'This is a family': the Black-led groups biking against racism

On 20 June, while Donald Trump bloviated before an underwhelming crowd at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, seven cyclist activists who had only recently met led a four-mile-long procession of an estimated 10,000 protesters on wheels across Manhattan, snarling traffic and greeting jubilant bystanders as they chanted “Black lives matter” and exchanged fists of solidarity.

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Going by the name Street Riders NYC, the Brooklyn-based crew had spent a week planning the 14-mile “justice ride” from Times Square to Harlem then down Broadway, concluding in Battery Park. “We’re like the moving billboard for Black Lives Matter. We can literally take it from borough to borough, all in one day, and make our message heard,” said Orlando Hamilton, 28, the charismatic, Marley-esque spokesman for the group. Though he is the one who addresses protesters before and after each ride, the group stresses that they are non-hierarchical.

As a teenager, Hamilton lost a friend to police violence, and the cops would routinely harass a close family member of his, who has mental illness. Before getting furloughed, Hamilton, who is a chef, worked at Carbone, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Greenwich Village. Incensed by George Floyd’s murder, he took to the streets where he saw how bikes enabled riders to both evade police kenneling and shield protesters. He began rallying other cyclists with the cry: “All bikes to the front.” As he kept going to protests, certain faces would reappear; when they got to talking, it turned out Peter Kerre and Antonio Garcia had also been leading bikers to the front. The three, along with Heins Evander, Travon Lewis, Drew Dudak and Kieron Cruz, decided to form a crew over Instagram group chat.

“That’s what this group is all about, making everyone safe,” said Garcia, 24. He cited a recent Facebook video by the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in which she describes protesters as “protectors”, after the Standing Rock resisters – the Street Riders are protectors, too, in his view.

“At first you feel scared,” Hamilton said of their traffic-snaggling tactics. “Like, ‘Hold on, you’re sacrificing me to go and be in front of the police?’ But then you see how everybody is actually working together.”

“That’s our reputation: we are safe, and we’re inclusive,” said Garcia, a pink-haired artist and native of Chiapas, Mexico. “Anybody is welcome.”

Street Riders NYC is part of the wave of young, Black-led organizations responsible for huge protests in New York. Regularly, these groups – including Warriors in the Garden, an especially engaged collective of activists in their 20s dedicated to peaceful protest for legislative change – will intermingle and unite, such as on Juneteenth, when Black Lives Matter NYC organizers enlisted the Street Riders to support their march from Brooklyn, then link up with a Warriors-led gathering in Manhattan, with thousands marching on to Central Park. “There weren’t many big bike protests, and now there’s five other bike protests going on too,” Hamilton observed, alluding to new, Black-led groups like Mind Body Results Cycling, Good Company Bike Club, Riders4Rights and Hoop York City, a women’s basketball league founded in 2018 that has recently pivoted from Zoom workout fundraisers to rides against racism after which riders are invited to donate to charity.

Existing groups with Black leadership have gotten in on the two-wheeled action, too: This past weekend, Bushwig, a home for drag and queer performance since 2012, led a “queers and queens unite” solidarity ride as a prelude to their annual Pride festival.

Heins Evander, a photographer who sets the group’s pace, described their protests as a “a gateway for people who want to get involved”, Hamilton concurred. “Before this, the culture of biking in New York was seen as an older white male-type thing,” he said. “They’re welcome [to protest] too. And they have been joining. But there’s other types of people out there that are riding and that created a culture too.”

A key tenet of that culture is care. If the Hong Kong protesters’ credo was Bruce Lee’s famous fighting philosophy to “be water”, the Street Riders’ ethos might be “we got you”, a phrase members regularly employ when describing their mission. It’s present in Hamilton’s pre-ride exhortations to hydrate and “get to know your neighbor”, just as it is in their constant on-the-go mending of protesters’ flat tires. Such care sets a tone. At the end of their Times Square ride I came upon one protester, Ruth Leary, a non-profit worker who had ridden miles lugging a fallen pedal in hope of returning it to its owner.

“The most important thing is the people who ride with us,” said Street Riders co-founder Peter Kerre, 39. “As much as it’s a protest, we make sure they feel this is like a family. We slow down, we check on people, we make sure nobody is left behind.”

Mixed in with the collective warm fuzzies is a certain rebellious, confrontational swagger. (“Why you look so mad, Black cop?” Hamilton taunted over the bullhorn. “We out here for y’all.”) Indeed, what might stand out most about the Street Riders, beyond their ability to draw such a crowd, is their tough yet tender approach. To ride with them feels like joining a joyfully freewheeling, occasionally flexed band of righteous outlaws turned liberators that won’t hesitate to shut down two lanes of the Williamsburg Bridge in the name of Black lives, as they did after the Times Square protest, then dismount and walk in solidarity down that same bridge, rows of menacing car headlights behind them, after stopping the entire procession as a safety precaution because just one protester’s bike has become unrideable.

Such solidarity – against systemic racism, against police brutality, with fellow riders and the public – is moving to see. Time and again, during three weeks of rolling with the crew, I’ve witnessed a striking diversity of protesters and supporters on the street – across race, gender, creed, age, orientation, ability and class. For Kerre, the group’s dreadlocked, e-scooter-riding elder, two encounters stand out: meeting an older activist in East New York crying with joy as thousands of protesters walked their bikes down her narrow street, and seeing a group of Hasidic boys in South Williamsburg chanting: “Black lives matter! Black lives matter!”

“To see so many young Orthodox Jewish kids” supporting the movement “is such a powerful thing”, said Kerre, a cybersecurity expert and accomplished DJ who has worked with Alicia Keys. “It shatters so many stereotypes. I’m reading news stories about small towns in America that have no Black people, but they’re having a protest. It’s touching because, as a Black person, we feel like everyone hates us. We’re treated like animals. Anything you do, you’re killed. Anything you do, someone calls the cops on you.”

Of course, not everyone is along for the ride. One irate woman in a stopped SUV on East 59th Street demanded protesters reimburse her for the time they’d made her wait. When informed of the additional delay – 20 or so more minutes – she snarled: “Get a life!”

“I like that they’re young Black and Latino men who are taking the steps to make the changes that are impacting them the most,” Juny François, a 50-year-old lawyer, told me in Battery Park after the Times Square ride. Since joining on three rides and finally meeting the crew in person, she’s offered to handle their legal work, such as setting them up as a not-for-profit to properly receive donations, pro bono. For this ride, François, who is Black, had brought along her two 17-year-old nephews. “They’re giving people an outlet that’s safe and that’s making a difference,” she praised.

Judging by their turnouts, the Street Riders have achieved this goal. But they’re not easing up. A few days after the Times Square ride, the Street Riders updated their Instagram profile to link to a Change.org petition they had created to divert emergency call response to mental illness and substance abuse away from the New York police department. (They are more than halfway to their goal of 10,000 signatures; they will present the final outcome to city council.) Divestment has been a rallying point for many activists. Hours earlier, two hundred protesters, led by organizers from the grassroots group Vocal-NY, had begun occupying City Hall Park, with a related demand for police defunding.

Later that night at City Hall Park, I ran into Garcia, who was spending the night occupying. Surrounded by new friends he’d made at previous protests, he appeared both exhausted and elated by all the activity around him. More than 600 protesters had set up an improvised camp – replete with free hot food, a mobile sound system and charging station. The mood pinballed between militant and festive. As the mechanical rattle from the projector illuminating “No justice no peace” on the surrogate’s court across from us threatened to overwhelm his soft voice, he described the Street Riders’ upcoming plans: New York City rides every Saturday, a potential one all the way to Washington DC, more petitions. They want to print out fliers to give to upset drivers they have stopped, explaining their reasons for protesting. “It has to evolve, because you have to be better than yesterday,” he said. “And that’s something we try to make clear to everybody who joins. Yesterday was great, but now it’s today. And today is gonna be better.”