Both a tribute to and celebration of Black people’s accomplishments and fortitude, Black Bike Week in the Twin Cities kicked off Sunday with an early morning slow roll to historic Black churches in Minneapolis. The eight-day event will conclude the evening of August 11, over dinner and conversation with world-renowned mountain biker Shaums March, the first African American chosen to attend the Mountain Bike World Championships, according to the Bike Instructor Certification Program (BICP).
Organizer Anthony Taylor, an educator, outdoorsman and accomplished cyclist himself, says that cycling initiatives like #30DaysofBiking in April, when the weather often is unpredictable, “is for the hearty. That doesn’t nurture people trying to find their way to biking. That’s not where you begin.”
Instead, Black Bike Week presents a different challenge: “How do we diversify who’s using a bike?”
The multi-faceted Cultural Wellness Center in Minneapolis and the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota — which is showcasing the week’s worth of events on its website — are among the six sponsors for Black Bike Week.
As a founding member of the Major Taylor Bicycling Club of Minnesota, the state’s premier African American cycling organization, Anthony Taylor started Black Bike Week in 2014 to expand access to and awareness of the sport to Black and other non-white cyclists.
“It’s a commemoration and celebration of the bike as a symbol of freedom, liberation and the contributions of African Americans to the movement,” says Taylor, 65. The Major Taylor club, which has chapters nationwide, is named for Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor, who in 1899 became the first African American to win a world cycling championship.
Press materials for Black Bike Week also highlight African American cyclist Kittie Knox, one of the few women in the League of American Wheelmen, back in the 1890s. When the league opted to prohibit non-white members in 1894, Knox challenged the racial exclusion policies. She also designed clothing to make biking accessible for women in an era of long skirts, big hats and lace-up shoes.
Progress is possible. This Tuesday evening, Black Bike Week is hosting a Ladies’ Night ride with Seaarra Hetherington of Biking with Baddies “to celebrate how cycling is growing in communities of women.”
Safety First
Six years after Anthony Taylor founded Black Bike Week in 2014, he spoke with Men’s Journal magazine about institutional racism in the not-so-great outdoors. It was September 2020, barely four months after police officers had murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, and Taylor described to reporter James Hancock how a noose had once been hung at a campsite where he was staying with his daughter.
She was 9 years old. “I’ve got to replace these memories,” Taylor recalled telling himself at the time. “I’ve got to change the emotional energy.”
Taylor spoke in the article about the distinction between a Black person being superficially welcomed at a park, playground, bike trail or campsite and truly feeling safe in outdoor spaces. “I told [my daughter] a story about my grandmother living in Mississippi, fighting for her rights and refusing to back down,” he told the Men’s Journal. “As a foundation — that’s what our people did, and that’s what we do. I said, ‘We have to take this space back.'”
Black Bike Week is one of many ways Taylor is working to reclaim and integrate the outdoors by helping people discover, practice and eventually succeed at an activity that brings him physical health, emotional solace and joy. “Why do the people we know love the outdoors?” he asked during a recent conversation with Streets.mn. “It’s a lifestyle. It brings balance to their lives.”
He’s a partner in Venture Bikes and Coffee on the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis, “a place where we want to build bike culture, not to sell expensive bikes. Biking for me has always been about building community,” Taylor says.
He wonders aloud — and sometimes asks his visitors directly — why most of the cyclists he sees on the Midtown Greenway are young adult white men, usually riding expensive bikes. “Demographically, on the Midtown Greenway at 10th Avenue, they’re in the middle of one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods,” where only 58% of the residents are white.
Larger issues of disparity are at play. “How do I remove your ability to predict who is the next cyclist? That’s the goal,” he says. He also wants to remove the ability to pick who owns a house based on race, “who has diabetes or cardiovascular disease; who has low income by race, ethnicity, gender and education. The work of this is a larger societal move to create equitable outcomes,” Taylor explains. “We wind up rewarding effort, and what I’m saying is: We have to reward outcomes. Who’s participating? Who’s reaping the benefits?”
Who Does Cycling Serve?
By visible example, Black Bike Week may shift the narrative about who cycling is for. “The sinister aspect of racism is the social and emotional harm it causes,” says Taylor, “the sense that you have been outside.”
And when the only cyclists you see are “super-fit,” and don’t otherwise look like you — whether in gender or age, ethnicity or body type, apparel choices or quality of bike — it becomes “a human confidence issue. People don’t want to fail, get hurt or be embarrassed.”
BikeMN Executive Director Michael Wojcik is partnering with Taylor on his goals, including an effort to get more cyclists of color and new cyclists on the inaugural Twin Cities Bike Tour on September 15. “The Bicycle Alliance wants to make biking, walking and rolling accessible to all Minnesotans, and this is part of that mission,” Wojcik says. “We recognize there are communities that haven’t had the same access or investment; and that is a historical wrong that we want to be part of correcting.”
It all begins with the basics. Venture Bikes and groups like Melanin in Motion, which Taylor founded, help new cyclists learn to ride and understand the equipment. A $30 fix or a bike that sells for less than $200 can take a new cyclist a lot farther, he explains, than a $1,500 e-bike.
“I take them out on the Greenway,” Taylor says. “We do a seat adjustment. How do they use a backpack? The No. 1 accessory I try to sell is an air pump. You have to put air in your tires.” That’s why he also offers loaner bikes at Melanin in Motion rides. “If people use a bike that’s tuned up, in shape, they have a better experience. That increases the amount they’ll spend on their first bike.”
Yes, he says, the environmental aspects of cycling are important, especially because climate change disproportionately affects people of color. “But the goal is to value biking because of the way it impacts your life, saves you money, makes your body feel better — this is about our relationship to nature.”
Photo at top by Stephy Miehle on Unsplash