American Motorcyclist - March 2004
This time the club really got into some shit. One of our members, Mighty Q, got himself shot and killed on the street corner right out in front of our clubhouse one Friday night. Q didn't meet his maker alone. He took down one of their boys too. In the blink of an eye the shooting ended. Two black men lay face down on the sidewalk. Blood everywhere. One of their guys and one of ours. Both gone. Q was a good kid. I didn't know exactly what he had gotten himself into, but I suspected trouble.
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This is how Soul on Bikes begins, and though such intensity is not sustained throughout its full 288 pages, it keeps you hooked, exploring a fascinating tale that is both an individual journey and a study of the evolution of our society from the 1940s to the present day, seen through the eyes of a black biker. Not only did Tobie Gene Levingston find his calling aboard a chopped Harley on the gritty streets of Oakland, but he brought others together to form a club that has expressed black pride and solidarity through its unique style for half a century. Though Levingston knew and admired the leadership of Sonny Barger, the East Bay Dragons chose not to strictly follow the model of the One Percenter clubs. Levingston explains, "we wouldn't fall into the territorial trap. We refused to even claim our own neighborhood streets. We wanted to avoid that gangster, Al Capone stuff. Instead, we'd ride from one community to another with pride and confidence. I liked it that when someone on the streets, black and white, male and female, cops and bike riders, whoever, saw us, they didn't quite know what to make of us. We were unusual and special. An East Bay Dragons MC member didn't neatly fit into any biker box or easy category."
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Tobie Gene Levingston, the lifetime president of the East Bay Dragons, was born into a sharecropper's family in Lillie, Louisiana in 1934. When an older brother, Wilton, invited their mother to visit him in Oakland in 1954, Tobie Gene borrowed the money for a bus ticket, joined her, and decided California was where he wanted to stay. Eventually, the entire family moved out, because, as Levingston explains, "The days of cotton as king in the rural south were over. The shipyards and postwar boom of California lured a new generation of hardworking blacks and blue-collar workers West. We joined the throngs of migrating Southerners, and it felt good to start anew." City life in California was utterly different from rural life in Louisiana. For example, an automobile became an essential part of a young man's life style. With young Levingston and his friends all getting cars and hopping them up, the East Bay Dragons actually began as a car club. But events soon led Toby Gene and his companions to motorcycles. Whereas he and his brothers had wrestled with the handles of a mule-pulled plow in the cotton fields of Louisiana, in Oakland they began to cruise the streets behind the bars of big Harley Hogs. Unlike most of the black clubs of the era who were into couples in spiffy uniforms aboard decked-out dressers, the East Bay Dragons became a male-only club, riding flashy Harley choppers.
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From Levingston's perspective, this book takes you through four decades of the rich cultural ferment of the Bay Area, from the jazz-playing, poetry-reading Beatniks to the Hippies and Flower Children of Haight Ashbury, from the political defiance of the Black Panthers to the dark days of streets flowing with coke in the 1980s. The Dragons rode through it all. They mixed and coexisted peacefully with the Hell's Angels, knew Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, and gave stoned-out white hippie girls rides on the bitch seats of their choppers. Levingston recalls, "During the hippie days, I thought white folks were going nuts. This was way beyond what the Beatniks were into. It was a gas riding through the Haight. We wouldn't do anything but stand around and listen to kids strum their folk guitars in the cafes. People were so zonked out, smoking, drinking, sharing; also into peace and love, they seemed to reach out to us."
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In fact, as I traveled with Tobie Gene through one of the most revolutionary periods in our history, I began to wonder if these guys did anything but spectate. They knew the Panthers and attended their rallies, but did not get into their activism. They saw the turmoil over Vietnam, but did not seem to take a stand for or against the peace movement, as did the Hell's Angels when they knocked hippy heads. The Dragons certainly had style, but did they have any depth? This question is answered in a chapter toward the end of the book entitled Devil on My Shoulder in which Tobie Gene begins to reveal his philosophy and bare his soul. He explores the philosophical conflicts between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and finds his own synthesis. He discusses patriotism, racism, and social justice. He reveals the wisdom and patience, developed over time, that has empowered him to keep a motorcycle club of brothers together for more than four tumultuous decades. In so doing, he challenges the propaganda of progress, stating, "While Dr. King brought us closer together, that togetherness came with a price. What I saw in the South and in Oakland when I first got here were black stores, black restaurants, and black motorcycle shops. Black enterprise. I think a case can be made that had we maintained more separation at the expense of togetherness, the black community might have more to show for itself today. With more access to the system comes more competition for the black dollar. We're now free to blend in with the crowd. But one of the prices we pay for the strides we've made in equality is that our strength and economic power has become spread out and watered down. Where are the black Harley-Davidson shops today?"
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Soul on Bikes is written with the help of brothers Keith and Kent Zimmerman. These are writers who have good experience with edgy subject matter, since they co-authored Hell's Angel with Sonny Barger, and ghost wrote No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs with John (Johnny Rotten) Lydon of the Sex Pistols. Their style is easy and vernacular. In fact, as I read this book, I wished it were available as a book-on-tape. I would love to hear this story through Tobie Gene Levingston's own voice. I recommend this book not just for its highly entertaining quality, but for the history and social commentary it provides, which, at times, is deep and meaningful. On one level it is an entertaining tale of one man's lifelong biker adventure. On another it is an allegory of what has happened to black Americans over the last 50 years. Driven from an agrarian society by corporate farming and the lure of steady wages, they have migrated to the cities where they could choose between being homogenized with white society, or marginalized into impoverished ghettos or, worse yet, jail cells by ridiculous drug laws and uneven justice. Somehow, the East Bay Dragons seem to have avoided either alternative.
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| Ed Youngblood, author of Heroes of Harley-Davidson (2003), served on the American Motorcycle Association staff for 28 years, including 19 years as its president.
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