CN
III ARCHIVES
BY LARRY LAWRENCE
I
t might have been one of
the few towns in America in
the 1970s where a black kid,
who happened to have a fas-
cination with motorcycles,
would be encouraged to
chase his dream of becom-
ing a top-flight road racer.
John Williams grew up
in Berkeley, California,
home of the University of
California, Berkeley, and to
a famously diverse popula-
tion of freethinking individu-
als who, instead of telling
a young Williams he was
crazy for wanting to chase
that particular dream, actu-
ally encouraged him and in
some cases helped him along his journey.
If you look in the record books, what you'll learn
about John Williams is that he was one of the top
AMA Battle of the Twins racers of the mid-1980s, a
man who won four Nationals along the way. But he
was much more than that. What the record books
won't tell you is that Williams was the first, and to
date, the only African-American to win an AMA
National Road Race. He went on to race at both
the Isle of Man TT and the Suzuka Eight Hour. Wil-
liams also helped break down barriers in apartheid
South Africa, by riding in that country's national se-
ries in the late 1980s.
The story of Williams' life in motorcycle racing
begins in Berkeley, when Williams was in seventh
grade.
"There was a motorcycle shop [TT Motors] that I
used to walk by every single day going to school in
the seventh grade," Williams recalls. "I would stop
by the shop on the way home and talk to the peo-
ple at the parts counter and basically just hang out.
After a complete year of walking by the place and
hanging out I asked the owner, John Gallivan, if
I could have a job. And you know how the story
goes, like any high school kid in a shop, you end
up sweeping floors."
And while Williams' first job in the motorcycle
industry was by no means glamorous, he at least
had his foot in the door. The next goal was to ac-
tually own a motorcycle and this is where, amaz-
ingly, John's mom comes into the picture. She
saw that a lot of John's friends were getting into
trouble as teens and wisely recognized motorcy-
cling as a way to keep her son focused on some-
thing constructive.
When he was 16 for Christmas, Williams finally
got his wish. His mom came into the shop with
him. John had saved up enough for a down pay-
ment and his mom financed a brand new Yamaha
RD350. "That was it man," Williams says with a
THE BERKELEY BURNER (PART 1)
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