(important update: there’s been a lot more to come out about Bessie Stringfield than when I first wrote this; that’s relayed at the end of this article, but for more info on Bessie, visit biographer Ann Ferrar’s website at http://www.bessiestringfieldbiography.com)

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Since first putting this online, the New York Times did a 2018 obituary on Bessie in which they tracked down some of her surviving relatives, who basically said she was telling tall tales on a number of finer points – nobody is trustworthy, haha! They claimed she was never adopted by white parents, and was not from Jamaica. Many of the stories of Bessie related in this telling (and virtually every other article on her) come courtesy of her official biographer, Ann Ferrar, who knew Bessie in life and wrote a few pages on her in her 1996 book Hear Me Roar: Women, Motorcycles, and the Rapture of the Road (which I cite below, in the citations). She is working on a longer biography of Bessie — you can find more info here: http://www.bessiestringfieldbiography.com

I’ll excerpt a bit from the New York Times obituary, explaining how these untruths came to dominate the dialog about Bessie:

Ferrar had passed on some of the misinformation of Stringfield’s early life, wanting to keep her legacy alive. Asked recently about these untruths, Ferrar wrote in an email, “Bessie’s running from her early past does not discount or in any way lessen her unusual achievements as an adult, and that is why Bessie continues to inspire new generations, and rightfully so.” “She asked me to tell her truth as her friend,” Ferrar said in an interview.

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