Black Nomads Meet
By Gemma Peckham
The nomadic community is huge, and growing—but it’s still not particularly diverse. One couple is working to change that.
(This story originally ran in ROVA Adventure Seventeen—February/March 2020.)
Bruce Edwards Jr. and Kadedra Holmes
If you have anything to do with van life or RVing, you’ll know how quickly the community is growing. Countless new Instagram accounts pop up every day, with new travelers taking to the road, keen to share their adventures. Van life events and meetups are more and more common, and networks of like-minded people are being built across the country.
A new addition to the van life scene is an event that is being planned for summer 2020, which has a particular goal in mind: promoting van life in the Black community.
The founders of Black Nomads Meet, vegan activist Kadedra Holmes and musician Bruce Edwards Jr., have been living van life for six months, chasing that elusive dream of financial freedom, creative freedom and connection to nature. Now they want to give other people of color the opportunity to learn about what road life can provide to us on a human level.
“I think we get stuck in the big city,” Bruce says. “There’s so much beauty out here—so many things to explore and surround yourself with, and make yourself at peace personally and spiritually. It just gets you away from the ruckus, and I think if more people did stuff like this, they would be more settled, and happier.”
For the pair, this is especially important for the Black community. During their time on the road, they have noticed a marked absence of Black people enjoying the outdoors and gaining the benefits that can be found in nature.
“When we did our cross-country road trip, that’s when we really started seeing it,” Bruce says. “You go across the midwest, getting over to the east coast, and you do see a lack of people of color at the campsites. There’s not much diversity out here.”
Kadedra agrees. “We hike often, and we see that we’re the only Black people,” she says.
Kadedra and Bruce tell me that there are many reasons that Black people historically haven’t been inclined to get into the outdoors. They’ve been exploring those reasons to better understand the current climate for people of color in on the road.
“There’s a lot of history behind it,” Bruce says. “Take it back to my grandparents’ time. If you were a Black person wandering in the woods and the outdoors, unfortunately there’s a chance that you’d have people like the KKK and other extremist groups preying on somebody that’s out there alone in the woods. There’s a lot of trauma there, and that doesn’t get talked about much. Sometimes it’s looked at as ancient history, but it’s not. My grandparents went through that. That’s only two generations back. You couldn’t be wandering off into the woods alone, because your life would be in danger. I think that those traumas have a lot to do with us not going out in the outdoors.
“Violence among Black travelers and Black van lifers is still a problem we face in our community. Many Black van lifers still struggle with discrimination and fear racial violence while living on the road.”
“I think it’s also that there is a discouragement of Black health in America,” Kadedra adds. “I think that the Black community is often promoted unhealthy medicines that harm our community, and there has been a [lack of encouragement] for Black people to exercise. I think it’s almost an inadvertent outcome that Black people don’t go out in nature, as a repercussion of there being inattention to Black physical and mental health in our country.”
On top of these historic and societal reasons is the representation (or lack thereof) of Black people in the outdoors, both in mainstream media and on social media.
“I think that a lot of Black people who are interested, especially in mobile living, go to the hashtag and all they see is people who don’t have the same disadvantages or obstacles as them,” Kadedra says. “Basically, the image of this lifestyle is that if you live this way, you look like you make a certain amount of money, and you have this mental clarity to go out into the middle of the woods in Kansas and feel perfectly fine.”
The couple has designed the Black Nomads Meet event to educate Black travelers about the realities of life on the road, and to inspire them to experience it for themselves.
“Our three main goals are to celebrate, educate and inspire,” Kadedra says. “First, we’re working to celebrate the history of Black travelers [and current travelers]. There is a strong, Black traveling community that we just aren’t aware of. That is something we want to celebrate; there is a strong existing Black culture that does travel, that does van life.
“Our second prong is to educate existing Black van lifers, or Black people traveling in their vehicle, about how to properly do this, how to be safe.
“And the third prong is to inspire Black people who do want to get into this lifestyle. Show them that you can do this, you can do this safely, and there are people here who will teach you how to do that the best way.”
The event will be held in the Atlanta area in August 2020. Bruce and Kadedra first imagined a small, one-day gathering with a limited number of people, but with their fundraising goal already met, and more people than expected confirming that they will attend, the scope of Black Nomads Meet is growing.
“We realized, ‘All right, we have to change up plans.’ We thought it was just going to be a handful of people, but this community’s even bigger than we thought,” Kadedra says.
“And we kept coming up with different ideas for different things to do, and we realized that we couldn’t do all of this in one day,” Bruce adds. “So, we decided to extend from one day to a full weekend. It’s going to be a weekend of fun and education.”
The community has responded overwhelmingly positively, with many Black van lifers and travelers emerging on social media who Bruce and Kadedra hadn’t yet connected with.
“We read our email and social media, and we see all these people,” Kadedra says. “We thought we knew everybody—but we really didn’t know everybody! People pop up out of nowhere and they just start following and be like, ‘Hey, awesome. I’ll be there.’”
With hundreds of followers, more than enough money donated to ensure that the event goes ahead, and an enormous amount of online support, Black Nomads Meet is shaping up to be a huge success.
“I remember planning this event at the library, and now we’re here,” says Kadedra. “It’s evolving very beautifully. I’m really excited to just bring Black people together, and this event is gonna be dope.”
To learn more about Black Nomads Meet, check out blacknomadsmeetup.org or Instagram @blacknomadsmeet. You can follow Bruce and Kadedra’s travels @deliciously_locd.