Milwaukee’s Terrence Clarke has been roller skating since he was 12 years old.
“A lot of times we didn’t have a ride to the skate rink,” Clarke remembers. “So we would skate all the way to the rink and then we’d have to skate all the way home.”
For years, the activity was a way for members of the Black community to relieve stress and express themselves. In recent years, skating became a popular trend on social media, but many people didn’t realize its roots in Black culture.
“It’s been alive way before TikTok or anything like that,” says Clarke.
Around the nation, skating parties keep the culture alive. Every city has its own style, which is on full display during something called the “style call.”
“So what they’ll do is they’ll stop the session and then they’ll call out each city and you sign up with the DJ and you give them a song that you want to skate to. So your city goes out and you show your style,” says Clarke. “Milwaukee has kind of a mixture of the Chicago style, which is JB (named for James Brown) style and kind of a bounce.”
Clarke and his partner, Ellen Fine, run Roll Train, a Milwaukee roller skating studio just down the street from the city’s famous Oriental Theater. “We advertise ourselves as a fitness class on skates, but it’s really, really about the culture, promoting the culture, getting people familiar with what we do,” Clarke said.
Roll Train hosts classes, meetups at skate rinks or downtown at Red Arrow Park. The park hosts an ice rink but roller skating wasn’t allowed until Clarke led efforts to change that rule. The city gave several different excuses as to why they couldn’t skate at the rink in the summer.
“What really got me is that they said, ‘Well, why don’t you guys go down to MLK and skate? They got a big space behind their center,’” Clarke said. “I said, OK, this is more racial than anything.”
After many years of efforts to get roller skating approved, the city finally opened the gates to Red Arrow Park. In 2023 Roll Train hosted their first skate event there.
While Roll Train has a mission to teach, it also exists to preserve the art and its importance to the community.
“So Black culture roller skating is something that needs to stay what it is. But also people need to see it and know what it’s about and know that it’s a generational thing. It’s a family thing,” said Clarke. “ It’s not a fad. It’s an art form.”
