 1936 and 1939. He is one of only two Indigenous runners to have won that race and the only one to have won it twice. A direct descendant of the last acknowledged royal family of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, he ran the marathon at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin and qualified for the 1940 Games, which were cancelled after the outbreak of the Second World War. His 1939 Boston time of 2:28:51 set an American men's record for the marathon, and he lowered the record again at a 1940 marathon in Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts, with 2:27:30. He was inducted into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame in 1973.