Winnetka riders welcome Black bicyclist at pier
Group makes clear that views of white woman not shared
Friendly people at Saturday’s bike ride kept saying, “Welcome.”
In truth, Otis Campbell didn’t feel unwelcome, even after a white woman — who was arrested and later charged with a hate crime — accosted him on the Winnetka pier where he and friends ended a long bike ride on Aug. 17. In the now widely circulated video Campbell took of the encounter, the woman tells him to “go back to where you’re from.” He lives in Skokie.
“I went to Niles North,” the 25-year-old said on Saturday, standing among a crowd of cyclists gathered to ride with him to the pier and make the point that Campbell, and Black people generally, are welcome in Winnetka. He regularly rides his Schwinn through the North Shore suburbs. He has a specialty sneaker business, has a background in computers and likes anime.
One white woman insisting he wasn’t welcome did not make him question what he believed about himself or his belonging, he said. He thinks she made some assumptions about him, perhaps. But she didn’t even know him.
When one of the organizers of the welcome ride, meant to be a message of anti-racism, told Campbell, “Welcome back to Tower Road,” he laughed. He’d already been back on rides.
“I honestly never intended to not go back. There was never any type of animosity against Winnetka or anybody from the North Shore or any white person in general. It was just one instance. I’m taking it as a little hiccup in the world of Otis at the moment,” Campbell said the day before the ride.
Holding a microphone set up to kick things off on Saturday, he told cyclists: “All your Black friends get judged every day. This happened. Now is the time to stand up against it.”
By the time riders took off on the trail toward the pier, there were more than 75 of them. Some carried posters meant for onlookers. One said, “Not a Racist? Great! COME JOIN US.”
Dozens more waited at the pier. Natalie Anthony, who lives on the east side of Glenview, saw the video Campbell took at the pier a couple of weeks ago and messaged him directly on Twitter to say she’d like to ride with him. It grew from there as a group of her friends helped organize the ride; she’d never done something like that before.
“I’m raising mixed-race kids on the North Shore,” she said. Explaining that she initially wasn’t sure how to take action, she said that liking anti-racist messages on Facebook didn’t feel like enough. “I can get off the couch and show I care.”
Riders said they showed up to make clear that they, the mostly white North Shore citizens, don’t share the views expressed by Irene Donoshaytis, of Northfield, who appeared in court this week facing a class 4 felony hate crime charge. Winnetka has about 12,500 residents. Ninety percent are white; census data from 2018 registers the percentage of Black residents at zero because there are so few. Neighboring Northfield, with about 5,500 residents, is about the same. Glencoe too; about 1% of the roughly 8,900 residents are Black.
“There are a lot of folks on the North Shore who don’t feel welcome here, don’t feel like they belong, and there are a lot of people who make people feel like they don’t belong,” said Patrick Hanley, a Winnetka community activist who has spent the summer helping organize anti-racism walks and Zoom seminars about racism. He helped with the bike ride too. “White folks have a hard time contextualizing Black people being in the north suburbs.”
Hanley talked about a man who lives in Winnetka and works at a coffee shop. People are friendly to him there. But when he was out in the community walking his dog, he was met with stares, somehow out of place and less welcome.
Ami Desai Das, a physician and community activist also from the east side of
Glenview who was helping lead the ride, told the group of cyclists preparing to ride a story of her friend’s recent experience being confronted in an ice cream shop.
“A prominent white lawyer comes up to her and says, stop speaking Spanish,” she said. “We can’t let that happen again and again and again.”
Not all racism involves a white woman screaming at a Black man that he doesn’t belong in her neighborhood. Even as she leads school diversity and equity committees, and talks about racist language and the experiences of people of color in her community, Desai Das said she regularly encounters people who don’t believe racism still exists.
Saturday’s organizers and riders came because they do.
It was about “just showing up and saying we have a voice, to show there are more of us than those disgusting people who don’t create an inclusive environment,” Karl Bilimoria said.
A couple of miles from the Tower Road Boat Launch, where the group began, as the ride neared the pier where Campbell had been told he wasn’t welcome, girls and boys smiled and held signs that said, “Welcome Otis and Friends.”
As he and his friend prepared to begin the route, Campbell said again that he never felt unwelcome. But with so many more riders there than he expected with a “Welcome” message, he said his heart was racing.
“All this is love,” he said.