History in the Making: Black Leaders Detroit Ride for Equity

Hello everyone,

I am starting this fundraising campaign to support my journey on the Black Leaders Detroit Ride for Equity this coming summer. The Ride for Equity will be a 5-week bike tour from Tulsa, OK -- the former home of Black Wall Street -- to Wall Street in Manhattan.

Along with cycling as a member of the tour, my goal is to record sounds and interviews along the way to create a series of podcasts and other musical/sound art pieces. Your support will go directly towards helping me achieve my mission and any overages will be donated to Black Leaders Detroit. Included in the funding amount is what will be needed to provide myself with food, lodging, and any other supplies I will need to purchase and account for, such as additional microphones and recording gear, bike parts, etc.

An opportunity like this Ride for Equity doesn't come along often, and it is my responsibility as a Black artist to fully capture this experience and to share my moments and discoveries with the rest of the world. Especially given our current political climate, there has never been a time that our society has needed something like this more. As we have come to realize, history will repeat itself if we are not aware of the circumstances that our predecessors lived through. What happened to Black Wall Street is not an anomaly. It was an all too common occurrence throughout the entirety of the last century. It happened in my hometown, Detroit, it happened in Philly, and it probably happened where you live too. I know that Black Leaders Detroit's goal is to share the story of Black perseverance through the lens of the difficulty of navigating business ownership, but I intend to shine a light on every other aspect of the Black experience that has been forgotten in the sands of time. Black history was not something that was made solely during the time of enslavement or the Civil Rights Movement; it's something that we create every day that we live our lives.