Kittie Knox and the Bike Boom

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
are going to talk about Kitty Knox, who was a
cyclist during the bicycle boom of the late nineteenth century,

(00:25):
and her story is tied to so much, just really
so much. This bicycle boom had connections to the Good
Roads movement and the suffrage movement and dress reform, and
then Kitty Knox's story in particular also connects to civil
rights because Knox was biracial and became known not just

(00:45):
for participating in what was a predominantly white sport, but
also for the clothes that she wore to do it,
and the fact that the League of American Wheelman tried
to close its membership to people of color after she
had already joined. We are going to start off in
this episode with a bit of bicycle history. Some of

(01:06):
it is stuff that has like come up in tiny
little glimpses and some of our past episodes on cyclists,
but this is some more comprehensive look at how bicycles
developed because we want to set the stage for how
bicycles became so incredibly popular in the United States during
Knox's lifetime, and how the sudden popularity of bicycles affected

(01:29):
the society that she was living in. Precursors to the
bicycle as we know it today didn't have pedals. You
pushed along the ground with your feet, or you rolled
downhill on them. One was the swift Walker, also called
the dre Zine after its inventor carlv Andres, who introduced
it in Germany in eighteen seventeen. The swift Walker had

(01:50):
a wooden frame and wooden wheels which had iron rims
and leather covered tires. Over the decades that followed, various
people improved on this designed by adding pedals to it,
and they also started calling these new vehicles by a
number of different names, including both velocipede and bicycle. But

(02:10):
these early bicycles were also called bone shakers because they
gave such a very rough ride. They were introduced to
the United States by eighteen sixty eight, but they were
so heavy and so cumbersome and frankly, so unpleasant to
be on that they did not really take off. Also,
if you're gonna send in a note about what the

(02:32):
word velocopied means there were a lot of different people
who used this word to describe a lot of different vehicles,
and it's become kind of an umbrella for usually two
wheeled human powered vehicles. But in my head, it's a
monster bug with a cajillion legs. Bicycles moved from leather

(02:55):
covered tires to solid rubber ones in eighteen sixty nine
and in eighteen seven and the bicycle builders started making
frames from hollow steel tubes and using wire spoked wheels
rather than wooden ones. Using wire spokes under tension made
it possible to make the wheels bigger without their being
unmanageably heavy. The result was the high wheeler, also known

(03:17):
as the penny farthing, which had one very large front
wheel and a smaller back wheel. This nickname came from
the relative sizes of two British coins, the penny and
the much smaller farthing. With a high wheeler, the rider
sat on a seat that was mounted above that big
front wheel, and the size of the front wheel gave
it several advantages. Each rotation of the petals moved that

(03:41):
huge wheel a lot, so as long as you were
not trying to go uphill you could go farther with
less effort. The size of the wheel also meant that
it could roll over things like small holes in the
road without a big problem, and once you were actually moving,
the whole thing was pretty stable. But there were are
also some pretty significant downsides. High wheelers were expensive and

(04:05):
for the most part only upper class people could afford them.
The seat was roughly chest high on the average rider,
so getting on and off could be a challenge, so
was safely bringing it to a stop. Brakes were minimal,
and they had to work against the power of that
huge front wheel. And while the front wheel could go
over small holes without a problem, if it hit a

(04:26):
big rock or a big stick or something else that
could cause it to stop suddenly. The rider usually took
a header, meaning that they flew over the handlebars and
landed head first. That could cause serious or even fatal injuries. Yeah,
I mean, people still can fly over the handlebars of
a bicycle, but this was from a height of like
a five foot tall wheel that you were sitting above,

(04:49):
a long way to fall. In spite of these limitations,
high wheelers were popular enough that people started forming clubs
to encourage their use and to provide a place for
a rider's to meet and socialize. For example, the first
bicycling club in the US was the Boston Bicycle Club,
formed in eighteen seventy eight. The high wheelers design made

(05:09):
it nearly impossible for most women to ride in the
clothing that was considered appropriate for them, so most women
who wanted to ride instead opted for a tricycle. These
had the same juxtaposition of big and small wheels, but
in a woman's tricycle there were two large rear wheels
with a seat in between them and then a smaller

(05:30):
wheel in front. The pedals connected to the rear wheels
through rods in a crank. There were also tricycles that
had a larger front wheel and two smaller rear wheels,
but these were mostly ridden by children, especially boys. Bicycles
and tricycles rose in popularity in spite of a major
obstacle to actually using them. The roads were not great.

(05:54):
The first recorded use of asphalt as a road surface
in the US was in Newark, New Jersey, in eighteen seventy,
but that very first attempt did not hold up very well.
The types of asphalt and concrete and composite that are
used for most road surfaces in the US today had
not been developed yet, so instead road surfaces included things

(06:15):
like McAdam, which incorporated compacted crushed stone, as well as
things like cobble stones and planks. But for the most part,
these kinds of roads were built in and around cities.
In more rural areas, roads were more like dirt paths.
The farmer whose land the road ran through or next too,

(06:36):
was responsible for maintaining that road on their own time
and at their own expense, so how well any road
was maintained, or whether it was maintained at all, could
really vary. Bad weather often meant that rural roads became
totally impassable. Obviously, there are still plenty of problems with
roads in the US today, and not every road is paved,

(06:58):
but at the end of the nineteenth century the roads
in the US were a lot worse. In eighteen eighty,
the League of American Wheelman was founded in Newport, Rhode Island,
as quote an organization to promote the general interests of cycling,
to ascertain, defend, and protect the rights of wheelman, and
to facilitate touring. The League did things like arranging rides

(07:22):
and races, providing social opportunities for members, helping people recover
stolen bikes and recover from crashes while biking, and advocating
for better roads. The league became a big part of
the good Roads movement, which called for taxpayer funded improved
roads all over the United States. This idea was really controversial.

(07:48):
Cyclists or wheelman as they were known at the time,
faced a lot of antagonism from other people using the roads,
including pedestrians, people on horseback, horse drawn vehicles, and in
some cities, street cars and trolleys. People argued that cyclists
were creating traffic jams and endangering themselves and other road users,

(08:09):
and some places tried to pass legislation to prohibit bicycles
and tricycles from using roads and parks. People were irate
over the idea that these same people who were supposedly
clogging up and misusing the roads were also calling for
measures that could raise taxes, and in rural areas, farmers
were very angry that the proposed road improvements could force

(08:33):
them to do even more work to maintain those roads.
Except for the part about rural farmers, this is still
the comments section on every article about someplace adding a
bike lane today. When the League of American Wheelman was founded,
there were already cycling organizations all over the United States,
especially in the Northeast, but a lot of them brought

(08:55):
together cyclists of a particular race or ethnicity, so these
tended to be small organizations that were locally focused. The
idea behind the League of American Wheelman was to open
up its membership to anyone over the age of eighteen
and bring cyclists together at the national level, giving them
more leverage to advocate for cycling and advocate for better

(09:18):
roads to ride on. In the mid eighteen eighties, the
potential membership of the League of American Wheelman increased enormously
thanks to a new development in bicycles, the safety cycle.
As was the case with the addition of pedals, several
different people introduced designs that incorporated the same basic elements

(09:38):
front and rear wheels of the same size, with the
pedals connected to the rear wheel by a treadle or
a chain. The first commercially successful version of the safety
cycle was called the Rover, and it was introduced by
John Kemp Starley in five Not long after pneumatic tires
also made the ride both smoother and faster. Safety cycles

(10:01):
were a lot smaller, lighter, and safer than the penny farthing,
and a lot less expensive. While a penny farthing might
cost a hundred dollars or more, soon there were safeties
that cost between thirty and seventy five dollars, and people
could pay as little as five dollars for a used one.
This was still most affordable to middle and upper class people,

(10:22):
but it was also just more affordable to a lot
more people than the penny farthing had been. The result
was a bicycle boom, and by the eighteen nineties there
were more than five hundred organizations dedicated to cycling all
around the US. Hundreds of businesses had started up to
make and sell hundreds of thousands of bicycles per year.

(10:45):
When the Panic of eight three started, the bicycle industry
was one of the only ones that really kept growing.
Kitty Knox's bicycle was a safety and we'll get to
that after a sponsor break. In addition to being less expensive,

(11:10):
safety cycles made it easier for nineteenth century women to
ride while still wearing clothing that was considered appropriate. That
meant that many women, especially middle and upper class women
suddenly had access to a new source of recreation and
a new way to travel on their own. Soon, bicycles
were becoming associated with the suffrage movement and with women's

(11:32):
rights and freedoms more generally. Both Susan B. Anthony and
Elizabeth Katie Stanton were quoted as saying woman is writing
to suffrage on the bicycle. Stanton talked about the bicycle
as inspiring women with courage, self respect, and self reliance,
and at one point Anthony said, quote, let me tell
you what I think of bicycling. I think it has

(11:55):
done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.
It gives women a feeling of freedom and self reliance.
I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman
ride by on a wheel, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.
There were still some challenges though. Long dresses and their
underlayers could easily get caught in chains, gears, or spokes.

(12:19):
One attempt to deal with this was the introduction of
bicycles with a step through frame rather than the original
diamond frame. So the diamond frame had a bar stretching
from below the handlebars to below the seat, but the
step through frame had a lower central bar, so someone
in a dress could step over it more easily and,
in the view of the time, more modestly. This also

(12:43):
left more room for all of that fabric. If you've
ever warn't a dress from this period, even if you're
doing the most simple day dress, it's a lot of fabric.
It is a lot. Some step through models also had
guards around the chain or around the back wheel to
try to keep dresses from becoming in hangled. For a
lot of women, though, a better solution was not to

(13:04):
ride in a dress. So the skyrocketing popularity of bicycles
in eighteen eighties and nineties also encouraged a movement for
dress reform. Women's cyclists started wearing trousers or leggings under
their dresses, or wearing bloomers and other bifurcated garments as
they rode, and of course this led to lots of criticism,

(13:26):
some of it from other women. Mary Sergeant Hopkins was
a vocal advocate for women's cycling, publishing a magazine called
Wheel Women from to eight. In eighteen ninety four, she
told a New York Times reporter quote, if there is
one thing I hate, it is a masculine woman. It
has made my heart sore to see the women who

(13:49):
have been putting on knickerbockers, riding with the diamond framed wheel,
the wheel with a high crossbar, and racing and scorching
with the men. It has made whee link just another
way to make a fool of herself, bring cycling to disrepute,
and make herself the laughing stock of the people. She
has made a halfway sort of creature of herself. She

(14:09):
can't be a man, and she is a disgrace as
a woman. I don't like her. That's a bless your
heart moment for me. Bless your heart, Mary Sergeant hop Yeah. So.
People also speculated that cycling would cause women to become aroused,
or damage their reproductive organs, or harm their health and

(14:33):
their bodies in some other way. There were even concerns
about something called bicycle face, which was described in all
kinds of ways. One article in edition of Literary Digest
cited British medical journals before describing bicycle face this way.
Quote over exertion, the upright position on the wheel, and

(14:55):
the unconscious effort to maintain one's balance tend to produce
a wearied and exhausted bicycle face. This piece also quoted
the Springfield Republican is saying bicycle face was quote usually flushed,
but sometimes pale, often with lips more or less drawn
in the beginning of dark shadows under the eyes, and

(15:16):
always with an expression of weariness. We don't have any
journals or letters or other personal memories from Kitty Knox,
but based on what we do know of her, it
seems like she did not care at all about whether
people thought her writing clothes were too masculine or about
the threat of so called bicycle face. She was born

(15:38):
Catherine Tole Knox on October seven, four. In news reports
and other documents from her life, her nickname of Kitty
is spelled in multiple ways, and sometimes she's also called Katie,
and it's not totally clear if this is a mistake
or if she just had more than one nickname. She
was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, which today is considered a

(16:00):
neighborhood of Cambridge. Kitty's mother was Katherine Toll, who was
a white woman from East Parsonfield, Maine. Katherine's family really
does not seem to have been an affluent one. Her
grandmother was a bond servant, and Katherine had worked in
a mill in Maine before moving to Massachusetts. Kitty's father
was a black man from Philadelphia named John H. Knox,

(16:22):
who worked as a tailor and a clothes cleaner. Kitty
also had a brother named Ernest, who was about two
years older than she was. At some point, Katherine and
John separated, and then John died in eighteen eighty three.
That was when Kitty was about seven. After that, the
family moved to Irving Street on the northern slope of

(16:43):
Beacon Hill in Boston. At this point, the city of
Boston had a population of a little more than three
hundred sixty thousand people in about a hundred and fourteen
thousand of those were immigrants, or about a third of
the city's population. The city also had about eight thousand
black residents. The northern slope of Beacon Hill and the
neighboring West End were home to a mix of black,

(17:05):
Irish and Italian families, as well as Jewish families who
had immigrated from Eastern Europe and immigrants from other parts
of the world. Interracial marriages were not all that unusual
in these neighborhoods. In about a fourth of the marriages
in which one half of the couple was black the
other was white, and often that was a black man
and a white immigrant woman. So while a white woman

(17:28):
raising two biracial children might have seemed unusual in some
parts of Boston, it would have been less so in
the neighborhood where the Knox family moved after John's death.
While this part of Boston was diverse in terms of race, ethnicity,
and religion, there were also a lot of tensions connected
to this diversity. Although whole neighborhoods looked integrated from the outside,

(17:50):
individual multi family buildings tended to essentially be segregated. There
were tensions and sometimes violence related to race and ethnicity,
as well as anti Catholic and anti immigrant violence, and
there were economic struggles as well. The Panic of eighteen
nine three started when Kitty was about nineteen. Kitty and

(18:10):
Ernest both seemed to have tried to establish respectable careers
for themselves in the face of all this. Kitty started
working as a seamstress and a dressmaker, and Ernest became
a steam fitter. That's somebody who installs, maintains, repairs piping
systems for things like steam and gas, and that was
considered a skilled trade, and Kitty saved up enough money

(18:31):
to buy her own diamond frame bicycle. She soon became
a visible figure in the world of cycling. The first
written mention of her as a cyclist is in the
Indianapolis Freeman in June of eight, which described her cycling
as graceful and noted that she was a member of
the Riverside Cycle Club, which was an organization for black

(18:53):
cyclists in Cambridge. And she made her own cycling outfits,
ones that were practical and stylish, and she became well
known for these as well. We don't like have insight
into her thought process on like why she decided to
buy a diamond frame bike specifically and why she decided
to make these particular clothes to wear on that bike,

(19:15):
but I love that she did. In eight she entered
a contest for the most approved female bicycling costume, which
was part of the July four festivities that Waltham, Massachusetts.
Her riding costume was described in the cycling publication the
Bearings quote a shirtwaist, man's shortcoat and bloomers to the

(19:37):
knee with tight leggings from the knee down. She also
wore a hat, and this whole outfit was in gray
checked fabric. Some people in the crowd hissed when she
was announced as the winner, and while some newspapers tried
to play that off as being about the fact that
she was in trousers, some of the other contestants were

(19:58):
in dresses, others concluded that it was really because a
woman of color had won this contest over the white
women who had entered. By this point, Boston had become
home to the League of American Wheelman's national headquarters, and
cycling had become incredibly popular in the area. Boston had
the highest per capita League membership of any city and

(20:19):
the highest percentage of women among its members. Knox had
joined the League in the League's advocacy for better roads
was accelerating during this time as well. The same year
that Knox joined the League, it had started publishing Good
Roads Magazine as part of its advocacy for federal legislation

(20:40):
for better roads. Boston based bicycle manufacturer Colonel Albert A.
Hope also circulated a petition calling for the establishment of
a Federal Roads Department to present the Congress that year.
When he did, it contained a hundred and fifty thousand
signatures which were wound onto these two giant wooden spools.

(21:02):
The Senate funded the Office of Road Inquiry, which was
a precursor to the Federal Highways Administration, and this marked
the start of an increasing effort to have the state
and federal government's take over the creation and maintenance of roads.
But even as the League was seeing some progress in
its objectives in nine four, it was also facing upheaval

(21:26):
about who could be a member. We'll talk more about
that after a sponsor break. We mentioned earlier that the
League of American Wheelman was at least theoretically open to
anyone over the age of eighteen when it was founded

(21:48):
in eighteen eighty, and Kitty Knox, who was biracial, became
a member in eighteen nine three. But at that point
some of the League's members were in the middle of
a multi air campaign to change the organization's constitution to
allow only white people to join. This was led by
Colonel William W. Watts from Louisville, Kentucky. This was happening

(22:13):
during a period of US history known as the Native
of American race relations. Many of the steps towards equal
rights and protections that have been made during reconstruction had
been rolled back, and Southern states in particular were implementing
discriminatory laws to disenfranchise and oppress their black population. This

(22:33):
was also a time of widespread lynching and other racist
violence and terror. Watts's calls to allow only white members
in the League of American Wheelmen were unanimously supported by
delegates from Southern states, and they had at least some
support from the states that have been considered border states
during the Civil War. While northern states generally opposed this proposal,

(22:57):
in a lot of cases that opposition was particularly vocal.
Watts first introduced this language at the league's annual meeting
in eighteen ninety two, but when the delegates took a vote,
it failed. At the eighteen ninety three meeting, of majority
of the delegates voted in favor of it, but not
the two thirds majority that was required to amend the

(23:20):
league's constitution. After the failed vote in eighteen ninety three,
members in some Southern states started leaving the organization in protest.
The league's eighteen ninety four meeting was held in Louisville, Kentucky,
and on February delegates voted on Watts proposed language. This time,
the measure passed with a vote of a hundred and

(23:41):
twenty seven to fifty four. A line was added to
the league's constitution which read, quote none but white persons
can become members of the League. The fact that this
meeting took place in Louisville, where Watts was from, played
a part in the way that the vote went. But
Watts and other white site lists from Louisville had also

(24:02):
pressured a local organization for black cyclists called the Union
Cycling Club to write a letter supporting the measure. This
letter itself was pretty ambiguous, but Watts had used it
as evidence that black cyclists were in support of a
segregated league. This measure also passed in spite of the
fact that the vast majority of the league's members lived

(24:24):
in the Northeast. While delegates from southern and border states
were the ones that were really most aggressively pushing for
this change, they also made up less than ten percent
of the league's total membership. The Massachusetts delegates to the
League of American Wheelmen were unanimously opposed to the measure.
One of its members was state Representative Robert Timo, a

(24:46):
black representative from Boston, Timo, called on the Massachusetts legislature
to denounce the league's resolution, which both houses did in March.
Of this resolution read in part quote, General Court deprecates
the action of the organization above reference to and regards
the enforcement of discriminations of this character as a revival

(25:09):
of baseless and obsolete prejudices. Organizations for black cyclists denounced
the measure as well, including the Riverside Cycling Club and
the Colored National League, And right away people started talking
about repealing this measure at the meeting, and Louis Jacqueesh
of Illinois introduced a measure to do so. This also

(25:31):
came as the League was deciding where to hold its meeting.
It was down to two options, Boston, Massachusetts, and the
coastal resort town of Asbury Park, New Jersey. Even though
the Massachusetts delegation had strongly opposed Watts's proposal, it appears
that they also backed down on trying to repeal it
in the hope that doing so would encourage Southern delegates

(25:54):
to vote for Boston to host the meeting. Ultimately, that
repeal measure was with on and despite the Massachusetts delegations
apparent finagling, Asbury Park was selected as host city. Kitty
Knox was one of the people from Boston who traveled
to Asbury Park for the meeting that July. She left
for New Jersey not long after that July fourth cycling

(26:17):
costume contests that we mentioned before the break. Boston attendees
made their way to Asbury Park by some combination of train, ship,
and ferry, and about thirty of them planned to make
at least part of the trip by bike, although the
weather and consequently the roads were so terrible that only
nine of them actually got there that way. As planned.

(26:39):
Asbury Park itself was largely segregated, with various public accommodations
accessible only to white patrons, even though that violated a
civil rights law that New Jersey had passed in eight four.
Asbury Park also did not allow trains to stop there
on Sundays, presumably to try to keep working class people
from New York from taking day trips there on their

(27:01):
one day off. According to her report in The New
York Times, after getting to ask Bray Park, Knox quote
did a few fancy cuts in front of the clubhouse
and was requested to desist. It is thought that this
episode will result in temporarily opening the color line question.
Some of the Aspray Park Wheelman officials, it has said,

(27:21):
will protest against permitting miss Knox to remain a member
of the league. She has held a league card for
six years. The local kickers say they will have a
reckoning with the league's secretary Abbott Bassett upon his arrival.
It's not clear where the Times reporter got the number
six years. This was in and she had become a

(27:44):
member in according to league records. Sometimes arithmetic will get him. Uh.
Knox was denied entry to the league's meeting even after
showing her membership card. In an article from the San
Francisco Hall that was reprinted in papers all over the country,
it was described this way quote When Miss Knox, whose

(28:05):
appearance and dress had been objects of admiration all day,
walked into the committee room at the local clubhouse and
presented her league card for a credential badge, the gentleman
in charge refused to recognize the card, and the young
woman withdrew very quietly. Nine out of every hundred members
interviewed expressed the heartiest sympathy for her and condemnation of

(28:28):
the hasty action of the Badge Committee. She was also
barred from the hotel where she had planned to stay
and wound up at a boarding house instead. At least
one restaurant turned her away, and she was kept out
of the league's women's lounge. She did attend a ball
that was held as part of the meeting, escorted by
a young man from Boston, but according to her report

(28:50):
in the New York Herald, quote, the many snubs which
have been placed upon her by many of the women
culminated last night, and dozens of them leaving the ball
the auditorium because she was not only there but the
first upon the floor in the waltz, which took the
place of the Grand march Um or right up in
the bearings, did not mention people leaving at all, instead

(29:13):
noting that only six hundred of the expected five thousand
people had been at the ball, and reported that Knox
quote danced every number on the order and added to
her reputation as a clever wheelwoman by proving herself a
model of gracefulness on the floor. And there was a
lot of reporting on all of this. We've already mentioned
papers from New York and San Francisco, but the story

(29:36):
was carried in newspapers from Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, Pittsburgh
and Scranton, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Illinois, Louisville, Kentucky, Wilmington, Delaware, just
on and on. You can just put this in a
newspaper database and just like hundreds of hundreds of articles
come up, some of them the same syndicated articles, some
of them original ones reporting on all of this. Although

(29:58):
the league's constitute s and now allowed only white members,
a person did not have to be a member of
the league to participate in most league sponsored rides and races,
and it's possible that Watts had intentionally worded his proposal
this way, knowing that some of the nation's black bicycle
riders were extremely popular athletes and that just barring them

(30:20):
from racing and the league sponsored events entirely might cause
a backlash. For example, Marshall Taylor, known as Major Taylor
and also as the Worcester Whirlwind, had won his first
race in eighteen nine two and would eventually become internationally famous.
So Kitty Knox was allowed to participate in some rides

(30:40):
that were arranged as part of the league meeting, as
were delegates from the Riverside Cycle Club, who had also
come in from Boston. A few weeks after the meeting,
the July issue of the league's bulletin and Good Roads
was published, in which w h S from Asbury Park,
New Jersey posed the question. At the national meet held

(31:01):
here last week, a negro was entered and rode in
one of the trial heats in a Class A race
on Saturday morning, July. The number pinned to him was
one thirteen. The trial heat was in the one mile
open Class A, the second race on Saturday's program. How
can a negro compete with Class Amen? How can a

(31:24):
negro be a member of the l A W As
it appears miss Knox of Boston is The answer that
was printed with this question was quote Miss Katie J.
Knox joined the league April eighteen ninety three. The word
white was put into the constitution February nine four. Such
laws are not and cannot be retroactive. We don't know

(31:47):
who it was that competed in the races, and we
know of no law that would keep a negro out
of an open race, be he league member or not.
So it seems as though, at least at the national level,
League of American Wheelman considered NX to be a member
in spite of the change to its constitution that was
made after she joined. It doesn't seem like she or

(32:09):
members of the Riverside Cycling Club were involved in national
level League events after this, though. A measure to remove
the league's color bar was reintroduced in eighteen ninety six
and then withdrawn and in even it was voted on
and passed, but not by the two thirds majority required,
and it seems like at that point the matter was

(32:30):
dropped and the league more or less stopped operating in
nineteen hundred. At that point, the bicycle boom had become
a bubble and it was collapsing thanks to everything from
a huge oversupply of bicycles on the market, to the
introduction of the motorcycle, to changing tastes as people started
to think of cycling as kind of a passing fad.

(32:53):
After the meeting in Asbury Park, Kitty had continued to ride,
though including participated in several centuries or hundred mile rides.
She and other black riders had also continued to face
discrimination from white riders and from the greater community, especially
in those long distance rides. These events usually involved stops

(33:15):
at ends for meals and rest, and sometimes those accommodations
only allowed white people to enter, even though in some
places that kind of racial discrimination had been outlawed. So
sometimes race organizers used the likelihood of being turned away
at a meal stop as a pretense to exclude black
writers entirely. When Knox and a group of about fifteen

(33:37):
black men were all turned away from a century ride
later on in eight it led to a discussion about
whether the state's various anti discrimination laws covering things like
theaters and restaurants also applied to cycling events. That was
obviously the state of Massachusetts, which I didn't specifically write
in this sentence. Kenny Knox made a name and reputation

(33:59):
for herself in the world of cycling at the end
of the nineteenth century. Newspapers all over the country reported
on her races and her outfits, although some of that
reporting was excessively focused on things like her skin color
and her appearance, and what her appearance looked like in
terms of her race. Her photograph and comments on her

(34:19):
writing and her writing clothes she made also appeared in
cycling publications all over the United States. Sadly, Kitty Knox
died on October eleven, nine hundred, at Massachusetts General Hospital
as a result of chronic kidney disease. She was very young,
just twenty six. She was buried in an unmarked grave

(34:39):
off of Vesper Path in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Her mother
died six years later and her brother died in nineteen eleven.
The first cars had been introduced by the time Kitty
Knox died, and Colonel Pope, who had presented that big
petition to Congress about improving the roads, had shifted his
manufacturing focus from pikes to cars. By nineteen ten, the

(35:03):
American Automobile Association had picked up where the League of
American Wheelman had left off with the good Roads movement
that continued into the nineteen twenties. The United States had
started passing some laws that set up federal funding for
roads in the nineteen teens, and the Federal Aid Road Act,
passed in nineteen sixteen, established the first large federally funded

(35:26):
highway construction programs in conjunction with the states. This was
the start of more widespread state and federal road and
highway projects once that were really focused on the needs
of automobiles rather than the needs of cyclists or pedestrians.
In some places, the first highways that were built for

(35:46):
automotive use actually followed roads that had originally been made
and improved for cycling. Some other parts of the world
saw similar trends, although not necessarily to the same extent
that the US did. But over the last few decades
some parts of the world have seen a bigger focus
on bicycles as a critical form of transportation, one that

(36:07):
is less expensive and far less environmentally destructive than cars are.
This includes everything from wealthier nations adding more dedicated bike
lanes and bike paths to their infrastructure, to efforts to
provide people living in impoverished rural areas with bicycles, which
can make a life or death difference in things like
access to medical care. Yes, some of the infrastructure stuff,

(36:29):
like I said earlier, it's like gets the same kind
of opposition um as stuff was happening in the in
the late nineteenth century, with people upset that a bike
lane is taking away parking, or that a bike lane
is making the road narrower for cars. Things like that. Today,
the League of American Wheelman has been revived as the

(36:50):
League of American Bicyclists, and in League president Earl Jones
signed a resolution revoking that e color line, also issuing
an apology and granting posthumous membership to Major Taylor the
Worcester Whirlwind. Jones had realized that that segregation language had
never been formally repealed and had asked the league's Board

(37:13):
of Directors to take action on it. Kinny Knox has
become locally better known in recent years. Laurence Phinison, known
as Larry, found her name while researching the history of cycling,
and went on to do more research into her life,
including finding surviving family members who were related to her
through her mother. This, plus research into other Boston areas

(37:35):
cyclists from the late nineteenth century, went into his book,
Boston's Bicycling Craze eighteen eighty to nineteen hundred, and that
book is dedicated to Kitty Knox. Her grave at Mount
Auburn Cemetery is also no longer unmarked, thanks to the
efforts of Knox's surviving relatives, Phenison, and other donors. A

(37:55):
marker designed by David Sullivan was placed in the summer
of It reads Katherine T. Kitty Knox eighteen seventy four
to nine hundred, and there's also an engraving of a bicycle.
Several of her living relatives were present at its official
unveiling on September. In August of the City of Boston

(38:17):
added an electric assist cargo trike to its fleet named
after Kitty Knox, and then Mayor Marty Walsh proclaimed August
twenty as Kitty Knox Day. This Kio trake is kind
of a pilot project and part of the city's efforts
to go carbon neutral. The idea is that if city
employees need to take something from one location to another,

(38:37):
they can use the trike rather than driving a car.
There is also a bike path named for her in Cambridge,
and in June of mass Bike hosted the Kitty Knox Ride,
which was a community ride with three options that included
the Kitty Knox Path. Yeah, the path is not particularly long,
so it's sort of like three loops that incorporated that
stretch as a part of a longer ride. Do you

(39:00):
have some listener man, sure do. This is from Claire,
and Claire said, hello, ladies. I've been catching up on
older episodes and I just listened to your episode on
penicillin fascinating and also all the egos. My background is
microbiology and I currently teach at a local university as
a sessional adjunct is the u S term teaching the

(39:21):
molecular end of biology, genetics and microbiology in particular. I'll
be posting this episode as an additional resource for my
micro class. Have you heard about phage therapy as something
we can use to enhance antibiotics or even to replace them?
Right now, it's looking like the best bet is to
use them in tandem, but it's early days. Phage therapy

(39:43):
predates universal antibiotic use, and even during the antibiotic era
in the West, Russia for sure, and China I think,
continued to use phage therapy because chemical therapy was so expensive.
This is an excellent introduction to phage therapy if you're
familiar with it. I am a huge micro nerve and
I find it one of the most exciting developments currently happening.

(40:04):
And then there's a link to an article from August
called phage therapy Past, Present and Future. Thanks for your
excellent work, Claire. And then also you got some pictures
of a rescue cat named Sedona also called in visit
cat and long cat. I love the cat pictures obviously,
UM I nearly accidentally printed them all out with the

(40:26):
text of the email, as I am pro to doing
when we get cat pictures. I had not heard of
phage therapy, and that does sound incredibly fascinating, And it's
also so fascinating that this is something that like has
such long origins, such long ago historical origins. UM that
is still considered to be in its early days in

(40:47):
terms of research now because of various complexities, the fact
that for a long time the world was more focused
on antibiotics. So thank you so much Claire for sending
this email. If you would like to write to us
about this or any other podcast or history podcasts that
I heart radio dot com and we're also all over
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(41:08):
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
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Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of
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(41:29):
listen to your favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Kittie Knox and the Bike Boom