She feels she has the best job in the world every time people let her share their stories. A professional photojournalist for more than 20 years, Conley, a Michigan native, worked for The Detroit News where she received multiple honors and fellowships. He can be reached by Twitter: Conley started at the Houston Chronicle as a staff photographer in 2015.

His work has appeared in Texas Monthly, the Los Angeles Times and. It’s not a white or Black thing.”Ĭamilo Hannibal Smith is a writer and filmmaker based in Houston. Sums up Carter, “Skateboarders universally vouch for each other and want to see that progression. But all those early efforts, resisting the pushback, paid off in a sport that studies even show favors skill over racial preference. “Back then, they didn’t want me,” Carter says, quoting part of a lyric from Houston rapper Mike Jones. Going pro would be proof to ex-neighbors and those who thought his interest in skateboarding was somehow chasing a white kid’s dream. His ambition is to get a job that utilizes his engineering degree, but he’s not counting out skateboarding as a source of income. He’s not a pro skater yet, but he is sponsored by a few skate-product companies as well as the Southside Skateshop. 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. “You got Lil Wayne and a few others in the music industry that they look up to that are involved in skateboarding.”Ĭarter is extending his involvement in skating. Today, he finds more young Black people are skating. Skateboarding, he says, brings people together. He was 14 when his skateboard became his dedicated companion. “It’s sad to say that because I’m African American, it didn’t look right, for whatever reason.” “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. He was among the first Black skaters in Houston to compete regularly in local competitions, but he also had to overcome stereotypes. Hayes grew up in southeast Houston and is an elder statesman of Houston’s skateboarding community. He always taught me how to do tricks properly.” “Derrick played a role helping develop my own style. (original gangsta, who has old-school talent), so I listened to what he was telling me,” Carter says. “It was cool skating with Derrick …and he was an O.G. 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. He says the most flack he caught for skating was from the folks living on his own block. He says he was often encouraged to get better by white skaters when he began. “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. 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. “On the outside looking in, you only see white boys getting praised on TV. He said that before discovering skating, he didn’t know that Blacks skated. It’s a sting he brushes off quickly, but he doesn’t like it when Black people take jabs at his choice of sport.Ī common narrative in the plight of the Black skater involves the resistance that comes from their own community. “I hadn’t heard that in a while,” Carter says. “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. Sometimes celebrating Black skaters is a slippery subject. Black skaters had not had their collective moment in the spotlight yet, and few appeared on “X Games” broadcasts.

“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. He didn’t look at himself as a Black skater all he was trying to do was skate and find encouragement to get better. In his early years of skating, Carter developed friendships with an ethnically diverse group of skateboarders. Gulley held two jobs to support her family, before earning a degree and getting a job in medical billing. 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. “He was also introducing me to skateboarding,” remembers Latasha Gulley.

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