COLOMBIA, SC (AP) – Motoclubs arrive in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, every May, for separate weeklong rallies, one predominantly white and the other black. Each brings millions of dollars, spent by hundreds of thousands of motorcyclists, and some inevitably loose, with drinking, public nudity and noise competitions that rock the skyscrapers by the sea.
At 60, Metris Batts says he celebrates with a little more responsibility than many others, but still rides to be seen at the Black event, sailing in his silver gray Honda VTX with colorful cowboy boots and jeans with rhinestones.
It’s exciting to walk fast, says Batts, so it’s irritating to be stuck for hours on a 37-kilometer one-way detour. Police erected barricades along Ocean Boulevard during the peak nights of Black Bike Week, officially known as Atlantic Beach Bikefest. White motorcyclists who ride days before for Harley Week in May are treated differently, say black motorcyclists.
“If you go on a cattle ramp, you can’t get out,” said Batts. “We ride for freedom.”
Civil rights lawyers now accuse the city in a federal court of racial discrimination, creating an experience so unpleasant that black visitors end up leaving. At the opening of arguments last week to five black and four white jurors, a NAACP lawyer said Myrtle Beach during Bikefest is “like a city under martial law,” reported The Sun News in Myrtle Beach.
City prosecutors argued that “different traffic control strategies” apply to each festival, and that the police response to Bikefest was imposed to prevent violence after a series of shootings and robberies six years ago.
Three people died and seven were injured that weekend in 2014. So-Gov. Nikki Haley asked to get rid of the Black event completely, calling it “South Carolina pollution”.
Bikefest originated along historically segregated beaches, where white bikers gathered in 1940 for the annual Harley Week. Around 1980, a local Black biker club called Carolina Knight Riders started a family and friends gathering in Atlantic Beach, a village north of Myrtle Beach known as “Black Pearl” for its reputation as a haven for African bathers. Americans.
The Atlantic Beach event soon spread to neighboring cities, including Myrtle Beach, where the majority of the 35,000 residents are white. Organizers say it is the largest annual influx of black visitors to the area and, like Harley Week, has grown far beyond any group’s ability to control.
Myrtle Beach, always struggling to promote the Grand Strand in South Carolina as a family luxury destination, tried to kick out motorcyclists with helmet requirements and noise standards, only to be brought to court by black and white motorcyclists. The city also lost to NAACP when a federal judge said its Bikefest traffic plan in the early 2000s was racially motivated; the latter forced passengers to go one-way for 8 kilometers.
Finding hostile shopkeepers and officers has become part of the Bikefest experience, said motorcyclists interviewed by The Associated Press. The NAACP sued restaurants and a hotel discriminating against African American tourists during the event, as well as questioning officials in other tourist destinations where black visitors claim to have suffered abusive policing.
“If my motorcycle runs out of gas in Myrtle Beach, I would push it out of the city limits,” said Lewis Clark, a biker from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, who helped organize the event in previous years.
Myrtle Beach city officials and the Chamber of Commerce declined to comment on the trial.
Jason Eastman, a sociologist at Coastal Carolina University, likens Black Bike Week and Harley Week to events like carnival and spring break, when visitors think social norms can be changed. What separates them is the reaction of the residents, Eastman said.
About a decade ago, he dug through 8,500 comments from readers online about the bicycle weeks in articles in The Sun News.
He found that, although the behavior of bikers at events is similar, commentators frame “Harley bikers, mostly white, as successful in their education and career”, while stereotyping black bikers as “unemployed, uneducated” , immature, lower class criminals “
Bikefest veterans often reject the nickname “Black Bike Week”, trying to direct the event back to Atlantic Beach, where it all started, supporting pierced joints and having fun at the local Hooters parking lot or at the Carolina Knight Riders Club.
“That’s where the real party is,” said Batts. “This is where the real network is. That’s where the real relationships are. “
This year’s Bikefest – which would be in its 40th year – was canceled because of COVID-19. The Knight Riders are already planning an event next May to make up for what they missed. “We are calling this the 40 Plus One,” said Aaron Cox, the club’s business manager.
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Michelle Liu is a member of the Associated Press / Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a national nonprofit service program that puts journalists in local newsrooms to report on covert issues.