Kittie Knox and the Bike Boom

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we are going to talk about Kitty Knox, who was a cyclist during the bicycle boom of the late nineteenth century, and her story is tied to so much, just really so much. This bicycle boom had connections to the Good Roads movement and the suffrage movement and dress reform, and then Kitty Knox's story in particular also connects to civil rights because Knox was biracial and became known not just for participating in what was a predominantly white sport, but also for the clothes that she wore to do it, and the fact that the League of American Wheelman tried to close its membership to people of color after she had already joined. We are going to start off in this episode with a bit of bicycle history. Some of it is stuff that has like come up in tiny little glimpses and some of our past episodes on cyclists, but this is some more comprehensive look at how bicycles developed because we want to set the stage for how bicycles became so incredibly popular in the United States during Knox's lifetime, and how the sudden popularity of bicycles affected the society that she was living in. Precursors to the bicycle as we know it today didn't have pedals. You pushed along the ground with your feet, or you rolled downhill on them. One was the swift Walker, also called the dre Zine after its inventor carlv Andres, who introduced it in Germany in eighteen seventeen. The swift Walker had a wooden frame and wooden wheels which had iron rims and leather covered tires. Over the decades that followed, various people improved on this designed by adding pedals to it, and they also started calling these new vehicles by a number of different names, including both velocipede and bicycle. But these early bicycles were also called bone shakers because they gave such a very rough ride. They were introduced to the United States by eighteen sixty eight, but they were so heavy and so cumbersome and frankly, so unpleasant to be on that they did not really take off. Also, if you're gonna send in a note about what the word velocopied means there were a lot of different people who used this word to describe a lot of different vehicles, and it's become kind of an umbrella for usually two wheeled human powered vehicles. But in my head, it's a monster bug with a cajillion legs. Bicycles moved from leather covered tires to solid rubber ones in eighteen sixty nine and in eighteen seven and the bicycle builders started making frames from hollow steel tubes and using wire spoked wheels rather than wooden ones. Using wire spokes under tension made it possible to make the wheels bigger without their being unmanageably heavy. The result was the high wheeler, also known as the penny farthing, which had one very large front wheel and a smaller back wheel. This nickname came from the relative sizes of two British coins, the penny and the much smaller farthing. With a high wheeler, the rider sat on a seat that was mounted above that big front wheel, and the size of the front wheel gave it several advantages. Each rotation of the petals moved that huge wheel a lot, so as long as you were not trying to go uphill you could go farther with less effort. The size of the wheel also meant that it could roll over things like small holes in the road without a big problem, and once you were actually moving, the whole thing was pretty stable. But there were are also some pretty significant downsides. High wheelers were expensive and for the most part only upper class people could afford them. The seat was roughly chest high on the average rider, so getting on and off could be a challenge, so was safely bringing it to a stop. Brakes were minimal, and they had to work against the power of that huge front wheel. And while the front wheel could go over small holes without a problem, if it hit a big rock or a big stick or something else that could cause it to stop suddenly. The rider usually took a header, meaning that they flew over the handlebars and landed head first. That could cause serious or even fatal injuries. Yeah, I mean, people still can fly over the handlebars of a bicycle, but this was from a height of like a five foot tall wheel that you were sitting above, a long way to fall. In spite of these limitations, high wheelers were popular enough that people started forming clubs to encourage their use and to provide a place for a rider's to meet and socialize. For example, the first bicycling club in the US was the Boston Bicycle Club, formed in eighteen seventy eight. The high wheelers design made it nearly impossible for most women to ride in the clothing that was considered appropriate for them, so most women who wanted to ride instead opted for a tricycle. These had the same juxtaposition of big and small wheels, but in a woman's tricycle there were two large rear wheels with a seat in between them and then a smaller wheel in front. The pedals connected to the rear wheels through rods in a crank. There were also tricycles that had a larger front wheel and two smaller rear wheels, but these were mostly ridden by children, especially boys. Bicycles and tricycles rose in popularity in spite of a major obstacle to actually using them. The roads were not great. The first recorded use of asphalt as a road surface in the US was in Newark, New Jersey, in eighteen seventy, but that very first attempt did not hold up very well. The types of asphalt and concrete and composite that are used for most road surfaces in the US today had not been developed yet, so instead road surfaces included things like McAdam, which incorporated compacted crushed stone, as well as things like cobble stones and planks. But for the most part, these kinds of roads were built in and around cities. In more rural areas, roads were more like dirt paths. The farmer whose land the road ran through or next too, was responsible for maintaining that road on their own time and at their own expense, so how well any road was maintained, or whether it was maintained at all, could really vary. Bad weather often meant that rural roads became totally impassable. Obviously, there are still plenty of problems with roads in the US today, and not every road is paved, but at the end of the nineteenth century the roads in the US were a lot worse. In eighteen eighty, the League of American Wheelman was founded in Newport, Rhode Island, as quote an organization to promote the general interests of cycling, to ascertain, defend, and protect the rights of wheelman, and to facilitate touring. The League did things like arranging rides and races, providing social opportunities for members, helping people recover stolen bikes and recover from crashes while biking, and advocating for better roads. The league became a big part of the good Roads movement, which called for taxpayer funded improved roads all over the United States. This idea was really controversial. Cyclists or wheelman as they were known at the time, faced a lot of antagonism from other people using the roads, including pedestrians, people on horseback, horse drawn vehicles, and in some cities, street cars and trolleys. People argued that cyclists were creating traffic jams and endangering themselves and other road users, and some places tried to pass legislation to prohibit bicycles and tricycles from using roads and parks. People were irate over the idea that these same people who were supposedly clogging up and misusing the roads were also calling for measures that could raise taxes, and in rural areas, farmers were very angry that the proposed road improvements could force them to do even more work to maintain those roads. Except for the part about rural farmers, this is still the comments section on every article about someplace adding a bike lane today. When the League of American Wheelman was founded, there were already cycling organizations all over the United States, especially in the Northeast, but a lot of them brought together cyclists of a particular race or ethnicity, so these tended to be small organizations that were locally focused. The idea behind the League of American Wheelman was to open up its membership to anyone over the age of eighteen and bring cyclists together at the national level, giving them more leverage to advocate for cycling and advocate for better roads to ride on. In the mid eighteen eighties, the potential membership of the League of American Wheelman increased enormously thanks to a new development in bicycles, the safety cycle. As was the case with the addition of pedals, several different people introduced designs that incorporated the same basic elements front and rear wheels of the same size, with the pedals connected to the rear wheel by a treadle or a chain. The first commercially successful version of the safety cycle was called the Rover, and it was introduced by John Kemp Starley in five Not long after pneumatic tires also made the ride both smoother and faster. Safety cycles were a lot smaller, lighter, and safer than the penny farthing, and a lot less expensive. While a penny farthing might cost a hundred dollars or more, soon there were safeties that cost between thirty and seventy five dollars, and people could pay as little as five dollars for a used one. This was still most affordable to middle and upper class people, but it was also just more affordable to a lot more people than the penny farthing had been. The result was a bicycle boom, and by the eighteen nineties there were more than five hundred organizations dedicated to cycling all around the US. Hundreds of businesses had started up to make and sell hundreds of thousands of bicycles per year. When the Panic of eight three started, the bicycle industry was one of the only ones that really kept growing. Kitty Knox's bicycle was a safety and we'll get to that after a sponsor break. In addition to being less expensive, safety cycles made it easier for nineteenth century women to ride while still wearing clothing that was considered appropriate. That meant that many women, especially middle and upper class women suddenly had access to a new source of recreation and a new way to travel on their own. Soon, bicycles were becoming associated with the suffrage movement and with women's rights and freedoms more generally. Both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton were quoted as saying woman is writing to suffrage on the bicycle. Stanton talked about the bicycle as inspiring women with courage, self respect, and self reliance, and at one point Anthony said, quote, let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood. There were still some challenges though. Long dresses and their underlayers could easily get caught in chains, gears, or spokes. One attempt to deal with this was the introduction of bicycles with a step through frame rather than the original diamond frame. So the diamond frame had a bar stretching from below the handlebars to below the seat, but the step through frame had a lower central bar, so someone in a dress could step over it more easily and, in the view of the time, more modestly. This also left more room for all of that fabric. If you've ever warn't a dress from this period, even if you're doing the most simple day dress, it's a lot of fabric. It is a lot. Some step through models also had guards around the chain or around the back wheel to try to keep dresses from becoming in hangled. For a lot of women, though, a better solution was not to ride in a dress. So the skyrocketing popularity of bicycles in eighteen eighties and nineties also encouraged a movement for dress reform. Women's cyclists started wearing trousers or leggings under their dresses, or wearing bloomers and other bifurcated garments as they rode, and of course this led to lots of criticism, some of it from other women. Mary Sergeant Hopkins was a vocal advocate for women's cycling, publishing a magazine called Wheel Women from to eight. In eighteen ninety four, she told a New York Times reporter quote, if there is one thing I hate, it is a masculine woman. It has made my heart sore to see the women who have been putting on knickerbockers, riding with the diamond framed wheel, the wheel with a high crossbar, and racing and scorching with the men. It has made whee link just another way to make a fool of herself, bring cycling to disrepute, and make herself the laughing stock of the people. She has made a halfway sort of creature of herself. She can't be a man, and she is a disgrace as a woman. I don't like her. That's a bless your heart moment for me. Bless your heart, Mary Sergeant hop Yeah. So. People also speculated that cycling would cause women to become aroused, or damage their reproductive organs, or harm their health and their bodies in some other way. There were even concerns about something called bicycle face, which was described in all kinds of ways. One article in edition of Literary Digest cited British medical journals before describing bicycle face this way. Quote over exertion, the upright position on the wheel, and the unconscious effort to maintain one's balance tend to produce a wearied and exhausted bicycle face. This piece also quoted the Springfield Republican is saying bicycle face was quote usually flushed, but sometimes pale, often with lips more or less drawn in the beginning of dark shadows under the eyes, and always with an expression of weariness. We don't have any journals or letters or other personal memories from Kitty Knox, but based on what we do know of her, it seems like she did not care at all about whether people thought her writing clothes were too masculine or about the threat of so called bicycle face. She was born Catherine Tole Knox on October seven, four. In news reports and other documents from her life, her nickname of Kitty is spelled in multiple ways, and sometimes she's also called Katie, and it's not totally clear if this is a mistake or if she just had more than one nickname. She was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, which today is considered a neighborhood of Cambridge. Kitty's mother was Katherine Toll, who was a white woman from East Parsonfield, Maine. Katherine's family really does not seem to have been an affluent one. Her grandmother was a bond servant, and Katherine had worked in a mill in Maine before moving to Massachusetts. Kitty's father was a black man from Philadelphia named John H. Knox, who worked as a tailor and a clothes cleaner. Kitty also had a brother named Ernest, who was about two years older than she was. At some point, Katherine and John separated, and then John died in eighteen eighty three. That was when Kitty was about seven. After that, the family moved to Irving Street on the northern slope of Beacon Hill in Boston. At this point, the city of Boston had a population of a little more than three hundred sixty thousand people in about a hundred and fourteen thousand of those were immigrants, or about a third of the city's population. The city also had about eight thousand black residents. The northern slope of Beacon Hill and the neighboring West End were home to a mix of black, Irish and Italian families, as well as Jewish families who had immigrated from Eastern Europe and immigrants from other parts of the world. Interracial marriages were not all that unusual in these neighborhoods. In about a fourth of the marriages in which one half of the couple was black the other was white, and often that was a black man and a white immigrant woman. So while a white woman raising two biracial children might have seemed unusual in some parts of Boston, it would have been less so in the neighborhood where the Knox family moved after John's death. While this part of Boston was diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and religion, there were also a lot of tensions connected to this diversity. Although whole neighborhoods looked integrated from the outside, individual multi family buildings tended to essentially be segregated. There were tensions and sometimes violence related to race and ethnicity, as well as anti Catholic and anti immigrant violence, and there were economic struggles as well. The Panic of eighteen nine three started when Kitty was about nineteen. Kitty and Ernest both seemed to have tried to establish respectable careers for themselves in the face of all this. Kitty started working as a seamstress and a dressmaker, and Ernest became a steam fitter. That's somebody who installs, maintains, repairs piping systems for things like steam and gas, and that was considered a skilled trade, and Kitty saved up enough money to buy her own diamond frame bicycle. She soon became a visible figure in the world of cycling. The first written mention of her as a cyclist is in the Indianapolis Freeman in June of eight, which described her cycling as graceful and noted that she was a member of the Riverside Cycle Club, which was an organization for black cyclists in Cambridge. And she made her own cycling outfits, ones that were practical and stylish, and she became well known for these as well. We don't like have insight into her thought process on like why she decided to buy a diamond frame bike specifically and why she decided to make these particular clothes to wear on that bike, but I love that she did. In eight she entered a contest for the most approved female bicycling costume, which was part of the July four festivities that Waltham, Massachusetts. Her riding costume was described in the cycling publication the Bearings quote a shirtwaist, man's shortcoat and bloomers to the knee with tight leggings from the knee down. She also wore a hat, and this whole outfit was in gray checked fabric. Some people in the crowd hissed when she was announced as the winner, and while some newspapers tried to play that off as being about the fact that she was in trousers, some of the other contestants were in dresses, others concluded that it was really because a woman of color had won this contest over the white women who had entered. By this point, Boston had become home to the League of American Wheelman's national headquarters, and cycling had become incredibly popular in the area. Boston had the highest per capita League membership of any city and the highest percentage of women among its members. Knox had joined the League in the League's advocacy for better roads was accelerating during this time as well. The same year that Knox joined the League, it had started publishing Good Roads Magazine as part of its advocacy for federal legislation for better roads. Boston based bicycle manufacturer Colonel Albert A. Hope also circulated a petition calling for the establishment of a Federal Roads Department to present the Congress that year. When he did, it contained a hundred and fifty thousand signatures which were wound onto these two giant wooden spools. The Senate funded the Office of Road Inquiry, which was a precursor to the Federal Highways Administration, and this marked the start of an increasing effort to have the state and federal government's take over the creation and maintenance of roads. But even as the League was seeing some progress in its objectives in nine four, it was also facing upheaval about who could be a member. We'll talk more about that after a sponsor break. We mentioned earlier that the League of American Wheelman was at least theoretically open to anyone over the age of eighteen when it was founded in eighteen eighty, and Kitty Knox, who was biracial, became a member in eighteen nine three. But at that point some of the League's members were in the middle of a multi air campaign to change the organization's constitution to allow only white people to join. This was led by Colonel William W. Watts from Louisville, Kentucky. This was happening during a period of US history known as the Native of American race relations. Many of the steps towards equal rights and protections that have been made during reconstruction had been rolled back, and Southern states in particular were implementing discriminatory laws to disenfranchise and oppress their black population. This was also a time of widespread lynching and other racist violence and terror. Watts's calls to allow only white members in the League of American Wheelmen were unanimously supported by delegates from Southern states, and they had at least some support from the states that have been considered border states during the Civil War. While northern states generally opposed this proposal, in a lot of cases that opposition was particularly vocal. Watts first introduced this language at the league's annual meeting in eighteen ninety two, but when the delegates took a vote, it failed. At the eighteen ninety three meeting, of majority of the delegates voted in favor of it, but not the two thirds majority that was required to amend the league's constitution. After the failed vote in eighteen ninety three, members in some Southern states started leaving the organization in protest. The league's eighteen ninety four meeting was held in Louisville, Kentucky, and on February delegates voted on Watts proposed language. This time, the measure passed with a vote of a hundred and twenty seven to fifty four. A line was added to the league's constitution which read, quote none but white persons can become members of the League. The fact that this meeting took place in Louisville, where Watts was from, played a part in the way that the vote went. But Watts and other white site lists from Louisville had also pressured a local organization for black cyclists called the Union Cycling Club to write a letter supporting the measure. This letter itself was pretty ambiguous, but Watts had used it as evidence that black cyclists were in support of a segregated league. This measure also passed in spite of the fact that the vast majority of the league's members lived in the Northeast. While delegates from southern and border states were the ones that were really most aggressively pushing for this change, they also made up less than ten percent of the league's total membership. The Massachusetts delegates to the League of American Wheelmen were unanimously opposed to the measure. One of its members was state Representative Robert Timo, a black representative from Boston, Timo, called on the Massachusetts legislature to denounce the league's resolution, which both houses did in March. Of this resolution read in part quote, General Court deprecates the action of the organization above reference to and regards the enforcement of discriminations of this character as a revival of baseless and obsolete prejudices. Organizations for black cyclists denounced the measure as well, including the Riverside Cycling Club and the Colored National League, And right away people started talking about repealing this measure at the meeting, and Louis Jacqueesh of Illinois introduced a measure to do so. This also came as the League was deciding where to hold its meeting. It was down to two options, Boston, Massachusetts, and the coastal resort town of Asbury Park, New Jersey. Even though the Massachusetts delegation had strongly opposed Watts's proposal, it appears that they also backed down on trying to repeal it in the hope that doing so would encourage Southern delegates to vote for Boston to host the meeting. Ultimately, that repeal measure was with on and despite the Massachusetts delegations apparent finagling, Asbury Park was selected as host city. Kitty Knox was one of the people from Boston who traveled to Asbury Park for the meeting that July. She left for New Jersey not long after that July fourth cycling costume contests that we mentioned before the break. Boston attendees made their way to Asbury Park by some combination of train, ship, and ferry, and about thirty of them planned to make at least part of the trip by bike, although the weather and consequently the roads were so terrible that only nine of them actually got there that way. As planned. Asbury Park itself was largely segregated, with various public accommodations accessible only to white patrons, even though that violated a civil rights law that New Jersey had passed in eight four. Asbury Park also did not allow trains to stop there on Sundays, presumably to try to keep working class people from New York from taking day trips there on their one day off. According to her report in The New York Times, after getting to ask Bray Park, Knox quote did a few fancy cuts in front of the clubhouse and was requested to desist. It is thought that this episode will result in temporarily opening the color line question. Some of the Aspray Park Wheelman officials, it has said, will protest against permitting miss Knox to remain a member of the league. She has held a league card for six years. The local kickers say they will have a reckoning with the league's secretary Abbott Bassett upon his arrival. It's not clear where the Times reporter got the number six years. This was in and she had become a member in according to league records. Sometimes arithmetic will get him. Uh. Knox was denied entry to the league's meeting even after showing her membership card. In an article from the San Francisco Hall that was reprinted in papers all over the country, it was described this way quote When Miss Knox, whose appearance and dress had been objects of admiration all day, walked into the committee room at the local clubhouse and presented her league card for a credential badge, the gentleman in charge refused to recognize the card, and the young woman withdrew very quietly. Nine out of every hundred members interviewed expressed the heartiest sympathy for her and condemnation of the hasty action of the Badge Committee. She was also barred from the hotel where she had planned to stay and wound up at a boarding house instead. At least one restaurant turned her away, and she was kept out of the league's women's lounge. She did attend a ball that was held as part of the meeting, escorted by a young man from Boston, but according to her report in the New York Herald, quote, the many snubs which have been placed upon her by many of the women culminated last night, and dozens of them leaving the ball the auditorium because she was not only there but the first upon the floor in the waltz, which took the place of the Grand march Um or right up in the bearings, did not mention people leaving at all, instead noting that only six hundred of the expected five thousand people had been at the ball, and reported that Knox quote danced every number on the order and added to her reputation as a clever wheelwoman by proving herself a model of gracefulness on the floor. And there was a lot of reporting on all of this. We've already mentioned papers from New York and San Francisco, but the story was carried in newspapers from Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, Pittsburgh and Scranton, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Illinois, Louisville, Kentucky, Wilmington, Delaware, just on and on. You can just put this in a newspaper database and just like hundreds of hundreds of articles come up, some of them the same syndicated articles, some of them original ones reporting on all of this. Although the league's constitute s and now allowed only white members, a person did not have to be a member of the league to participate in most league sponsored rides and races, and it's possible that Watts had intentionally worded his proposal this way, knowing that some of the nation's black bicycle riders were extremely popular athletes and that just barring them from racing and the league sponsored events entirely might cause a backlash. For example, Marshall Taylor, known as Major Taylor and also as the Worcester Whirlwind, had won his first race in eighteen nine two and would eventually become internationally famous. So Kitty Knox was allowed to participate in some rides that were arranged as part of the league meeting, as were delegates from the Riverside Cycle Club, who had also come in from Boston. A few weeks after the meeting, the July issue of the league's bulletin and Good Roads was published, in which w h S from Asbury Park, New Jersey posed the question. At the national meet held here last week, a negro was entered and rode in one of the trial heats in a Class A race on Saturday morning, July. The number pinned to him was one thirteen. The trial heat was in the one mile open Class A, the second race on Saturday's program. How can a negro compete with Class Amen? How can a negro be a member of the l A W As it appears miss Knox of Boston is The answer that was printed with this question was quote Miss Katie J. Knox joined the league April eighteen ninety three. The word white was put into the constitution February nine four. Such laws are not and cannot be retroactive. We don't know who it was that competed in the races, and we know of no law that would keep a negro out of an open race, be he league member or not. So it seems as though, at least at the national level, League of American Wheelman considered NX to be a member in spite of the change to its constitution that was made after she joined. It doesn't seem like she or members of the Riverside Cycling Club were involved in national level League events after this, though. A measure to remove the league's color bar was reintroduced in eighteen ninety six and then withdrawn and in even it was voted on and passed, but not by the two thirds majority required, and it seems like at that point the matter was dropped and the league more or less stopped operating in nineteen hundred. At that point, the bicycle boom had become a bubble and it was collapsing thanks to everything from a huge oversupply of bicycles on the market, to the introduction of the motorcycle, to changing tastes as people started to think of cycling as kind of a passing fad. After the meeting in Asbury Park, Kitty had continued to ride, though including participated in several centuries or hundred mile rides. She and other black riders had also continued to face discrimination from white riders and from the greater community, especially in those long distance rides. These events usually involved stops at ends for meals and rest, and sometimes those accommodations only allowed white people to enter, even though in some places that kind of racial discrimination had been outlawed. So sometimes race organizers used the likelihood of being turned away at a meal stop as a pretense to exclude black writers entirely. When Knox and a group of about fifteen black men were all turned away from a century ride later on in eight it led to a discussion about whether the state's various anti discrimination laws covering things like theaters and restaurants also applied to cycling events. That was obviously the state of Massachusetts, which I didn't specifically write in this sentence. Kenny Knox made a name and reputation for herself in the world of cycling at the end of the nineteenth century. Newspapers all over the country reported on her races and her outfits, although some of that reporting was excessively focused on things like her skin color and her appearance, and what her appearance looked like in terms of her race. Her photograph and comments on her writing and her writing clothes she made also appeared in cycling publications all over the United States. Sadly, Kitty Knox died on October eleven, nine hundred, at Massachusetts General Hospital as a result of chronic kidney disease. She was very young, just twenty six. She was buried in an unmarked grave off of Vesper Path in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Her mother died six years later and her brother died in nineteen eleven. The first cars had been introduced by the time Kitty Knox died, and Colonel Pope, who had presented that big petition to Congress about improving the roads, had shifted his manufacturing focus from pikes to cars. By nineteen ten, the American Automobile Association had picked up where the League of American Wheelman had left off with the good Roads movement that continued into the nineteen twenties. The United States had started passing some laws that set up federal funding for roads in the nineteen teens, and the Federal Aid Road Act, passed in nineteen sixteen, established the first large federally funded highway construction programs in conjunction with the states. This was the start of more widespread state and federal road and highway projects once that were really focused on the needs of automobiles rather than the needs of cyclists or pedestrians. In some places, the first highways that were built for automotive use actually followed roads that had originally been made and improved for cycling. Some other parts of the world saw similar trends, although not necessarily to the same extent that the US did. But over the last few decades some parts of the world have seen a bigger focus on bicycles as a critical form of transportation, one that is less expensive and far less environmentally destructive than cars are. This includes everything from wealthier nations adding more dedicated bike lanes and bike paths to their infrastructure, to efforts to provide people living in impoverished rural areas with bicycles, which can make a life or death difference in things like access to medical care. Yes, some of the infrastructure stuff, like I said earlier, it's like gets the same kind of opposition um as stuff was happening in the in the late nineteenth century, with people upset that a bike lane is taking away parking, or that a bike lane is making the road narrower for cars. Things like that. Today, the League of American Wheelman has been revived as the League of American Bicyclists, and in League president Earl Jones signed a resolution revoking that e color line, also issuing an apology and granting posthumous membership to Major Taylor the Worcester Whirlwind. Jones had realized that that segregation language had never been formally repealed and had asked the league's Board of Directors to take action on it. Kinny Knox has become locally better known in recent years. Laurence Phinison, known as Larry, found her name while researching the history of cycling, and went on to do more research into her life, including finding surviving family members who were related to her through her mother. This, plus research into other Boston areas cyclists from the late nineteenth century, went into his book, Boston's Bicycling Craze eighteen eighty to nineteen hundred, and that book is dedicated to Kitty Knox. Her grave at Mount Auburn Cemetery is also no longer unmarked, thanks to the efforts of Knox's surviving relatives, Phenison, and other donors. A marker designed by David Sullivan was placed in the summer of It reads Katherine T. Kitty Knox eighteen seventy four to nine hundred, and there's also an engraving of a bicycle. Several of her living relatives were present at its official unveiling on September. In August of the City of Boston added an electric assist cargo trike to its fleet named after Kitty Knox, and then Mayor Marty Walsh proclaimed August twenty as Kitty Knox Day. This Kio trake is kind of a pilot project and part of the city's efforts to go carbon neutral. The idea is that if city employees need to take something from one location to another, they can use the trike rather than driving a car. There is also a bike path named for her in Cambridge, and in June of mass Bike hosted the Kitty Knox Ride, which was a community ride with three options that included the Kitty Knox Path. Yeah, the path is not particularly long, so it's sort of like three loops that incorporated that stretch as a part of a longer ride. Do you have some listener man, sure do. This is from Claire, and Claire said, hello, ladies. I've been catching up on older episodes and I just listened to your episode on penicillin fascinating and also all the egos. My background is microbiology and I currently teach at a local university as a sessional adjunct is the u S term teaching the molecular end of biology, genetics and microbiology in particular. I'll be posting this episode as an additional resource for my micro class. Have you heard about phage therapy as something we can use to enhance antibiotics or even to replace them? Right now, it's looking like the best bet is to use them in tandem, but it's early days. Phage therapy predates universal antibiotic use, and even during the antibiotic era in the West, Russia for sure, and China I think, continued to use phage therapy because chemical therapy was so expensive. This is an excellent introduction to phage therapy if you're familiar with it. I am a huge micro nerve and I find it one of the most exciting developments currently happening. And then there's a link to an article from August called phage therapy Past, Present and Future. Thanks for your excellent work, Claire. And then also you got some pictures of a rescue cat named Sedona also called in visit cat and long cat. I love the cat pictures obviously, UM I nearly accidentally printed them all out with the text of the email, as I am pro to doing when we get cat pictures. I had not heard of phage therapy, and that does sound incredibly fascinating, And it's also so fascinating that this is something that like has such long origins, such long ago historical origins. UM that is still considered to be in its early days in terms of research now because of various complexities, the fact that for a long time the world was more focused on antibiotics. So thank you so much Claire for sending this email. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or history podcasts that I heart radio dot com and we're also all over social media. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app wherever else you get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.