Great Black Jockeys : The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America's First National Sport

by HOTALING, EDWARD

• ISBN13: 9781400080700
• ISBN10: 1400080703
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1999-08-01
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press

Summary

More than a century before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, black athletes were dominating America's first national sport. The sport was horse racing, and the greatest jockeys of all were slaves and the sons of slaves. Cheered by thousands of Americans in the North and South, they rode to victory in all of the major stakes, including the very first Kentucky Derby. Although their glory days ranged from the early 1700s to the turn of the 20th century, the memory of these great black jockeys was erased from history. Who were these athletes and why have their names vanished without a trace? "This may be the most fascinating untold sports story in American history. We are lucky that it is so well told now by Mr. Hotaling in his wonderfully written book." Charles Osgood, anchor, CBS News Sunday Morning The Great Black Jockeysis the first book about the lives and times of the forgotten men whose extraordinary skills were a wonder to behold, men with names like "Honest Ike" Murphy, Abe Hawkins, Willie Simms, Austin Curtis, Jimmy Winkfield, and dozens more. This is also a story of a young country where whole towns turned out in cleared fields to cheer and place wagers on magnificent horses and the men who rode them, and where the greatest athletes in the land were the property of others. For fleeting moments on the racecourse black riders in colorful silks tasted the glory and freedom that slavery had denied them. InThe Great Black Jockeys,the exploits and courage of America's earliest and best athletes are finally remembered. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

<b>Edward Hotaling,</b> a leading social historian, is the nation's preeminent authority on the history of black jockeys. An Emmy-winning writer and producer for the NBC television station in Washington, D.C., he is the author of <i>They're Off! Horse Racing at Saratoga</i> (Syracuse University Press). In addition, he has published articles in the <i>New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald-Tribune,</i> and many other publications. Mr. Hotaling lives in Washington, D.C.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>

Excerpts

From the Introducion, a Look Back at the First Kentucky Derby
"Today will be historic in Kentucky annals as the first 'Derby Day' of what promises to be a long series of annual festivities, which we confidently expect our grandchildren a hundred years hence to celebrate in glorious centennial rejoicings."
The confidence of the Louisville Courier-Journal would prove justified, to put it mildly. Now, 125 years hence and going into the twenty-first century, the Kentucky Derby is still one of the most moving public gatherings in America, in or out of sports. Its phenomenal on-site crowds of well over 150,000 people—something baseball and football and basketball can't dream of—still stand as one as they try to follow the local folks to the strains of "My Old Kentucky Home," a heart-tugging few minutes worth the race itself. At a venue almost void of physical charm, in a sport almost dead, one of the most magical moments in sports is still created around—what? An idea? A tradition? Hype? The best the sport can offer? Better to leave it a mystery. At the same time, however, as the Derby enters a third century, it is many furlongs behind the original in one aspect: the representation of African Americans in important roles.
The first Kentucky Derby—foreshadowed by the 1839 Kentucky sweepstakes matching Wagner and Grey Eagle—began modestly. It was certainly no more impressive than America's first derby, day eleven years earlier in New Jersey, with its huge New York crowd, raving press coverage, and guaranteed participation by the major stables. Yet it held considerably more promise than that 1864 derby in Paterson. Unlike New Jersey and New York, Kentucky knew right away that it had bottled something precious, something that it had always possessed, its identity. It was—and to those who look closely, still is—symbolized by the women of Kentucky, not only in the way that the states of the Old South crowned their reigning belles, but in the way that nation states coined a national woman, in the way that America, in eleven years, would put one on a pedestal in New York Harbor, even if she would spend the rest of her stone cold life trying to get down, proving that she wasn't from Kentucky. When the Courier-Journal's rival, the Louisville Commercial, reminded everybody, "Kentucky is proverbial the world over for its beautiful women as well as fine horses," the compliment was graciously accepted. And when the women turned out in force that Monday, they were really more than a measure of commercial success; they were the most important part of the event. Kentuckians saw not only their new derby but especially the women there as a rare and valuable expression of statewide unity and pride.
"Until the close of this first day it has been the wont of our people to refer with glowing enthusiasm to the extraordinary aggregation of beauty which congregated at the Gray [sic] Eagle–Wagner contest of thirty-five years ago," said the Courier-Journal. "It would seem that no impulse, in the long interval since, so served to draw together the people of Kentucky; but we now have another great event."
That first Wagner–Grey Eagle event had drawn about ten thousand people; so did this one. And just as editor William T. Porter had waxed on about the beauty of the ladies watching Cato ride Wagner to victory over the Kentucky-bred Grey Eagle, the Courier-Journal's man at the first Kentucky Derby couldn't stop once he had started on their daughters. He led off his report with the crowd, with the results of the race taking a back seat.
It was made up of every element; but place aux dames et demoiselles before the pen shall treat of another feature. It is much, indeed, when attention and admiration may be diverted from the prime object which has gathered a great assemblage together, but not the Derby itself, with its absorbing interest and excitement, will linger as long in the minds of the spectator there, as the brilliant array, arranged in dazzling groups and lines, from the outermost limit of the stand full a hundred feet to the black mass beyond, which marked the half space set apart for the men, and in its serried parallels stretching up in twenty tiers back to the outer railing. Blondes and brunes there were, stately beauties and petite, matrons and maids, in such bewildering number as to daze the eye, except that the cumulative effect was striking and even glorious to such a degree as may not be seen twice in a lifetime. We dare assert that the most glowing description given to this feature of yesterday's gathering cannot be too extravagant to adequately picture the panorama, constantly shifting with its varied and brilliant colors, during five hours of the day. There were a thousand women there, each exemplifying in her own enchanting face that
"Loveliness, ever in motion, which plays
"Like the light upon Autumn's soft, shady days,
"Now bare, and now there, giving warmth as it flies
"From the lips to the cheeks, from the cheeks to the eyes."
Obviously, it was hard on the frontier. To this day, no great sporting event attracts as large and enthralled an audience of women as the Derby does. And only a Bluegrass belle could appreciate the compliment, quoted on that first Derby Day, that a passing horse trainer once paid to "a high-bred Kentucky girl" when he exclaimed, "By George, she looks like a thoroughbred Glencoe filly." After all, she was likely to know that the imported Glencoe was an incredible "filly sire," the progenitor of 481 children, of whom an astounding 370 were daughters, a good many of them champions.
The ten thousand at the first Kentucky Derby were also inaugurating the Louisville Jockey Club and its new track on the old Churchill family land, to be dubbed Churchill Downs a decade later. "The stand is second in size only to Saratoga and will seat 3,500," the Courier-Journal boasted. The prices ranged from ten dollars to watch the finishes from the quarter (home) stretch to a dollar for the grandstand to fifty cents for the "field stand," or bleachers with not much of a view. Within a few years, admission to the vast infield, circumscribed by the track, would be free of charge, "both to people and wagons," and home to about two-thirds of the crowd. While the grandstand and quarter-stretch crowd represented "social life," one reporter noted, "the swarm of free visitors typified popular (including negro) life."
Reviving one of Yelverton Oliver's dreams, M. Lewis Clark, grandson of the explorer William Clark, had organized the new Jockey Club, but the loudest presence, with his white hat and red ties, was the flaming Irishman H. Price McGrath, who had been John Morrissey's former partner at Saratoga and Abe Hawkins's self-proclaimed protector. McGrath was now loudly lording it over his home state. If there was something going on, McGrath was in the middle of it. Born poor, he was after success with a vengeance, and he was now creating a Kentucky racing stable and stud farm of his own, discreetly named McGrathiana, its manor house modeled, with equal modesty, after Saratoga's cavernous United States Hotel.
"For two and a half cents I was denied an education," said the bitter McGrath. As a boy, he had given a dime to a wealthy neighbor and asked him to bring home a spelling book from the city. Returning without it, the rich neighbor gave the boy his dime back, explaining, "The book cost twelve and one-half cents." Still trying to get that two and a half cents out of the rich, McGrath flew his green and gold on two entries in the first Derby, Chesapeake and Aristides. They were the favorites, too.
"A dense, pushing and vociferous mass of excitable gentlemen" mobbed the little stands where the English-originated auction pools were underway. Next to them, in the enclosure reserved for the "Paris Mutuals," as the new pari-mutuels were called by the local paper, the betting went on "in the quiet manner that this system appears to effect." Perhaps, since each pari-mutuel ticket was democratically priced at five dollars, there was nothing to talk about; only plenty to worry about as the nervous buyers considered their options. Today vast lines of anxious bettors line up for their moment of truth at the pari-mutuel windows in uncharacteristic silence, as if they are about to make their confession. This religious silence is almost total at the automated machines, where they don't even have to talk to the priest at the window. Gone forever is the sweaty display of humanity that so shocked the effete Henry James, the shouting, shoving, shirt-sleeved auction pool crowds. But through the rest of the nineteenth century, the old yelling crowd and the new queues of pari-mutuel bettors coexisted at the Kentucky Derby and elsewhere. There was also plenty of side betting. "Cigars, champagnes, silk hats and suppers were won and lost ad libitum."
On that first Derby Day, a single ticket in the auction pools on either Chesapeake or Aristides was bid up to $105 (then as now, two horses entered by one owner were bet as one, a "stable entry"). McGrath's strategy was to use his little red sprinter Aristides as a mechanical rabbit to exhaust the others, leaving the durable Chesapeake to run them over; if McGrath had any side bets with individuals, he had his money on Chesapeake.
Opening the day's entertainment was a three-quarter-mile sprint by a field of six of all ages. The English rider Billy Lakeland, on Bonaventure, staved off another white boy, Bobby Swim, on Hutchinson, to win the inaugural dash in front of the one thousand white belles with the best seats in the house. But when fifteen three-year-olds—thirteen colts and two fillies—pranced out on the track for the second race of the day, the very first Kentucky Derby, the preeminence of the black jockeys at Louisville was obvious. It was pretty much an African American parade to the post, with William Henry on Chesapeake, Oliver Lewis on Aristides, and black riders on most of the others as well; the white jockeys, Lakeland, on the filly Ascension, and Cyrus Holloway, on Enlister, were a tiny minority. Faced with incomplete records, most historians have guessed that Lakeland was the only white rider, resulting in countless regurgitations of the impressive but erroneous line: "Fourteen of the fifteen jockeys in the first Kentucky Derby were black."
So there they were, pounding down the stretch toward the belles, Oliver Lewis pulling with all his might on Aristides so Chesapeake could take over, but Aristides refusing to cooperate, wanting to run. And in the spirit of Willie Jones, and Andrew Jackson, and the Napoleon of the Turf, Price McGrath didn't just sit in the clubhouse and watch. Let a man who was watching tell it: "Lewis, on Aristides . . . seemed to take a pull on his horse, expecting Chesapeake to come in and take up the running, but where, oh where, was Chesapeake? . . . Fortunately for the favorites, McGrath was near the head of the stretch, and taking in the position of all at a glance, waved his hand for Lewis to go on with the good little red horse and win if he could all alone." Aristides "dashed under the wire the winner of one of the fastest and hardest run races ever seen on a track. The time made, 2:37.75, is the best for the distance ever accomplished by a three-year-old with 100 lbs. up."
Here, then, are the horses and their jockeys, the first five in their actual order of finish, the rest listed simply as "also-rans" in the next day's reports and the earliest official records.
The First Kentucky Derby, May 17, 1875
EntryJockey
AristidesOliver Lewis
VolcanoHoward Williams
VerdigrisDick Chambers
Bob WooleyWilliam Walker
Ten BroeckMonroe Kelso
GrenobleJames Carter
Bill BruceM. Jones
ChesapeakeWilliam Henry
SearcherRaleigh Colston Jr.
AscensionWilliam Lakeland
EnlisterCyrus Holloway
McCreeryDick Jones
WarsawPeter Masterson
VagabondJames Houston
Gold MineCornelius Stradford


From the Hardcover edition.

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Excerpted from The Great Black Jockeys: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America's First National Sport by Edward Hotaling
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.