About Atlantic Beach Bike Week
Hit the road and drive up to North Myrtle Beach for Atlantic Beach Bike Week. This motorcycle rally is held every year during Memorial Day weekend. Meet and greets, parties, live music and entertainment will be held throughout the weekend.
The History of Black Bike WeekBlack Bike Week was founded by the infamous Flaming Knight Riders motorcycle club in 1980 — before the fall of their icon Leroy Bolden aka King Dragon — who changed their name in 1982 to the Carolina Knight Riders.
Black Bike Week is recently reported to draw crowds in excess of 400,000 people to the area though it is hard to distinguish them from the crowd of spring breakers who have been in Myrtle Beach during the same time. This explosion of visitors happens every year for an extended weekend of motorcycle racing, concerts, parties, and street festivals. Alone, it would be considered the third largest motorcycle rally in the entire country after Sturgis and Daytona. But when combined with Myrtle Beach’s Harley Week it has arguably more people than any other city.
Since it started in 1940 during a time of vast racial inequality, it is no surprise that the Spring Rally, referring to the Myrtle-Beach-held Harley-Davidson Week, was a predominantly white motorcycle event.
During the 1960s and 1970s in the thick of segregation, many of the Black motorcyclists – having been turned away from Harley Davidson Week – turned to Atlantic Beach because it was the only beach in the entire southern United States where Black families were welcomed and not banned.