BLACK & A COWBOY

African-Americans hit the trails in the earliest days of cattle driving. Then they took their skills to wild west shows and rodeos, where they've been stars ever since.

by T.R. Witcher

for American Legacy. The Magazine of African-American History, X (Winter 2005), pp.32-40

And yet here is one. Actually, Clarence "Solo" Clemons is an electrician. But he's also a member of the Federation of Black Cowboys, and he certainly looks the part, decked out in cowboy boots, a denim jacket with a wool collar, and a great big belt buckle, his dredlocks spilling out from underneath his cowboy hat.

Clemons says the neighborhood was mostly farmland a generation ago, filled with stables quarering hundreds of horses. There used to be miles of sand dunes for riding on, and easy access to Jamaica Bay. "It looked like you were in the West," Solo says. But like the original Western frontier, this tiny facsimile has been closing, especially in the last decade, when the sand dunes began to be cleared for a Home Depot. Most of the stables have been sold to developers or torn down to make way for new housing. Horse owners have had to move their animals to Staten Island or Long Island, and the area is a desolation of empty lots and trash.

The Federation of Black Cowboys formed here in 1994, leasing its stables and surrounding parkland from the city's Parks Department. The cowboys---a handful of men who grew up around horses and were determined to pass down the legacy of America's black cowboys---spent years sprucing up the site. What animates Cedar Lane is a hearty machismo that, even if it is a little bit for show, would fit right in on the plains of the Wild West. Ed Dixon, the head of the federation since 1999 and a man whose hands are hard as stone, introduces himself by explaining, "I don't do nothin' but eat beef and ride bull," and moves with a confident swagger that the immortal black cowboy Nat Love would have admired.

The Federation has grown to 45 members. They want people to remember not just that African -Americans participated in the settling of the American West but that black folks helped invent what a much later generation would call cowboy culture. "You don't see it much in the movies," says Arnold Berry, one of the federation cowboys. "But don't fool yourselves. We were there."

In the years after the Civil War, African-Americans began migrating west. They took with them the horsemanship skills they had learned while toiling as stable boys, trainers, and jockeys during slavery. Just as 15 of the first 28 winning jockeys of the Kentucky Derby, begun in 1875, were black, so too were thousands of cowboys who led cattle up the famous Chisholm Trail from Texas to Abilene, Kansas.

The word rodeo comes from the Spanish word rodear, to round up. Pat Hildebrand, the executive director of the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, in Colorado Springs, explains that rodeos evolved from the tasks demanded by trail drives, starting as early as the 1860s. Cowboys from different ranches often held impromptu calf-roping or horse-riding contests at the end of the drives. She says there was a bronco-busting contest with a prize in 1869 in eastern Colorado, but towns as far afield as Pecos, Texas, and Prescott, Arizona, have all laid claim to having held the first rodeo.

By the 1880s rodeos had become fairly common across the West, and black cowboys had already made their mark Among the most famous was Nat Love. Born a slave in Tennessee, Love left home at the age of 14, passed through Dodge City, and found work as a cowboy in Texas. He had the peculiarly American gift for self-promotion. After he won a cowboy contest in Deadwood, South Dakota, he wore the nickname Deadwood Dick as a badge of honor until his death in 1931. Another leading early black cowboy, Jesse Stahl, competed in an Oregon rodeo in the early 1900s, and when the judges discriminated against him by not awarding his clearly superior performance with first prize, he rode his next bronco facing backward in protest.

The most celebrated black cowboy was Bill Pickett, who enjoyed a long caree with the 101 Ranch, of Marland, Okla homa. Between 1905 and 1931 the 101 Ranch put on the most popular Wild West show in America, touring the states and Europe.

Before Pickett's emergence in the early twentieth century, most rodeos consiste of calf roping and bronco busting. He invented an entirely new sport called bulldogging, which is featured in professional rodeos to this day. In a feat that lay somewhere between Olympian athleticism and madness, he would launch himself from a fast-riding horse, land on a bull, grab it by its horns, and wrestle the animal to the ground. The climax was that in getting the bull to the ground he would actually bite its lip and hold on with a death grip, finally showing that he had won by letting go of the animal's horns.

While Pickett was enjoying as much success as a black man could on horseback, Oklahoma and Texas were witnessing the birth of all-black rodeos. The two states lay at the heart of the black experience in the West.

In 1905 the black-settled town of Boley, Oklahoma, held its first rodeo, though the town leaders called it merely a summer festival. It was a competition between Creek Indians and blacks in bronco busting and calf roping, and, more important, a chance to draw other blacks who might wish to settle there. The festival was a "huge town-wide open house to encourage people to come to Boley," says Chip Coleman, the head of the city's chamber of commerce, which has run a rodeo every year to this day.

In the ensuing decades, black rodeos sprouted throughout the heart of Oklahoma, in towns such as Drumright and Clearview. In Okmulgee, Kenneth LeBlanc's father and grandfather began their own rodeo in 1956. They were tired of having to compete in white events after the crowds had gone home, so they rented the white facility for $50. Two years later they built their own arena.

Another Oklahoman, Cleo Hearn, decided he wanted to become a cowboy in 1947, when he was nine, after seeing Marvel Rogers, one of the top black cowboys of the day. Rogers, like the LeBlancs, wasn't allowed to compete with the white riders, but he had built such a reputation that, at the end of a rodeo" when all the others had finished, he would pass a hat around the crowd and, then take a "hat ride," facing down the toughest bulls and horses of all. If he held on, he took the hat money. Sometimes it was more than the official prize.

Rogers taught Hearn the ropes, and Hearn, as a student representing Oklahoma State University in competition, became the first African-American to attend college on a rodeo scholarship. He began competing in black rodeos in Drumright and Okmulgee in the mid-1950s, and he, too, had a tough time being forced to compete after the main show was over. But he persevered and in time became known in the industry as Mr. Black Rodeo. In 1971 he put on his first rodeo of his own, at the armory in Newark, New Jersey. It has since evolved into the Chevrolet Cowboys of Color Rodeo, which tours the Southwest every year with black, Latino, and Native American cowboys and cowgirls.

From the time the Federation of Black Cowboys was organized, its members were keen to pass down their legacy to urban youth. "The time we spend here, it's about teaching the kids," says Ed Dixon.

The federation has hosted three rodeos since 2001, and it puts on programs in conjunction with the city's board of education. Last summer 1,500 children visited the Cedar Lane Stables to learn about riding and caring for horses. Kids, Arnold Berry believes, want to feel powerful, and it's one thing that gets them in trouble as they grow up. Learning to control a thousand-pound beast that can crush you if you're not careful is a form of power, and youngsters seem to take to it.

The men of the federation call themselves cowboys, but they have never quit their day jobs. Clemons is an electrician, Dixon a subway operator (now retired), and Berry a computer technician. To find a full-time cowboy, you have to travel up to Sugar Hill in Harlem and ask for Bennie Miller, known in the neighborhood as Tex, and known by the Howard Beach cowboys as Uncle Ben.

Uncle Ben walks slowly, hunched over, his neck drawn into the planes of his shoulders. Yet he radiates an energy that is rare for a man of 92. Like all real cowboys, he wears a leather belt with a serving tray of a buckle. His apartment is filled with photos of his rodeo performances at Madison Square Garden in the 1940s and '50s, and the stuffed heads of longhorns are mounted on the walls.

Born in South Carolina in 1912, Miller grew up riding. His father was a veteran of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, the first extravaganza of its kind. When Ben was 10 he was sent to Fort Bend County, Texas, to live with an uncle. He helped his uncle raise cattle and break horses, and he was 16 when a scout for the 101 Ranch came to visit, looking to recruit riders for its Wild West show.

"What do you want me to do?", Ben asked the scout. "Pick cotton? I don't pick no cotton."

"No, I don't want you to pick cotton," the scout said. "I want you to ride in the 101 Ranch."

The boy didn't really know what the 101 was, but he signed on anyway. "I was young and wild and looking for adventure," he says. And he got it, as he traveled across Oklahoma and east through the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee, earning a dollar a day. He even crossed paths once or twice with a middle-aged Bill Pickett, who was one of the 101's most respected ranch foremen.

The 101 was also a working ranch, and Ben and other cowboys faithfully looked after the cattle. They would often camp outdoors at night, ringing the campsite with gunpowder (whose smell animals are said to dislike) to keep away snakes, bobcats, and mountain lions. There was no color line on the ranch, he remembers; everyone had to work together. But when he went into town, any town, he says, "that's when you knew you were black." White cowboys entered stores and restaurants through the front door; Miller entered through the back if he went in at all. The only integrated place he recalls from his travels was a bus depot in St. Louis.

He liked all of it, though, even the cities. "But I felt better at home on the range," he says. "No one to bother you. You pray, you read your Bible, you got your cattle and horses. Your horse is your best friend. You gotta dog over there; he lets you know what's wrong. If you fall off your horse drunk, he'll stand there till you get back on it."

The 101 Ranch stopped putting on Wild West shows in 1931; Bill Pickett died the following year, after being kicked in the head by a horse. As the Depression wore on, these shows in general faded out, victims of a culture more enamored with Western movies and with rodeos. Ben was among the many cowboys who joined to start the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association in 1936, ushering in the modern rodeo era. His travels on the circuit brought him to Madison Square Garden once a year, and he eventually moved his family to New York. "I was looking for freedom," he says. "Freedom and voting." He retired in 1959.

Maybe it's not like the old days, but in most respects there has never been a better time for black cowboys than now. Rodeos are becoming big-time sporting events. The PRCA stages more than 600 of them a year, attended by 23 million fans.

Thyrl Latting, who got his start in the late 1940s bucking horses, went on to become a successful promoter. Years ago, Latting says, black rodeos were a tough sell for African-Americans: "Most had migrated from the South. They didn't want anything to do with country things."

But times have changed. Lu Vason, a concert promoter, never heard of black cowboys until 1977 when he went to Cheyenne Frontier Days, a large rodeo festival in Cheyenne, Wyoming. "I had always liked Westerns," he says, and he knew that black audiences would love to see their own taking part. Getting a black rodeo started wasn't easy, and it toot Vason, then in his early forties, another seven years of study and preparation before he staged the first Bill Pickett International Rodeo near Denver in 1984. Now Vason's rodeo series makes 10 stops during its yearly season, has more than 100 minority cowboys and cowgirls, and attracts more than 120,000 fans.

Black rodeos are still held in Boley and Okmulgee. "The only reason we keep this an all-black rodeo is because it's novelty," LeBlanc admits. "There are very few places you can go and see nothin, but black cowboys."

But in the mainstream rodeo, black cowboys have become fixtures. Vason estimates there are nearly 800 black professional rodeo cowboys. In 1982 Charley Sampson became the first African-American to win a PRCA world championship in bull riding. And in 1999, Fred Whirfield, a six-time calf-roping champion also won the all-around championship.

New stars are constantly emerging. Ronnie Fields grew up on a ranch in Vernon, Oklahoma, got his start in rodeo in 1997, and three years later won the first of three consecutive steer-wrestling championships in the International Professional Rodeo Association---the minor league of the rodeo world. Now he moved on to the more prestigious PRO and says, "I'm not done. That was, that level, but I've moved up." He adds that he doesn't feel impeded by the color of his skin, and in that respect professional rodeo may finally be beginning to embrace the ethos of its trail driving roots. "Young kids are inspired by what we're doing," he says. "If I can inspire them to keep off the streets, no matter what their ethnicity is, I feel I've done something." ##

T. R. Witcher is a writer who lives in New York