Kittie Knox was a young biracial cyclist in the 1890s who fought against race-based limitations in America’s post-Reconstruction reaction against Black advancement. During her cycling career (1893 – 1899), she became a well-known century (100-mile) rider, protested the League of American Wheelmen’s color bar in 1895, and refused to conform to conventions about fast riding and wearing a long skirt while cycling. For decades after her untimely death, Knox’s groundbreaking story was virtually unknown outside of the world of cycling.
Scholar and writer Larry Finison has worked to bring her remarkable life back to a wider audience and speaks about Kittie Knox in the context of the late 19th century cycling craze.
Larry Finison is a social psychologist by training and public health practitioner by profession and then turned to the social history of bicycling. He is the author of Boston's Cycling Craze, 1880-1900, Boston's 20th Century Bicycling Renaissance, and Bicycling Inclusion and Equity (2023). His most recent work is Kittie Knox: Exclusion and Inclusion in Boston’s Black Athletes: Identity, Performance, and Activism.
