A group of children standing on the sidewalk squealed in excitement as a procession of six dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) roared past them on a frigid April morning. The bikers showed off their tricks, leaning back as their front wheels lifted off the ground in vertical wheelies. One rider became enveloped in a cloud of smoke as he swiveled his bike around in circles. It was an atypical recess for the students at Chicago’s Genevieve Melody Stem elementary school.
The demonstration was hosted by B-360, a Baltimore-based non-profit organization that hosts a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) program for students under 16 to learn how to build, code, design and 3D print model-size robot dirt bikes. In an effort to expand its programming to other cities, B-360 staff and volunteers taught the students Stem principles through hands-on experiments and bike demonstrations. By learning the mechanics and safety behind dirt bikes, the Chicago school’s principal, Tiffany Tillman, said she hoped the majority Black student body will “know they have different opportunities to always be successful”.
Regulations on urban dirt biking, which grew in popularity in cities in the 1980s, vary by state and local jurisdiction. It’s illegal to own or ride bikes on public or private property in Baltimore and riders can be penalized with a criminal misdemeanor resulting in imprisonment and a fine, which primarily affects Black men. As of 23 April, 18 people were arrested in Baltimore in 2024, while in 2023, 34 people were arrested. (The Baltimore police department did not provide a racial breakdown of those arrested.) In Chicago, though, urban dirt biking is not tracked as a charge; one white person and seven Black people were arrested for motorbike-related offenses between April 2023 and April 2024, according to police data.
Since 2021, B-360 has partnered with the Baltimore city state’s attorney’s office to offer a 20-hour diversion program on dirt bike safety and Stem education to help adults cited for dirt bike offenses avoid prosecution. As of April, one defendant was referred to B-360’s diversion program in 2024. Yet the organization operates in a legal gray zone, since dirt bike riding is a misdemeanor. Even housing an unlocked dirt bike or selling motor fuel to the vehicles is forbidden. This year, the state announced further restrictions on the activity by vowing to penalize parents and guardians of youth dirt bikers.
“Under the current policy, we are criminals,” said Brittany Young, founder of B-360. “So the goal is if [programming] can make it [in Baltimore], it can make it anywhere.”
Young, a 34-year-old retired chemical engineer, hopes that Chicago will be the first of many cities that the group expands to. In the future, she’d also like her staff to teach classes at Melody elementary.
During their annual summer camp, the non-profit takes over a recreation center for students ranging in ages from four to over 30 to learn how to ride, fix and repair dirt bikes. But it’s been a challenge to find a permanent home for the organization. “The last thing we want to see is having a space in Baltimore and having people go to jail,” Young said. B-360 is currently raising $20m to build an urban dirt bike campus, similar to a skateboarding park.
They are working toward a memorandum of understanding with the city or property owners to attain a dedicated space. But before building a campus, she and her staff hope to change the policies that continue to penalize urban dirt biking and push for zoning for the activity for the first time. They hope to gain possession of the confiscated bikes to use for programming, which Young says the city has been shipping abroad.
“Dirt bike culture is Black culture,” Young said. “It’s not going anywhere. How do we elevate it to make sure it can stay and stay in a way that grows people and grows communities?”
‘We don’t just put people in jail’
Born and raised in Baltimore, Young started B-360 in 2017, following the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old who died of a spinal cord injury in Baltimore police custody. After the uprisings that shone a light on the overpolicing of Black communities, Young wanted to help uplift her community by providing Stem education and to protect the Black dirt bike riders that have become a cultural stronghold in the city. She saw two issues in need of a solution: for Black people to understand how smart they are, and that “for nonviolent offenders we don’t just put people in jail or create police taskforces, [but] that we think holistically about how to pipeline them for training and having real lives”.
She began working with Rashad Staton, the executive director of the Baltimore-based youth leadership development organization Community Law in Action, to advocate for policy changes around dirt biking. A part of the original dirt biking families of Baltimore, Staton said he used a Johns Hopkins fellowship to study how to decriminalize the popular activity from a public health lens, because “police involvement and engagement is a social determinant to our trajectory of Black and brown folks.
“Why have we had a taskforce and four mayors in Baltimore city that have all been in [agreement] or [shown] some type of support of B-360, but we still haven’t seen a change in our local ordinance?” Staton asked.
According to Young, the penalization of urban dirt biking parallels tactics used during the “war on drugs”, a government-led initiative to stop illegal substance use that primarily targeted Black and brown communities beginning in the 1970s. She notes the implementation of government taskforces and the confiscation and recirculation of bikes in police possession.
“When the ‘war on drugs’ happened, they made the possession of an illegal substance that could send you to jail. Those practices became outdated, they became arcane. People realized that was not a good tactic or strategy,” Young said. “Now with dirt bikes in Baltimore, possession of dirt bikes is a misdemeanor, we had a dirt bike police taskforce. We also see the same media strategies of describing dirt bike riders as ‘gun-toting criminals’.”
B-360 says that their programs have helped keep youth dirt bikers off the streets. Yet, they don’t receive funding for their diversion program. (The Baltimore city state attorney office’s chief of communications, James E Bentley II, said over email that the office doesn’t fund any of the diversion programs it partners with.)
Young hopes that like the “war on drugs”, that the public will come to realize that the draconian measures around dirt biking drains public resources and funnels people of color into the criminal system. Through her and other advocates’ work, the Baltimore police department disbanded its dirt bike taskforce, launched in 2016, in 2020.
The organization’s work has also inspired policy discussions with local and state leaders, and they are receiving state and federal funding and support.
B-360 received $1.25m in Baltimore’s American Rescue Plan Act funding in 2022 for Stem education and workforce training and $3m in federal funding for the development of a dirt bike campus and programming in the 2023 fiscal year.
Dirt bike parks exist in rural areas for people who ride on dirt, but what Young has in mind is a dirt bike park for those who ride on asphalt. The campus will also serve as a training center for people to learn how to fix and repair dirt bikes.
“B-360’s unique program promotes public safety and economic opportunity in parts of the city that have been historically overlooked and underserved,” Chris Van Hollen, the US senator from Maryland, who helped secure the funding, said. “The $3m in direct federal investments we secured will help provide a safe place away from city streets for young people to ride, while also helping to spark a passion for math and science within them and teaching them practical skills they can apply to future careers.”
Senator Ben Cardin, who also advocated for the funding, added that the support will “expand education opportunities and deliver key services for the community”.
‘Riders are geniuses’
In Chicago, Genevieve Melody Stem elementary school students stood under black tents in the schoolyard where they participated in a variety of experiments that simulated principles in dirt biking. A DJ blared music by Soulja Boy and other popular hits from speakers.
At one station, the students created lava lamps in small bottles by mixing colored water with oil that quickly rose to the top. Then they were given Alka Seltzer tablets that sunk to the bottom of the tube. The experiment demonstrated the concepts of hydrophobicity, when a molecule has an aversion to water, and hydrophilia, when it has an attraction to water.
“Since water and oil don’t mix, if they ever decide to work on gas bikes in the future, especially with two-stroke bikes, they’ll have to mix fuel and oil together,” B-360 lead instructor Shavone Mayers Dixon explained between experiments. “They need to know the different properties of these liquids and how to work with them if anything ever arises with their bike.”
In a demonstration of the exothermic process, when a reaction releases heat, and the endothermic process, when it absorbs heat, students created their own toothpaste by mixing together food coloring, yeast and peroxide in test tubes. The young children beamed as they watched green, red or blue foam spill on to the table. They rubbed the warm goo in between their fingers as an instructor explained that it was an example of an exothermic reaction. Learning the concept could help them avoid explosions when fixing bikes in the future.
During the summer sessions, students are taught mechanical engineering by learning how to fix their dirt bikes. And they are taught physics principles by learning that popping a wheelie requires pushing their bikes to a 12 o’clock position. “Riders are geniuses,” Young said. “We know riders that can put together bikes with just parts and pieces. Stem is a part of it all around.”
In the future, Young hopes that B-360 will teach classes during the school day, ideally with a trial run starting at the end of the current school year. They will continue raising funds for their dirt bike campus. She hopes that the efforts will show police and politicians that bike riding, just as Black culture, is here to stay.
“You can’t just erase it, because you can’t erase Black people.”
