Bicycles and the winter holiday season have always been tied up together for me. They speak to love, freedom and the loss of it, shame — and revolutionary acts of philanthropy by formerly incarcerated people.
My earliest Christmas memory stars a deep purple bike with a banana seat and cruiser-style handlebars. It was 1960, and I was 9 years old. The bike was too glorious for wrapping, towering over the other presents that sat lumpy and small under the shiny synthetic tree. Somebody had bent the front wheel’s chrome forks down, giving it a low-rider slope that made me feel like a little man before I even took the thing for a spin.
That bike meant a lot, given how hard my parents had been working to do right by me and my seven siblings. Nearly five years earlier they’d moved us from a housing project in South San Francisco to a home in Belle Haven. This neighborhood on the peninsula was part of the growing suburb of Menlo Park, but it sure as hell didn’t feel like it. Because right after the Nunn family moved in, the neighborhood turned from White to Black, almost overnight.
Real estate salesmen whispered in the ears of White homeowners that a “Negro” invasion was coming, so they better sell immediately. Meanwhile, the sweet, zero-down payment deals they offered to Black families like mine seemed too good to be true. And they were. Those loans blew up when balloon payments came due. By December 1960, we were on our third house in the neighborhood. My father was working two jobs, scratching his way forward in search of the American dream. When us kids got a little older, my mother would join him in the low-wage workforce — taking care of White kids and cleaning White homes.
The freeway hemmed Belle Haven in from the rich White neighborhoods to the west, turning our community into an invisible cage. But that Christmas I felt free. I had my first bike! I rode it with pride, popping wheelies just a few blocks from our house. That feeling lasted six days, ending when I heard a police siren behind me. Two cops got out. The big one picked up the bike to look for a serial number. “It’s stolen,” he said, not even looking at me. Then he tossed it in the trunk and they were gone.
On the slow walk home, I puzzled it out. Maybe my father or one of my brothers had stolen it. Maybe they’d bought it from someone who had. One thing I knew for sure: The bike wasn’t mine anymore. I was a Black kid, and that made me a suspect. That shit feeling marked the birth of my rage against law enforcement. And it played on repeat. In my invisible cage, there was no presumption of innocence.
I had my next memorable encounter with law enforcement two years later. There was one pedestrian bridge that crossed the Bayshore Freeway, and that’s the route I walked with my childhood best friend, Nate Harrington, to get to the park where we played our Little League baseball games.
One day we were crossing the wide lawn of an elementary school when we saw a hunk of metal winking at us in the sunlight. We pitched some rocks at it, baseball style. Then we took it with us, a cool chunk of junk.
We made it one block before those sirens pulsed again. My supposed crime this time: stealing public property. That piece of metal turned out to be a sprinkler. Instead of taking us to the station, the officers brought us home and let our fathers do the beating.
Nate and I were so upset, we devised a fucked-up plan to run away that relied on the freedom only a bike can provide to a kid. By this time, we each had one to call our own, so we rode without looking back. About 14 miles to the north, we hunkered down in a public bathroom, shivering in the cold fog. We didn’t last long after that.
Inside the invisible cage where we grew up, it was the police, not school teachers, who were molding our future. They were treating us like thugs when we were just being boys. The more they defined me and my friends as suspects and criminals who didn’t belong — even in our own neighborhoods — the more we accepted the identity they imposed on us. We became what they told us we were.
I stole a lot of bikes from the esteemed institution of Stanford University, which was so close but so out of reach for anything other than thieving. I pulled off some fine burglaries on that side of town, too. That’s as lofty as my notion of Black brilliance got back then. Drugs complicated the picture — first weed and then heroin when it came flooding in after the weed supply dried up.
I was 19 years old when I took part in a robbery that left the store owner dead. When I told my father I wouldn’t snitch and give up the shooter, I saw him weep for the first time.
When I entered the state prison system in early 1972 with a life sentence, I had a son and a daughter with two different mothers. My kids needed a father, but I hadn’t even started shaving yet. There would be no family Christmas for me for many years to come.
I served my first two years in Deuel Vocational Institution, a prison east of the Bay Area that was so violent in the 1970s it was known as Gladiator School. I ran into plenty of friends and acquaintances there, but what shocked me most was to hear Nate — who was quiet and brilliant — call out my name. Because our schools in Belle Haven had turned into the Black version of “Lord of the Flies,” I was barely literate. It was Nate who taught me how to read inside my new cage made of concrete and steel. He taught me how to reason and how to dream. I spent a lot of time in the hole, mostly for allying myself with any Black revolutionary brother who could feed my intellect. The guards would stoke racial tensions among the mostly Black, Mexican and White population, stand back as we beat and shanked each other, then lob tear gas and fire bullets into the shitstorm they’d created.
After Gladiator School, I spent seven years at a place that proved even more violent — San Quentin State Prison. Survival required me to sacrifice my humanity in ways I would spend decades processing and deeply regretting. But I was fortunate to have my godsister Shirl Miles and my pen pal Kathy Labriola in my corner. They visited often, offering me friendship and softness and helping me preserve a thin thread of a lifeline to my inner self. They allowed me to reflect, and the winter holiday season was always significant.
As I grew into my manhood, I recognized my father’s personal sacrifice. His absence from my Little League and Pop Warner games stung because I wanted to shine for him. But bouncing from cell to cell, I came to understand that his absence stemmed from the fact that he was working his ass off to keep the rent paid and food on the table.
This realization turned the spotlight back on me. I knew my responsibility was to take care of my own kids and provide for them. Every Christmas was a reminder that I had failed in that responsibility.
I engaged in some risky hustles so I could pass some cash to my mother during the holidays — to make sure my little girl had something she could call a gift from her daddy. My son would have to wait. His mom and I were on the outs when I was locked up.
The day I walked out the gates of San Quentin on parole — Oct. 22, 1981 — my plan was to eat a Winchell’s donut, drink a Henry Weinhard’s beer, smoke some weed and find a sweet sister to snuggle up with.
Instead, I wore holes in my prison-issued Naugahyde shoes searching for my son since I’d lost touch with his mother. When I found him two days later, I had $10 in my pocket. I gave him $9. It was the least I could do after so many years of absence and failed responsibility, and it wasn’t near enough.
Since I got out of prison, I’ve never held a job that wasn’t dedicated to improving the conditions for human beings living in and coming out of cages. I worked for half a dozen years as a paralegal for the nonprofit Prison Law Office, sitting face-to-face with brothers on death row, recognizing how easily I could have been one of them.
The trauma proved to be too much. I gave in to crack addiction in the late 1980s. But I got clean and helped build Free At Last, a drug program in my neighborhood to help fix the mess I helped make. Then, with a year of sobriety under my belt, I was privileged to go to work for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, eventually becoming the longtime executive director of the Oakland-based nonprofit. Together, we helped bring an end to the shackling of incarcerated pregnant women and to indefinite long-term solitary confinement in California prisons.
In 2003, a handful of other formerly incarcerated people had come on board as staff. In casual meetings, we all agreed: We were sick of others speaking for us, using our personal experience as garnish for their policy work, however well-meaning. So a group of us got together for a marathon planning session and created All of Us or None, a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated people demanding restoration of our full civil and human rights — in our own voices.
With our Ban the Box campaign, we’ve successfully pushed for laws and measures across the country that eliminate questions about criminal history from job applications. We have also worked to re-enfranchise voters in jail or on felony parole so they can exercise their citizenship, sit on juries and influence our governance. Despite all those accomplishments, one of things I’m most proud of is giving bicycles to kids with incarcerated parents during the winter holidays.
The Big Bike Giveaway started small. In 1999, a prisoner inside San Quentin who’d been repairing used bikes let me know a new shipment had come in.
At the time, some of the men I’d practiced political education with in prison had been gathering to figure out how to do good. We called ourselves “Timers,” and our crew included community activist Robert Moody and former Black Panthers Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt and Arthur “Tha” League.
In 2000, the Timers got with San Quentin officials and asked for the bikes so we could give them to kids whose parents were incarcerated. We focused on a housing project in West Oakland, surveying the place to see how many adults were missing because they were locked behind bars. Their kids were the first to get bikes, and we let the children know the gifts were from their parents.
San Quentin helped steer bikes in our direction for a few years, but we knew we had a problem when the assistant warden asked me to tell the kids the bikes came courtesy of the prison. For them, it was a smooth PR move. For me, it was a nonstarter. As Addie Kitchen, a correctional officer I’d known since the ’70s, walked me out, I said, “These kids don’t need to know that San Quentin loves them. I’m gonna tell them that their parents love them.”
So, we parted ways with San Quentin and started scraping together the money on our own, lining up at midnight before Black Friday sales with cash burning holes in our pockets. By this time, All of Us or None was a growing movement. Some of us who gathered at those early meetings had been out of prison for months or weeks, even days. Others for decades. But we’d still ask everyone in attendance to give up $50 to buy a bike. Even chickenshit people who would sell you a loosie would reach in their pockets to make a donation. Others would say, “Hey, I can’t give you $50, can I help put the bicycles together?” The answer was always yes.
Eventually we changed the name of the Big Bike Giveaway to the Community Giveback to emphasize how we were collectively participating in philanthropy. The act of giving back isn’t something only rich people do.
Year after year, I’ve stood at microphones and asked a growing crew of volunteers, “How many of y’all have stolen a bike?” Plenty of hands go up. “Well,” I shout, “now’s your chance to give one back!”
In the crowd are men and women who, like me, sat in their cells feeling inadequacy and shame in their failed responsibility. Doing right for other people’s children helps fill the hole.
As members of All of Us or None became better organizers, we also became better fundraisers. An army of formerly incarcerated volunteers still distributes the bikes at our Community Giveaways, but we raise the money to get them from outside donors. We buy the bikes in bulk, along with a helmet for each child.
The second Saturday of every December, we throw up a big tent, light up the barbecues and turn up the music. There’s face painting for the kids and gifts to pamper the mothers and grandmothers. Art supplies are set up at a separate table so kids can make thank-you cards for their loved ones inside. Because, as we tell them, these bikes are from them.
These days we’re reaching out to the chaplains inside prisons — including women’s facilities — to make sure we get the word out. They provide applications to anyone who has a kid who needs a bicycle and can make it to the festivities. At our 2022 giveaway, a 9-year-old named Paris arrived with her grandmother. Her daddy had been locked up since she was 2, and her grandmother told me that trust between them was raw and delicate. I got to see Paris’ eyes go wide as her dad called from California State Prison, Sacramento, and told her, “I bought you a bike. That’s why you’re there, to pick your bike!” Listening to that little girl speak to her father, I knew I had hit the ball the right way.
This Dec. 14 marked our 25th annual Community Giveback. We raised enough money to give away 280 bicycles. And we did something a little different. We sent those bikes into San Quentin so prisoners there could help put them together. We wanted them to taste a bit of the joy that comes with giving back.
I’m 73 now and semi-retired. Many people my age have been getting out of prison with nowhere to land where they’re treated with dignity. Legal Services for Prisoners with Children is building a home for some of them in the unused parsonage of a West Oakland church, but too many are dying before the thing is even done.
As for the nearly 20 million of us on the outside marked by felony convictions, too many are still considered suspects in our own neighborhoods. Revolution is a slow process, and there have been setbacks. We keep pushing. In the meantime, we’ll be giving away bikes in the name of those still locked inside, knitting our communities back together.
Dorsey Nunn recently retired as the executive director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. His book, “What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection,” was published in April 2024 by Heyday Books. Co-authored by longtime journalist Lee Romney, it tracks Nunn’s personal and professional story from boyhood to incarceration in the revolutionary 1970s, the tough-on-crime prison explosion of the ’80s and ’90s, and the creation of All of Us or None, a national movement of formerly incarcerated people demanding restoration of their full civil and human rights.
