Hells Angels: Warum gibt es keine Schwarzen Mitglieder?

Summary

The video investigates why Black members are rarely seen in the Hells Angels and whether the club has an explicit rule excluding them.

It traces the club’s early history, noting that the Hells Angels’ first decades were less formally organized. Sonny Barger helped establish common rules and insignia after founding the Oakland charter in 1957. The narrator describes early connections between Barger and African American biker groups, including the East Bay Dragons MC, whose founder, Toby Levingston, said the groups spent time and rode together.

The video also discusses the Chosen Few MC, founded by Black bikers, which later accepted a white member. According to the account, the Hells Angels offered its members patches in the 1970s, but the Chosen Few chose to remain independent.

The video presents conflicting explanations for the club’s later racial exclusion. Former Hells Angel George Christie attributed it to racial segregation in prison, which he said carried over into the club. Charles Goldsmith is cited as supporting that explanation, while former member Chuck Zito is said to have rejected Christie’s account.

The narrator reports finding no explicitly racist rule in the three Hells Angels rulebooks he reviewed, while cautioning that this sample is too limited to establish what all internal rules say. He also notes that the club has publicly denied being racially segregated. Sonny Barger’s reported 2000 BBC remark—that the club itself was not racist, but had enough racist members that a Black person would never be accepted—is presented as capturing the gap between official policy and practice.

The video gives examples of that gap:

• In England, a club reportedly failed to join the Hells Angels because it had a Black member, John Michelson. After a violent attack by Hells Angels in 1979, Michelson died in 1985 during a police arrest. The dispute was reportedly resolved soon afterward, and the club eventually joined the Hells Angels.
• In Vancouver, the Satans Angels MC’s bid to join was allegedly delayed because it had a Black member, until an agreement recognized him as Hawaiian.
• The video also mentions Haitian-born Gregory Woolley, who led the Rockers MC, a Hells Angels support club, but was not himself an official Hells Angel.

The narrator concludes that the Hells Angels had relationships with Black and Latino bikers and groups in their early history, but that informal racial exclusion later became entrenched, possibly influenced by prison culture. He stresses that public sources are limited and that practices may differ across the club’s many charters and countries.

Presenter and Contributors

• Presenter and narrator: Ben Bugatty
• Former members cited: George Christie, Charles Goldsmith, Chuck Zito, and Sonny Barger
• Other historical figures discussed: Toby Levingston, John Michelson, and Gregory Woolley