The Bicycle Maker That’s Creating Good Jobs for Ex-Cons

The 1854 Cycling Co. wears its influences on its grease-stained sleeves. The bicycle company is named for the year Franklin Pierce, who had become the 14th president thanks in part to a promise to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, began pressuring officials in free states to arrest former slaves and return them to their owners in the South.

One such young former slave, 19-year-old Anthony Burns, was arrested in Boston and sent back to Virginia, leading to a protest in nearby Framingham, Mass., led by abolitionists Sojourner Truth, Henry David Thoreau, and William Lloyd Garrison. There, Garrison held a match to a copy of the Constitution, calling it “a covenant with death, an agreement with hell.”