Ride in Living Color also brings people together for social rides, at times 40 to 50 bicyclists strong. In 2011 she founded the platform Ride in Living Color, which educates people about mobility justice and the history of African American cyclists, such as Marshall “Major” Taylor, nicknamed the Black Cyclone, who set multiple world records in the late 19th and early 20th centuries despite death threats, intimidation, and physical attacks that attempted to slow him down. But my process is not working within the system.” “That’s actually what I was told-that to advocate for safe streets for New Los Angeles Charter Middle School, I had to get to the back of the line with everyone else. “We’ve been told to get at the back of the line since we came to America,” Davis-Overstreet tells me. She has collaborated on a wide range of projects, from pushing for bike lanes and crosswalks on high-risk streets to helping the city develop policies for zero-emission zones to improving access to local parklands in the community of Baldwin Hills. Seventy percent of serious injuries and fatalities are clustered on just 6 percent of the city’s streets, most of which are located in Black or Latino neighborhoods.Ī community organizer and strategist, Davis-Overstreet holds a master’s degree in urban sustainability from nearby Antioch University. In L.A., Black residents account for 18 percent of collision victims, despite comprising only about 8 percent of the city’s population. Such deaths occur twice as often in neighborhoods where the median per capita income is less than $21,000. at large, a pedestrian dies every 90 minutes. The problem is worse for the unhoused, who have little choice but to spend all of their time on these dangerous streets. For many people who rent or own homes in marginalized areas, walking or biking is the only transportation option, but infrastructure for those on foot or on two wheels, such as crosswalks, bike lanes, and even sidewalks, is often absent. As an adult, she fell in with L.A.’s Black road-cycling community and eventually found her calling in mobility justice, an endeavor that seeks to make communities of color safer for those moving around within them. Besides, the lifelong cyclist knows which streets to avoid pedaling down in the place where she was born and raised.ĭavis-Overstreet grew up roaming this largely Black (and later Latino) area, located about eight miles east of Santa Monica, on a gold banana-seat high-riser with ape-hanger handlebars. ![]() ![]() She isn’t wearing a helmet while she normally does opt for one, personal-safety gear offers little in the face of the systemic problems she’s fighting. Today the 61-year-old is vibrant in cyan beaded earrings, Vans, and brow-line glasses, with a nineties-style choker coiled around her neck and a black ball cap tucked over tight, dyed burgundy curls. ![]() After her daughter, Niah, began sixth grade there in 2013, Davis-Overstreet led a grassroots campaign urging the city to install pedestrian infrastructure at the dangerous intersection in front of the school. I’m following her mauve city bike north on Redondo-we’ve just left West Adams Boulevard, the main drag through her childhood stomping grounds of the same name-and we’re heading for New Los Angeles Charter Middle School, about half a mile away as the crow flies. The welter of Interstate 10 drowns out Yolanda Davis-Overstreet’s voice as we pedal beneath an ivy-laced underpass on the cusp of South L.A.
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