By Aaron Naparstek

LEGS IN THE PRIZE "With their very bodies they obstructed the wheels of injustice." This is how African-American civil rights pioneer James Farmer describes the actions of the men and women who, in 1960, put their lives on the line to sit in at segregated lunch counters and public facilities throughout the South.

Today, Farmer's words just as easily refer to the 112,000 New Yorkers who use a bicycle as transportation each day. Thanks to the lunch-counter moment of August's 5000-rider Critical Mass and the city's crackdown on all cyclists since then, there is a new civil rights movement underway. This time the sit-in takes place on the seat of a bicycle.

In 1960, sit-ins marked a change in the mood and tactics of African-Americans. "Up until then, we had accepted segregation—begrudgingly—but we had accepted it," Farmer says. "Segregation persisted only because we allowed it to persist." By simply bellying up to a lunch counter and saying, "Serve me too," sit-ins fomented the most powerful challenge to the institutional racism of the South since the Civil War.

Today, a growing number of New Yorkers are sitting astride bikes and likewise saying, "Serve me too." By their very presence on the street, cyclists are showcasing the deeply ingrained injustice of New York's cars-first status quo.

Like the African-American soldiers who returned home from World War II having fought for others' freedoms, New Yorkers today see cities like London, Berlin and Amsterdam, where bikes are provided with real infrastructure, and we know that things could be much better here.

We see that the benefits of a bike-friendly city accrue to many more people than just cyclists. A biking city is cleaner, quieter and more civil. Its citizens are far less likely to be killed and maimed by motorists. Its children are less likely to grow up with an asthmatic cough or be sent off to the Middle East to fight for the energy supplies necessary to keep a car-centered economy rolling.

Like blacks in the segregated South, today's cyclists are outsiders to the dominant culture. This gives them a unique view of the system. The more you ride, the more you marvel at the irrationality of a city that reserves the vast majority of its precious public space for its most costly, dangerous, polluting, wasteful and unaccountable citizen—the motorist.

To be sure, nothing New York City cyclists and pedestrians endure today compares to 500 years of slavery and segregation. But when the NYPD rounds up cyclists for mass arrests, think of Birmingham police chief Bull Connor attacking peaceful demonstrators with dogs and fire hoses. When a troglodyte politician like Bronx city councilwoman Madeline Provenzano pushes anti-bike legislation, think of Alabama governor George Wallace standing at the schoolhouse door, barring black students from registering for classes.

History will reserve a special place of shame for the leaders of New York City's bicycle crackdown, and a place of honor for all the cyclists who got arrested just for being traffic. o