NY Road Runners MC

a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit charitable organization

Black bikers on Broadway.

About the Road Runners

The NY ROAD RUNNERS are a group of brothers and sisters who ride the beast. We live to promote the aesthetic, practice, and mythology of Black motorcycling, and to imagine a liberated future for all Black people through the lens of Black cultures.
All the knowledge and skills we have learned over a lifetime of living in the belly of the beast we want to bring to bear upon Black communities: economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, spirituality,
sex, and war—every area of a people’s activity. Indeed, our mission and goal is the resurrection of a people.
Everything the ROAD RUNNERS can do, we will teach the people to do. Everything the people can do, we will teach the ROAD RUNNERS to do. For we are the people.
Riding motorcycles is actually the least of it, but still, we love to ride, and riding is how we organize our Power.

What's Behind the Name?

ROAD RUNNERS

The ROAD RUNNERS name comes from a long running social club and bowler's guild that my grandparents were members of for the majority of their adult lives. The Des Moines Roadrunners are a group of mostly Black people in my hometown who carved out a space for other Blacks in the area to gather socially and contribute to the well-being of themselves and the Black community they lived in. In addition to dominating the local and regional bowling circuits, the Roadrunners organized social gatherings, supported candidates with a commitment to Black people for local public office, formed job training and career opportunity networks, sponsored food and clothing drives and created rent pools for needy Black families, gave college scholarships to promising Black high school graduates while honoring all Black graduates in an annual ceremony (yep, yours truly earned one of those scholarships way back in the day and I still have the plaque to prove it!), plus many other activities that I’m forgetting right now. They even had an informal lottery for Black people for a time before the state took over that particular form of generating revenue. My maternal grandparents, particularly my grandmother, were long time and valued members of the Roadrunners, both of them accomplished bowlers and, more importantly, community advocates who were proud to be Black and to support Black people. Both my grandparents died recently within months of each other, and so I chose the ROAD RUNNERS name as a way to honor them and to extend their legacy. Without my grandparents, Homer and Dorothy McCurn (God rest their souls), I would not be here and would not be who I AM.

There is also a clandestine political purpose for choosing the name ROAD RUNNERS. We are subliminal seducers. Warriors. Gravediggers. Exorcists. But also gardeners. Excavators. Witch doctors and cultivators. Our families and friends will feel and know our presence through our works. So will our enemies. You dig?

As an added bonus, the roadrunner bird itself is a noble creature, revered among the Hopi, the Pueblo, and other Southwest Native American tribes as a good omen and for its healing attributes. Its footprint is an “X” which has some significance to me personally in connection to one of my spiritual fathers, Malcolm X, of course. The “X” footprint also serves as a form of misdirection to the roadrunner’s predators and natural enemies making him difficult to track. This is also a useful symbol for our club since, again, subversive activity is a part of our strategy. I know you all remember the Warner Brothers Saturday morning cartoons featuring the Roadrunner versus Wile E. Coyote. Hundreds of episodes but the bird was never captured, right? Reminds me of the trickster spirit common in African and Afrikan Diaspora culture and mythology, like Anansi, Brer Rabbit, and High John the Conqueror. As a people, we have used that kind of cunning and dexterity to survive this racist wasteland and we must continue to use it.

Lastly, the roadrunner is mostly a ground bound creature using running—and running at great speeds relative to its size—as a means of getting around. But the roadrunner CAN fly, if needed, in order to escape predators. Many of you are also familiar with the Black children’s story The People Who Could Fly about a community of African captives in the new world who escaped slavery by literally flying home to Africa.

The bird, you see, represents all of that to me, that escape velocity and spirit of the ancestors that we call on when absolutely necessary. And our Egun never lets us down.

This is WHO WE ARE.

- Kobie Colemon aka "Brer Exorcist" PRESIDENT