Conversation Questions for Parents and Teachers
How do you think Kittie become such a courageous and determined young woman?
What do you think she learned from her family? Her community?
How do you think her experiences with her Black, White, and immigrant neighbors might have affected her dreams and actions?
Are there people in your city or town or neighborhood that seem like Kittie Knox in her courage and determination? They don’t have to be cyclists or of any particular race or gender.
How was Kittie a model of good health? Do you think you could do what she did? Now or in the future?
Actions You Might Take
Draw a picture of Kittie with you and your friends as you think you would like bicycling in your neighborhood.
Create a short play about Kittie? What kind of scenery would you need? What would actors say to each other (the dialogue)?
Find a Google map of Boston and locate Kittie’s brick house at the corner of Irving and Cambridge streets (220 Cambridge Street). What is there now on the bottom floor? What could you do there?
Historical Backgrounds
Cycling
Modern cycling began in the early 1870s. the Boston Bicycling Club – a gentlemen’s organization, started in 1878. They raced and toured on high wheeled bicycles.
Women, and men who could not vault up into a high wheeler seat started riding large-wheeled tricycles. They formed clubs to take leisurely rides into the countryside.
By the late 1880s, “safety” bicycles began to appear. They had equal-sized wheels, cushioned tires, and chains. Some had brakes. Women’s bikes had a curved frame to fit a long dress, and chain guards to avoid the dress being caught in the chain. But this drop frame had to be heavier than a man’s “diamond” frame to be strong enough. Kittie and other young fast riding women chose the diamond frame.
The greater speed and lower price of safety bicycles attracted many different sorts of people to cycling. In the mid-1890s cycling was more popular than baseball and football, and the new sport of basketball. But only men could race under League of American Wheelmen (“League”) regulations. It was feared that women who rode fast would publicly sweat, develop a “bicycle face” from the strain and a “bicycle hump” from bending over the handlebars.
Many state militias in New England started Bicycle Units. The all-Black Company L of the 6th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, had its own Black officers and had an armory in the West End near Kittie’s home. Many members were West End or Cambridge cyclists and members of the Riverside Cycle Club. They paraded on bicycles with other militia units and got special praise from the Governor of Massachusetts.
Southern bicycle clubs agitated to kick Black cyclists out of the League and succeeded in 1894. Massachusetts and several other states tried to resist the color bar but lost the final vote.
Cycling declined and by the 1900s it was almost gone. Bike clubs, cycling reporters, and news disappeared. Gentlemen cyclists joined the newly forming country clubs to get away from the sights and smells of the city, and its immigrants. They started riding and racing motorcycles and eventually automobiles. The automobile took advantage of the League’s “Good Roads” campaign. Cycling rolled only slowly on – the Bicycling Bust – until the 1970s when the environmental movement aroused great interest in it again – a Bicycling Renaissance.
Race
Black Americans looked forward to a better life with freedom from slavery (13th Amendment, 1865). The 14th Amendment (1868) guaranteed citizenship, and the 15th Amendment (1870) got Black men the right to vote. A Public Accommodations law prohibiting discrimination passed in 1875. But a reaction came on in full force, amid the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. Federal troops were withdrawn from the Confederate states in 1877, and there was no real obstacle the reassertion of White supremacy. The Public Accommodations law was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1883.
A massive growth in anti-Black (Jim Crow) laws and practices in the South affected northern culture and politics too, even in that hotbed of Abolitionism – Boston.
In addition, laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the growth of the Immigration Restriction League(1894) created opposition to immigrants.
A wave of demeaning cartoons, vaudeville acts, minstrel shows, parade floats, advertisements and songs – cycling songs too – mocked Black citizens and immigrants.
In Boston cycling clubs, too, there were steps backward to fall in line with the national movement against Black and immigrant rights. Sterling Elliott, for example, President of the League, who had been a supporter of Kittie Knox in 1895, changed his mind. And Kittie’s White ally Charles Percival was slapped down by the national leadership of the Century Road Club of America for promoting a century ride with no color bar.
So, Kittie’s time was a time of increasing challenges to Black rights. The fight for rights reached another peak in the 1950s and 1960s, but threats continue.
Gender
In Kittie’s big year of 1895 the right of women to vote was still twenty-five years away. A national cultural conflict went on between “modern” women (the New Woman or Coming Woman) and their male allies, versus the traditionalists (many men but some women, too). They opposed women’s suffrage (the vote), modern dress style – also known as “rational dress” – careers outside the home, freedom to travel, to own property (if married), in inheritance, and in many other ways.
Some cycling women banded together under the umbrella of The Wheelwoman and its publisher Mary Sargent Hopkins. The magazine boosted cycling but insisted that women should wear dresses and portray a lady-like image. Yet they had to deal with the increasing adoption of bloomers by fast-riding younger women like Kittie Knox.
The suffrage movement was divided over the question of race. The National American Women’s Suffrage Association was not committed to Black social and political rights. As Kittie Knox moved to the West End, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin started a new club and journal called Women’s Era. They carried pro-Black suffragist messages. Ruffin was a speaker at anti-lynching protests held at the Charles Street AME Church, just a few blocks from Kittie’s home. The Church also hosted protests of the League’s color bar and many other barriers.
So, Kittie Knox’s neighborhood was a hotbed of political activism. While the newspapers never mention her speaking at the rallies, they likely influenced her determination to continue on her pedaling ways, despite the barriers. (WC = 889)
Bibliography
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Pres of Harvard University Press, 2001).
Adelaide Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class, 1750–1950. (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1994).
Lorenz J, Finison, Boston’s Cycling Craze: A Story of Race, Sport, and Society (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).
Lorenz J. Finison, “Kittie Knox, Boston Cyclist in the 1890s: The War Between Exclusion and Inclusion,” In Robert Cvornyek and Douglas Stark, Boston’s Black Athletes: Identity, Performance, and Activism.” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2024).
J.A. Mangan and Andrew Ritchie (Eds.), Ethnicity, Sports, Identity: Struggles for Status. (London: Frank Cass, 2004).
Elizabeth Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston 1865-1900 (New York: Academic Press, 1979).
Mark Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890-1920 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997).
Racial Labels
In capitalizing both Black and White, I have followed the guidelines of The Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP), the American Psychological Association (APA), and Isabel Wilkerson’s practice in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Kittie and other biracial children were also called “mulatto.” The term “colored” was frequently used in nineteenth and early twentieth century documents. The census-taker in 1880 penciled a note about the Knox’s as the “only colored family in this section [of Cambridge].” This was a big contrast to her West End neighborhood in Boston where she was one among many.
Bicycling History 