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Bessie Stringfield, “Motorcycle Queen of Miami”: the first Black woman to ride across the United States solo.
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Motorcyclist Bessie Stringfield was born Betsy Ellis in Edenton, North Carolina and her family migrated to Boston, Massachusetts soon after. Orphaned at the age of five, she was adopted and raised by an Irish woman. On her sixteenth birthday, she was gifted a 1928 Indian Scout 101. Stringfield had no former experience on how to operate a motorcycle but proved to be a natural. When asked how she learned, she replied: “I wrote letters to the Man Upstairs. I put the letters under my pillow, and He taught me.” Fascinated by the new machinery and eager to ride, she was determined to go the distance.
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Shortly after turning nineteen, Stringfield began her journey traveling across the United States unaccompanied—her destinations were decided by flipping a penny over a map. This method eventually led her to cover the forty-eight lower states long before the era of interstate highways, as well as Europe, Brazil, and Haiti. While in the Jim Crow South she was often refused accommodation while on the road which forced her to sleep on her motorcycle at various filling stations if she could not use a Black person’s home as a rest stop. Once she was followed by a white man in a pickup truck who ran her off the road and her bike.
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Self-taught, she performed stunts like hill climbing and trick riding at carnival shows, but when she removed her helmet and revealed her sex the judges denied her of prizes. At the height of World War II Stringfield aided the U.S. Army as a civilian courier, using her own 61-inch Harley-Davidson to transport documents between domestic army bases. By the 1950s, Stringfield settled in Miami, Florida where she became a nurse and founded the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club with whom she continued to ride with until she reached her eighties. She was nicknamed the “Motorcycle Queen of Miami.”
Written for @filson1897. #BlackHistoryMonth
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