Big news: MassBike is the co-winner, along with our partner Plays in Place, of the 2026 Kittie Knox award! This award celebrates advocates and educators who work to remove barriers and make bicycling more inclusive. You can learn more about the award at the National Bike League website, and watch the award ceremony here! (our award is at 15:35)

The Kittie Knox Award is granted by the League to honor groups and individuals championing equity diversity and inclusion in the bicycle advocacy movement. We are honored to share the award with Plays in Place for our work commissioning and producing plays to celebrate Kittie (the namesake of the award), who was a riracial cyclist from the 1890s during Boston bicycling boom.

Kittie broke barriers for gender and racial discrimination; she was a gifted seamstress who sewed her own riding clothes (bloomers) allowing freedom from the limitations of hoop-skirts of the era, she led rides from Boston to Worcester and back outpacing most of her male contemporaries, and was a star of Boston’s social scene when she was written up in the Boston Globe as a popular rider amongst the social clubs. Working with Plays in Place, MassBike fundraised over $100,000 to produce the plays, which have recently been published a book with production photos and essays to share the plays in communities across the country.

When receiving the award, MassBike Executive Director Galen Mook stated how “bike advocacy is more than just comment letters and showing up to meetings, it is a pursuit of a social movement so this is a representation of a combination of arts and culture combined with history to move the movement forward. Partnering with playwrights to tell an artistic story that really moves the social justice needle forward.

This is a difficult story to tell for the League, since Kittie Knox faced the color bar from the League and was rejected from League membership. We represent that in the play, and a century later to recognize how far we’ve come that the League is leaning into the story to know where we have gotten to at this point and how far we have to go.”

Plays in Place producer and playwright Patrick Gabridge noted how writing a play about racial barriers in the 1890s is a “difficult subject, and difficult time in America that we were talking about then, which maps into parts of America we’re talking about now. Kittie did not allow herself to be defined by other people, she decided to seize power for herself, the play is not a play of trauma but a play of bike joy and Black joy, this is something we need in the cycling movement.”

Hampton Richards, the actor portraying Kittie in the run of plays in the Boston area, accepted the award, and addressed the crowd by commenting on the diversity of advocates in the room.

“Looking at everyone today, this is what she fought for,” Hampton said. “Us all being together in this room and biking together, to bike freely without restraint, without a bar, without anybody in her way, this is the future she foresaw, and [we’re] grateful to be a part of it.”

This was a huge effort over the past several years. Thank you to historian Larry Finison for all the ongoing research to find the primary sources to tell Kittie’s story. And to all the funders and supporters who helped get these plays produced. We are so proud to have the work turned into a playbook to be shared with organizations and theater companies across the country.

If you’d like to purchase a book of the plays or learn more about the Kittie Knox Plays, visit this link and save the date for Friday, June 19th (Juneteenth) for the 5th Annual Kittie Knox Ride where we will visit the historical sites from Kittie’s era on a group bike ride.