The Billy Bike Motorcycle From The Movie "Easy Rider" And The Black Men Who Didn't Get Credit For It

[96Blue]

Welp, Brehs/Brehettes, y'all know how the story goes...

Benjamin F. Hardy (Ben Hardy)

Clifford Vaughes (Cliff Vaughes)

Larry Marcus helped too







We Did It, They Hid It: Benjamin F. Hardy Built One of the Most Famous 'Choppers' Seen on the Big Screen

Benjamin F. Hardy was a prominent black motorcycle engineer and chopper builder. He was known for creating the customized choppers for the characters ‘Captain America; and ‘Billy’ which appeared in 1969.

Working along with another Black motorcycle builder, coordinator, Cliff Vaughs, Hardy built two ‘Billy’ bikes and three ‘Captain Americas.’ One of the bikes was destroyed in the making of the movie, the rest of which were stolen. The ‘Billy’ bike was typical of the custom motorcycles Black bikers were riding at the time.

Despite the two black men’s phenomenal work, they remained largely unknown and uncredited for 25 years. They were not welcomed into the mainstream of the white motorcycle world. Hardy’s work has been featured in the “Black Chrome” exhibition at the California African American Museum.

 

[get these nets]

Thanks, I'm a bit of a film geek. Gonna look up to see if they got any publicity at the time for the custom work.

There seemed to have been in a tough spot.....that film probably wasn't popular with Black audiences, the general white audience and the white biker subculture probably copied the idea of custom bikes and paid white artists to to do it.

I'm hoping that the brothers mentioned in the article at least got hired to do the bikes in the Black biker films of the 1970s.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I was going to make a thread on this months ago but forgot about it.

 

[Lord_nikon]

I just watched Easy Rider