Roll models
Houston’s Black skateboarders glide into the spotlight
It was a photo just like any other that had been taken of him skateboarding. Houston’s Ty’Rae Carter is seen floating in the air doing a tailgrab nosegrind at the edge of a skate ramp, the tallest in the city. He’s gripping the top of his board, his face etched in concentration. The trick was worthy of the picture, but the image ended up being worthy of something else: a historic moment in skateboard culture.
It appeared in Thrasher Magazine, the holy writ for skateboarders, which devoted its September issue to Black skaters. Across its front and back covers, the faces of 35 Black
skateboarders appeared in a neat grid. Carter’s place in the skate world’s upper echelon was solidified.
Skaters of color, specifically Black skateboarders, are finally being recognized as the Black Lives Matter movement reached a crescendo over the summer. Earlier this year, the University of Southern California published a study, called “Skateboarding, Schools and Society,” that looked at skateboarding culture’s racial inclusivity.
An exclusive skateboard deck created by the skate company the Berrics, called the “Thank You” skateboard, features names of Black skaters from the past 40 years.
Skateboarding has long been stereotyped as a sport geared toward white suburban kids. But, beyond Carter’s photo, the Bayou City is name-checked all over that September issue of Thrasher. It ranges from the profile of pro skater Darrel Stanton, who made the cover of the magazine in the summer of 2002, to a timeline of Black firsts in the world of skateboarding. The first time a Black skater won a pro streetskating contest was Kareem Campbell’s 1993 first-place finish in Houston.
s for women, Hawaii’s Sharon Denise Reed, who has Southeast Texas roots, made a name for herself skating in amateur competitions in Houston, and California skaters Samarria Brevard and Adrianne Sloboh are included on the Thrasher cover.
Redemption on the ramp
On a recent Saturday night, Carter is skating up and down the same ramp from the photo, the Houston Vert Ramp in the northwest part of the city. A crowd is cheering.
The multicultural grouping of about two dozen skaters, many professional and some from as far away as Brazil, represent the face of today’s skate culture. Carter, 21, is one of two Black skaters showing off their skills.
Carter got into skateboarding because of proximity. As a 13-yearold, he lived across the street from one of Houston’s biggest places to skate, Lee and Joe Jamail Skatepark, and after taking a liking to the sport, he began spending 12-hour-plus summer days there.
He found meaning on this island of concrete slopes in the shadow of downtown. By sixth grade, he had stopped hanging around the friends in his neighborhood. Carter discovered a support network at the park that contrasted with his home’s at-risk environment in the Allen Parkway Village housing complex, where he had moved in 2004 with his single mother and two sisters.
“You got to one corner, you may see a fight, you go to the next corner (and) may see a drug deal. You see a lot of people with little opportunity trying to make ends meet,” he recalls about growing up there. “You try to make your way through it and try not to get into too much trouble,” he says. “My way to get out was to go across the street to the skatepark.”
His mother was a willing accomplice.
“He was also introducing me to skateboarding,” remembers Latasha Gulley. She was learning about all the parts, from the wheels to the ball bearings that she had to buy for Carter to build his own board.
Gulley held two jobs to support her family, before earning a degree and getting a job in medical billing.
In his early years of skating, Carter developed friendships with an ethnically diverse group of skateboarders. He didn’t look at himself as a Black skater; all he was trying to do was skate and find encouragement to get better.
“As far as skateboarding, I knew Shawn White, I knew Tony Hawk, and I knew Bucky Lasek,” he says about the well-known skaters, all white. Black skaters had not had their collective moment in the spotlight yet, and few appeared on “X Games” broadcasts.
Sometimes celebrating Black skaters is a slippery subject. “You do that white-boy sport?” someone said, chuckling to Carter when he was visiting his mother’s old South Park neighborhood a few months ago. “I hadn’t heard that in a while,” Carter says.
It’s a sting he brushes off quickly, but he doesn’t like it when Black people take jabs at his choice of sport.
A common narrative in the plight of the Black skater involves the resistance that comes from their own community. He said that before discovering skating, he didn’t know that Blacks skated.
“On the outside looking in, you only see white boys getting praised on TV. You don’t see Black people getting praised on TV like that, and this is the early 2000s, you know?” Carter said, noting that he never let his race get in the way of his interest in skateboarding.
The O.G.
“You do have people from other races that sort of look at you like you don’t belong, but I can’t say that was a large part of my experience in Houston,” says Derrick Hayes, who, at 49, became a mentor for Carter at Lee and Joe Jamail Skatepark.
He says he was often encouraged to get better by white skaters when he began. He says the most flack he caught for skating was from the folks living on his own block.
He and Carter would often be the only two Black people skating transition, meaning skating a course and bowls — which look like empty swimming pools — as opposed to street style, utilizing sidewalks, stairs and
other urban structures.
“It was cool skating with Derrick …and he was an O.G. (original gangsta, who has old-school talent), so I listened to what he was telling me,” Carter says. “Derrick played a role helping develop my own style. He always taught me how to do tricks properly.”
Hayes grew up in southeast Houston and is an elder statesman of
Houston’s skateboarding community. He was among the first Black skaters in Houston to compete regularly in local competitions, but he also had to overcome stereotypes.
“They look for you to play basketball, play football, that’s it,” he says about growing up in the 1980s and wanting to skate, which he still does to this day. “It’s sad to say that because I’m African American, it didn’t look right, for whatever reason.”
He was 14 when his skateboard became his dedicated companion. Skateboarding, he says, brings people together. Today, he finds more young Black people are skating. “It’s widely accepted now,” Hayes says. “You got Lil Wayne and a few others in the music industry that they look up to that are involved in skateboarding.”
For Carter, that togetherness Hayes mentions has translated into a larger skate community that he says is more diverse than the one at predominantly white Texas A&M University, where he’s in his senior year. He’s finishing up his industrial engineering degree and, as a two-time national wrestling champ, is a sports star beyond skateboarding.
He heads to a local skatepark in College Station for study breaks and serves as vice president of the university’s National Society of Black Engineers chapter.
Carter says skateboarding is in his blood now and he’ll never stop. He’s suffered a couple of concussions while skating, his mother says. But as with all serious skateboarders, falling down means getting back up.
Carter is extending his involvement in skating. He joined with friend and skater Justin Wiederman, parks and recreation assistant for the city of Houston, to form the DTP Foundation, which stands for the nonprofit Developing Today’s Potential.
He’s not a pro skater yet, but he is sponsored by a few skate-product companies as well as the Southside Skateshop. His ambition is to get a job that utilizes his engineering degree, but he’s not counting out skateboarding as a source of income.
Going pro would be proof to exneighbors and those who thought his interest in skateboarding was somehow chasing a white kid’s dream.
“Back then, they didn’t want me,” Carter says, quoting part of a lyric from Houston rapper Mike Jones.
But all those early efforts, resisting the pushback, paid off in a sport that studies even show favors skill over racial preference.
Sums up Carter, “Skateboarders universally vouch for each other and want to see that progression. It’s not a white or Black thing.”
Left: Ty’Rae Carter is studying industrial engineering at Texas A&M University but says he wouldn’t rule out turning pro.