It's a strange thing to be writing about these photos during a pandemic and what amounts to a nationwide police riot. I began this project in 2002 and was done with most of the shooting by 2010. That's long enough ago that both the time I spent at Eastside Speedway, just outside of Waynesboro, Virginia, and the images themselves have taken on the rosy glow of nostalgia. I remember the days and nights that I spent making these pictures as some of the happiest times in my life. I can't say that's wrong. But the truth is I started going to the track because I was lonely. The people in these photos became friends when friendship was what I desperately wanted. Collectively, they formed a community when a sense of belonging is what I needed. I'll always be grateful for that.
When I drove out to Eastside for the first time, I didn't know I'd make friends and become part of a surprisingly diverse racing community. I was just thinking it would be fun to spend an evening making photos of fast cars and smoky burnouts. I'd seen an article in a local newspaper that made me suspect that I could get close to the action. On the way out, I felt a touch of trepidation. I'd been into racing all my life, but I'd never been to a dragstrip. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, but overt hostility didn't seem to be out of the question. Waynesboro is a small Southern city that's struggling economically. Drag racing is a macho, working-class sport. And I'm black. That added up to me being apprehensive.
But I've never been much good at math. The first thing I noticed after I parked the car and walked toward the pits, is that I wasn't the only African American there. Far from it. Many of the racers were black. So were plenty of the spectators and one or two of the track's personnel. Most of the people at the track, from racers to workers, were white, and many of them had friendly relationships with the black people who were there. (I was to learn that these friendships often went back decades.) None of this made much sense to me. In all my years of reading automobile magazines, watching races on TV, and occasionally going to a track in person, I'd never heard of more than a handful of black racers, none of whom were drag racers. I had a lot to learn.
It turns out that no motorsport has been more open to African Americans and to other people of color than drag racing. What I saw on my first trip to the track is duplicated all over the country, from small, grassroots dragstrips, like Eastside, to the large corporate tracks that attract the National Hot Rod Association's top professional racers. The same is true for women racers, and it's been this way for a long time.