African Americans and Horse Racing
From the beginnings of the sport in the United States, and particularly from the early 19th century, African Americans have made significant contributions to horse racing.
Organized horse racing dates from the second half of the 17th century in North America. It became a major pastime for wealthy landowners in the American South, and it was common for enslaved people to care for and train the horses and, eventually, to ride them in races. The earliest African American jockey known by name was “Monkey” Simon, who rode at the Clover Bottom Race Track in Tennessee about 1806. During the 1820s, horse racing became the most popular sport in the United States, and a large number of the best trainers and jockeys in the country were African Americans.
The Civil War put an end to racing during the 1860s, as all available horses were needed for the military, but by 1875 horse racing had again become popular, and it was in that year that the first Kentucky Derby was run. The first winner of that race was an African American jockey, Oliver Lewis.
Another African American jockey, Isaac Burns Murphy, won the Kentucky Derby three times (1884, 1890, and 1891), a record that was not broken until 1948, when jockey Eddie Arcaro won his fourth. Murphy also had the distinction of becoming the first jockey to be inducted into the National Museum of Racing’s Hall of Fame, and he remains known as one of the best American jockeys ever, having won (by his tally) 44 percent of his races. Murphy was just one of many African American jockeys during the late 19th and early 20th centuries; another was Willie Simms, also a member of the National Museum of Racing’s Hall of Fame, who in the 1890s became the first (and only) African American jockey to win all of the American Triple Crown races. In the first 28 runnings of the Kentucky Derby, African American jockeys won 15. James Winkfield became the second jockey to win Kentucky Derbies back to back, in 1901 and 1902, but he was the last African American jockey to win the race.
African Americans were also among the best-known trainers in horse racing during the same period. For example, Edward Brown trained the horse Baden-Baden, who won the Kentucky Derby in 1877, and Alex Perry trained Joe Cotton, who won in 1885. In addition, African Americans remained involved in the sport as exercise riders, groomers, stable hands, and clockers.
After World War I, as horse racing became a major attraction for the mainstream United States, African Americans were excluded from riding and were hired almost exclusively as stable hands. The reason, according to Winkfield, was money: “When a lot of money got in the game, the white men then, like they do now and like they’ve always been, wanted…to have, not only the money, but also the reputation.”
It was only at the turn of the 21st century that African Americans began to play an important role in American horse racing again. Both rap singer MC Hammer and Motown Record Corporation founder Berry Gordy, Jr., owned and raced horses. In 2000 jockey Marlon St. Julien became the first African American to ride in the Kentucky Derby since 1921. He finished seventh. In that same year William E. Summers IV chaired the Derby Festival Board, only the second African American to do so. “It’s great having an African American jockey involved in a race to come back during the year I was chair,” he said.
