A history that’s been suppressed’: the Black cowboy story is 200 years old

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When Larry Callies went to the movies as a boy in Rosenberg, Texas, the heroes riding horses and wearing 10-gallon hats were all white men.

But the real cowboys Callies knew were Black. His great-grandfather Lavel Callies was an enslaved cowboy who worked with horses professionally after emancipation. 

Historians estimate that 20% to 25% of the people who settled the continental US west – a region from Washington state to Montana and New Mexico to California – were Black men and women. They moved cattle on horseback, settled towns, kept the peace and delivered the mail in the wild, wild west. But Black cowgirls and cowboys have been pretty much invisible to most. For nearly 200 years, two separate cowboy narratives, one Black and one white, have trotted side by side in the US. The two have rarely crossed paths. Until now.

Today, it seems like modern Black cowboys and cowgirls are everywhere. Who could miss Beyoncé starring as a red-white-and-blue rodeo queen on the cover of her Cowboy Carter album? Her embrace of equestrian symbols shines a spotlight on those who have quietly kept the Black cowboy legacy alive: community equestrian clubs like Compton Cowboys and Chicago’s Broken Arrow Horseback Riding Club, modern Buffalo Soldier units, as well as local and traveling Black rodeos like the Bill Pickett invitational rodeo. Since 1984, the rodeo has crisscrossed the US, sharing the riding and roping talents of Black cowgirls and cowboys with audiences from New York to Florida and Dallas to Los Angeles.

It raises the question: why did it take so long? “It’s hard to wake up a nation to history,” says actor and activist Glynn Turman, who recently wrapped up filming on Kevin Costner’s new western film series Horizon: An American Saga. “There’s a history that has always been suppressed when it comes to our culture,” Turman says. “It’s an ongoing assault.”

While everyone knows about George Washington’s cherry tree, few know the story of William Lee, the enslaved Black man who managed the general’s hunting expeditions and rode with him in revolutionary war battles.

A century later, the invisibility of Black men and women who settled the west from the late 1860s to the 1890s is seen as part of the post-civil war backlash against Black economic and political gains. “Racism reached its zenith in the early 20th century in the US, so the things Black people have done have been swept under the rug,” says Art T Burton, a western historian. see more...