Bicycles and the winter vacation season have all the time been tied up collectively for me. They converse to like, freedom and the lack of it, disgrace — and revolutionary acts of philanthropy by previously incarcerated folks.
My earliest Christmas reminiscence stars a deep purple bike with a banana seat and cruiser-style handlebars. It was 1960, and I used to be 9 years outdated. The bike was too superb for wrapping, towering over the opposite presents that sat lumpy and small below the shiny artificial tree. Any individual had bent the entrance wheel’s chrome forks down, giving it a low-rider slope that made me really feel like a bit man earlier than I even took the factor for a spin.
That bike meant rather a lot, given how exhausting my mother and father had been working to do proper by me and my seven siblings. Practically 5 years earlier they’d moved us from a housing undertaking in South San Francisco to a house in Belle Haven. This neighborhood on the peninsula was a part of the rising suburb of Menlo Park, nevertheless it positive as hell didn’t really feel prefer it. As a result of proper after the Nunn household moved in, the neighborhood turned from White to Black, nearly in a single day.
Actual property salesmen whispered within the ears of White owners {that a} “Negro” invasion was coming, in order that they higher promote instantly. In the meantime, the candy, zero-down fee offers they supplied to Black households like mine appeared too good to be true. They usually have been. These loans blew up when balloon funds got here due. By December 1960, we have been on our third home within the neighborhood. My father was working two jobs, scratching his method ahead in the hunt for the American dream. When us children obtained a bit older, my mom would be a part of him within the low-wage workforce — caring for White children and cleansing White properties.
The freeway hemmed Belle Haven in from the wealthy White neighborhoods to the west, turning our neighborhood into an invisible cage. However that Christmas I felt free. I had my first bike! I rode it with satisfaction, popping wheelies just some blocks from our home. That feeling lasted six days, ending after I heard a police siren behind me. Two cops obtained out. The large one picked up the bike to search for a serial quantity. “It’s stolen,” he stated, not even me. Then he tossed it within the trunk they usually have been gone.
On the gradual stroll residence, I puzzled it out. Perhaps my father or certainly one of my brothers had stolen it. Perhaps they’d purchased it from somebody who had. One factor I knew for positive: The bike wasn’t mine anymore. I used to be a Black child, and that made me a suspect. That shit feeling marked the start of my rage towards legislation enforcement. And it performed on repeat. In my invisible cage, there was no presumption of innocence.
I had my subsequent memorable encounter with legislation enforcement two years later. There was one pedestrian bridge that crossed the Bayshore Freeway, and that’s the route I walked with my childhood greatest buddy, Nate Harrington, to get to the park the place we performed our Little League baseball video games.
At some point we have been crossing the huge garden of an elementary faculty after we noticed a hunk of steel winking at us within the daylight. We pitched some rocks at it, baseball fashion. Then we took it with us, a cool chunk of junk.
We made it one block earlier than these sirens pulsed once more. My supposed crime this time: stealing public property. That piece of steel turned out to be a sprinkler. As an alternative of taking us to the station, the officers introduced us residence and let our fathers do the beating.
Nate and I have been so upset, we devised a fucked-up plan to run away that relied on the liberty solely a motorcycle can present to a child. By this time, we every had one to name our personal, so we rode with out trying again. About 14 miles to the north, we hunkered down in a public rest room, shivering within the chilly fog. We didn’t final lengthy after that.
Inside the invisible cage the place we grew up, it was the police, not faculty academics, who have been molding our future. They have been treating us like thugs after we have been simply being boys. The extra they outlined me and my buddies as suspects and criminals who didn’t belong — even in our personal neighborhoods — the extra we accepted the id they imposed on us. We turned what they informed us we have been.
I stole a variety of bikes from the esteemed establishment of Stanford College, which was so shut however so out of attain for something aside from thieving. I pulled off some wonderful burglaries on that facet of city, too. That’s as lofty as my notion of Black brilliance obtained again then. Medication difficult the image — first weed after which heroin when it got here flooding in after the weed provide dried up.
I used to be 19 years outdated after I took half in a theft that left the shop proprietor useless. After I informed my father I wouldn’t snitch and quit the shooter, I noticed him weep for the primary time.
After I entered the state jail system in early 1972 with a life sentence, I had a son and a daughter with two completely different moms. My children wanted a father, however I hadn’t even began shaving but. There can be no household Christmas for me for a few years to return.
I served my first two years in Deuel Vocational Establishment, a jail east of the Bay Space that was so violent within the Seventies it was often known as Gladiator Faculty. I bumped into loads of buddies and acquaintances there, however what shocked me most was to listen to Nate — who was quiet and good — name out my identify. As a result of our colleges in Belle Haven had became the Black model of “Lord of the Flies,” I used to be barely literate. It was Nate who taught me how one can learn inside my new cage fabricated from concrete and metal. He taught me how one can motive and how one can dream. I spent a variety of time within the gap, largely for allying myself with any Black revolutionary brother who may feed my mind. The guards would stoke racial tensions among the many largely Black, Mexican and White inhabitants, stand again as we beat and shanked one another, then lob tear gasoline and hearth bullets into the shitstorm they’d created.
After Gladiator Faculty, I spent seven years at a spot that proved much more violent — San Quentin State Jail. Survival required me to sacrifice my humanity in methods I might spend a long time processing and deeply regretting. However I used to be lucky to have my godsister Shirl Miles and my pen pal Kathy Labriola in my nook. They visited usually, providing me friendship and softness and serving to me protect a skinny thread of a lifeline to my interior self. They allowed me to replicate, and the winter vacation season was all the time vital.
As I grew into my manhood, I acknowledged my father’s private sacrifice. His absence from my Little League and Pop Warner video games stung as a result of I wished to shine for him. However bouncing from cell to cell, I got here to know that his absence stemmed from the truth that he was working his ass off to maintain the hire paid and meals on the desk.
This realization turned the highlight again on me. I knew my duty was to maintain my very own children and supply for them. Each Christmas was a reminder that I had failed in that duty.
I engaged in some dangerous hustles so I may go some money to my mom in the course of the holidays — to ensure my little woman had one thing she may name a present from her daddy. My son must wait. His mother and I have been on the outs after I was locked up.
The day I walked out the gates of San Quentin on parole — Oct. 22, 1981 — my plan was to eat a Winchell’s donut, drink a Henry Weinhard’s beer, smoke some weed and discover a candy sister to snuggle up with.
As an alternative, I wore holes in my prison-issued Naugahyde sneakers trying to find my son since I’d misplaced contact along with his mom. When I discovered him two days later, I had $10 in my pocket. I gave him $9. It was the least I may do after so a few years of absence and failed duty, and it wasn’t close to sufficient.
Since I obtained out of jail, I’ve by no means held a job that wasn’t devoted to bettering the situations for human beings dwelling in and popping out of cages. I labored for half a dozen years as a paralegal for the nonprofit Jail Regulation Workplace, sitting face-to-face with brothers on dying row, recognizing how simply I may have been certainly one of them.
The trauma proved to be an excessive amount of. I gave in to crack dependancy within the late Nineteen Eighties. However I obtained clear and helped construct Free At Final, a drug program in my neighborhood to assist repair the mess I helped make. Then, with a yr of sobriety below my belt, I used to be privileged to go to work for Authorized Companies for Prisoners with Kids, ultimately changing into the longtime government director of the Oakland-based nonprofit. Collectively, we helped carry an finish to the shackling of incarcerated pregnant girls and to indefinite long-term solitary confinement in California prisons.
In 2003, a handful of different previously incarcerated folks had come on board as employees. In informal conferences, all of us agreed: We have been sick of others talking for us, utilizing our private expertise as garnish for his or her coverage work, nonetheless well-meaning. So a gaggle of us obtained collectively for a marathon planning session and created All of Us or None, a grassroots motion of previously incarcerated folks demanding restoration of our full civil and human rights — in our personal voices.
With our Ban the Field marketing campaign, we’ve efficiently pushed for legal guidelines and measures throughout the nation that eradicate questions on prison historical past from job purposes. We’ve additionally labored to re-enfranchise voters in jail or on felony parole to allow them to train their citizenship, sit on juries and affect our governance. Regardless of all these accomplishments, certainly one of issues I’m most pleased with is giving bicycles to children with incarcerated mother and father in the course of the winter holidays.
The Large Bike Giveaway began small. In 1999, a prisoner inside San Quentin who’d been repairing used bikes let me know a brand new cargo had are available.
On the time, a number of the males I’d practiced political schooling with in jail had been gathering to determine how one can do good. We known as ourselves “Timers,” and our crew included neighborhood activist Robert Moody and former Black Panthers Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt and Arthur “Tha” League.
In 2000, the Timers obtained with San Quentin officers and requested for the bikes so we may give them to children whose mother and father have been incarcerated. We targeted on a housing undertaking in West Oakland, surveying the place to see what number of adults have been lacking as a result of they have been locked behind bars. Their children have been the primary to get bikes, and we let the kids know the presents have been from their mother and father.
San Quentin helped steer bikes in our route for a couple of years, however we knew we had an issue when the assistant warden requested me to inform the children the bikes got here courtesy of the jail. For them, it was a clean PR transfer. For me, it was a nonstarter. As Addie Kitchen, a correctional officer I’d recognized for the reason that ’70s, walked me out, I stated, “These children don’t must know that San Quentin loves them. I’m gonna inform them that their mother and father love them.”
So, we parted methods with San Quentin and began scraping collectively the cash on our personal, lining up at midnight earlier than Black Friday gross sales with money burning holes in our pockets. By this time, All of Us or None was a rising motion. A few of us who gathered at these early conferences had been out of jail for months or weeks, even days. Others for many years. However we’d nonetheless ask everybody in attendance to surrender $50 to purchase a motorcycle. Even chickenshit individuals who would promote you a loosie would attain of their pockets to make a donation. Others would say, “Hey, I can’t provide you with $50, can I assist put the bicycles collectively?” The reply was all the time sure.
Finally we modified the identify of the Large Bike Giveaway to the Neighborhood Giveback to emphasise how we have been collectively collaborating in philanthropy. The act of giving again isn’t one thing solely wealthy folks do.
Yr after yr, I’ve stood at microphones and requested a rising crew of volunteers, “What number of of y’all have stolen a motorcycle?” Loads of palms go up. “Effectively,” I shout, “now’s your probability to provide one again!”
Within the crowd are women and men who, like me, sat of their cells feeling inadequacy and disgrace of their failed duty. Doing proper for different folks’s youngsters helps fill the outlet.
As members of All of Us or None turned higher organizers, we additionally turned higher fundraisers. A military of previously incarcerated volunteers nonetheless distributes the bikes at our Neighborhood Giveaways, however we increase the cash to get them from outdoors donors. We purchase the bikes in bulk, together with a helmet for every baby.
The second Saturday of each December, we throw up a giant tent, mild up the barbecues and switch up the music. There’s face portray for the children and presents to pamper the moms and grandmothers. Artwork provides are arrange at a separate desk so children could make thank-you playing cards for his or her family members inside. As a result of, as we inform them, these bikes are from them.
Today we’re reaching out to the chaplains inside prisons — together with girls’s services — to ensure we get the phrase out. They supply purposes to anybody who has a child who wants a bicycle and might make it to the festivities. At our 2022 giveaway, a 9-year-old named Paris arrived together with her grandmother. Her daddy had been locked up since she was 2, and her grandmother informed me that belief between them was uncooked and delicate. I obtained to see Paris’ eyes go huge as her dad known as from California State Jail, Sacramento, and informed her, “I purchased you a motorcycle. That’s why you’re there, to select your bike!” Listening to that little woman converse to her father, I knew I had hit the ball the fitting method.
This Dec. 14 marked our twenty fifth annual Neighborhood Giveback. We raised sufficient cash to provide away 280 bicycles. And we did one thing a bit completely different. We despatched these bikes into San Quentin so prisoners there may assist put them collectively. We wished them to style a little bit of the enjoyment that comes with giving again.
I’m 73 now and semi-retired. Many individuals my age have been getting out of jail with nowhere to land the place they’re handled with dignity. Authorized Companies for Prisoners with Kids is constructing a house for a few of them within the unused parsonage of a West Oakland church, however too many are dying earlier than the factor is even accomplished.
As for the practically 20 million of us on the surface marked by felony convictions, too many are nonetheless thought of suspects in our personal neighborhoods. Revolution is a gradual course of, and there have been setbacks. We hold pushing. Within the meantime, we’ll be making a gift of bikes within the identify of these nonetheless locked inside, knitting our communities again collectively.
Dorsey Nunn not too long ago retired as the chief director of Authorized Companies for Prisoners with Kids. His e-book, “What Sort of Chicken Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection,” was printed in April 2024 by Heyday Books. Co-authored by longtime journalist Lee Romney, it tracks Nunn’s private {and professional} story from boyhood to incarceration within the revolutionary Seventies, the tough-on-crime jail explosion of the ’80s and ’90s, and the creation of All of Us or None, a nationwide motion of previously incarcerated folks demanding restoration of their full civil and human rights.
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