Tasha Klusmann

Tasha Klusmann grew up in Southeast Washington, D.C., and entered roller-skating culture by accompanying her older brother to a rink in nearby Forestville, Maryland. Recreational visits developed into lessons and performance training with Wheels of Fortune, a D.C. roller-skating troupe. That formation inside a community practice meant that rink etiquette, family access, regional music and collective movement mattered alongside individual skill.

With Wheels of Fortune, Klusmann performed in public events including the Cherry Blossom Festival Parade. In 1986 the troupe traveled to Atlanta for Coca-Cola's centennial celebration and presented a twenty-minute stage show. Her long-term significance, however, rests as much in preservation as performance.

Our Family Skate Association established the National African American Roller Skate Archive in 2004. Klusmann, identified as the association's president and the historian behind the archive, collected photographs, skates, jerseys, jackets, medals, programs, flyers and other objects, while also seeking oral histories. The archive's premise is that Black skating history lives not only in major events but in routes to rinks, local music, dress, floor etiquette, social networks and the memories of people whose experience was seldom preserved by conventional institutions.

The project developed in relationship with Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Materials and oral histories were placed at the center after Klusmann and the institution conducted outreach across the country. Klusmann's historical work also preserves difference within Black skating. She describes D.C. skating as fast, often using the rink's outside lane while moving to slower Quiet Storm-style R&B, and contrasts that practice with New York, Detroit and Chicago traditions, emphasizing that styles carry distinct floor etiquette.

Public programs have widened the archive's reach. In February 2024, WTOP profiled Klusmann at Lanham Skate Center as the archive's founder, noting her family's appearance as extras in the 2005 film *Roll Bounce*. In 2026, HumanitiesDC and the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum presented her research in "The Art of Roller Skating: 'Style' Roller Skating as American Folk Art," using archival images, historical research, cultural analysis and documentary footage to frame Black "style" skating as a regional, intergenerational folk-art tradition.