Think of the greatest American sports stars of all time and names like Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan will likely spring to mind.
But long before these champions smashed the record books — and blazed a trail in the public’s imagination — the first generation of black U.S. athletes dominated an unlikely sport.
The godfathers of Owens, Ali and Jordan weren’t stereotypical towering, musclebound men found on basketball courts or in boxing rings.
Instead, they were the jockeys of the race track and their dizzying success — and dramatic fall — is one of the most remarkable buried chapters in U.S. sporting history. (CNN)
This week, we’ll take a look at the history of black jockeys in the United States and feature the stars from the past as well as the present.
The sport of horse racing is the only instance where the participation of blacks stopped almost completely while the sport itself continued—a sad commentary on American life…Isaac Murphy, so highly admired during his time for his skills and character, would have been ashamed of his sport. –Arthur Ashe, quoted by Edward Hotaling in They’re Off! Horse Racing at Saratoga
Black jockeys won 15 of the first 28 Kentucky Derbies. But at any race track in this country now, you’d have a hard time finding an African-American in the saddle.
In the early days of racing in this country, African-American faces were prominent. Slaves in the south grew up on farms, working in stables, and plantation owners wouldn’t hesitate to put their slaves on their horses’ backs in informal racing in the south. When racing became organized sport in the early 19th century, black boys and men were in the vanguard in the saddle, dominating racing until the turn of the century.
But as was the case with so many other segments of American life, racism pushed black jockeys out of the saddle – literally and figuratively – and by the early part of the 20th century, they had virtually disappeared from horses’ backs at America’s biggest racetracks.
The introduction of the Jim Crow laws in the late 1880s — segregating blacks and whites — spelled an end to the golden era of black jockeys like Jimmy Winkfield and Isaac Murphy.
Increasing violence against black jockeys forced many to abandon racing and move to northern urban areas, says Joe Drape, author of “Black Maestro,” which tells the story of champion jockey Jimmy Winkfield.
“It became too dangerous to put black riders on horses,” he added. “An influx of Irish immigrants were now slugging it out on the track, riding black jockeys into railings and making them fall.”
The great black jockeys were not only ridden out of the sport about 100 years ago, but they were often sketched out, engraved out — and eventually written out of American history.
This week, we’re helping to write them back in.