Black Cowboys Research Articles

Reclaiming space and memory: Black cowboys and the right to the city

AbstractThis article draws on ethnographic observations from a Black trail ride event in Houston to examine how African Americans negotiate identities and spaces through embodied memories and mobility. Movement and mobility have always influenced racialised belonging through the geopolitics of borders and boundaries, which are inextricably tied to collective meanings of “blackness.” Everyday negotiations of blackness require Black Americans to reckon with the historical and contemporary implications of limited mobility and their place in U.S. society. Engaging with Lefebvre's notion of “the right to the city,” this article reflects on how Black trail riders challenge dominant constructions of space and belonging through collective movement and memory. By analysing a specific ethnographic moment during the trail ride, when Black participants moved from a place bounded by property lines to the space of city streets, the article explores the intersections of race, geography, and mobility. It considers how embodied memories and public reclamations of the past by Black communities pose a threat to established spatial and racial hierarchies. The article contributes to theoretical discourses on geopolitics, borders, and boundaries by centering the experiences and agency of Black trail riders in reimagining and navigating racialised landscapes.

Nonhuman Animals as Symbols in the #BlackLivesMatter Protests of 2020

Abstract Racial uprisings often include animalized commentary and symbolic use of nonhuman animal bodies. This paper highlights some of the nonhuman animal bodies observed during the #BlackLivesMatter protests within the United States in 2020 – specifically, the use of pig, horse, and dog bodies during street protests. Displays of pigs carry with them a racially rife past in the United States. This history harmed protesters during #BlackLivesMatter protests, being described as suffering “like animals,” and the use of “pig” as an epithet for the police is explored. For the Black Cowboys who joined the protests on horseback, the physical presence of their horses amplified their message, symbolized a shift in their freedom, and positioned them eye-to-eye with the mounted police officers. The use of dog bodies within politics, how they amplified political messages as “sign-carrying vehicles,” and the dangers for them and others in protests are addressed.

Cowboy Cool: A Professional Black Cowboy’s Perspective

AbstractEveryday embodiments of Black cowboy masculinities are balancing acts that attend to systems of power in racialized spaces. These practices create a space to consider how Black men discuss different ways they understand their positionality in the US hierarchy of racialized patriarchy. This article examines how Black cowboy performances are a balancing act that becomes a conversation about “coolness” as a citational practice. Coolness is also a method with implications for Black male legibility in mainstream country‐western rodeo. For Black cowboys, the definition of “cool” is not textually written to reveal rules or elements for testing. Performance and storytelling—traditional African and African American cultural practices—provide connections to how Black cowboys “play” with positionalities and ideologies of insider/outsider knowledge. This ethnography presents ways that one cowboy communicates how “things aren't always what they seem to be.” It advocates for more humanistic representations of Black masculinity while shifting the narrative frame of unmarked heroes, the cowboys.

Black Cowboys of Rodeo: Unsung Heroes from Harlem to Hollywood and the American West

Black Cowboys of Rodeo: Unsung Heroes from Harlem to Hollywood and the American West

Sonic Ecologies

Sonic Ecologies

Broadening the Story

Broadening the Story

Girls of the Golden West by John Adams

Reviewed by: Girls of the Golden West by John Adams James Peck GIRLS OF THE GOLDEN WEST. Score by John Adams, libretto by Peter Sellars. Directed by Peter Sellars. San Francisco Opera, San Francisco. December 10, 2017. Click for larger view View full resolution Ryan McKinny (Clarence), J’Nai Bridges (Josefa Segovia), Julia Bullock (Dame Shirley), and the San Francisco Opera chorus in John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Girls of the Golden West. (Photo: Stefan Cohen / San Francisco Opera.) The director Peter Sellars crafts indelible images charged with a sense of historical portent. Often, his productions reflect upon the stakes of public memory. He invites audience members to grapple with the claims of an imagined past upon their lived present. These values shape Girls of the Golden West, the latest collaboration between Sellars and composer John Adams. Adams and Sellars’ newest opera premiered at the San Francisco Opera in November 2017. It depicts the California Gold Rush through the interwoven stories of three women. The title alludes ironically to David Belasco’s play and Giacomo Puccini’s opera, The Girl of the Golden West (1910). Whereas they romanticized the American [End Page 94] West, Adams and Sellars emphasize the violence and injustice of westward expansion. Their counter-history offers a multiethnic, multinational, and racially fractious frontier. The characters struggle for a chance at the wealth of the conquered land and the privileges of US citizenship in the freshly minted state of California. Click for larger view View full resolution A scene from the first act of Girls of the Golden West. (Photo: Cory Weaver / San Francisco Opera.) In addition to directing, Sellars spliced together the libretto from a range of archival materials, including memoirs, poetry, and miners’ ballads. The first act introduces the characters within the exploitative context of settler capitalism. It begins with the white prospector Clarence (played by Ryan McKinny) trumpeting the arriving miners with text from Mark Twain’s hardscrabble yarn, Roughing It: “It was a driving, vigorous, restless population . . . the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.” However, the libretto soon upends this mythologizing lore by centering on stories of women and people of color. Act 1 constellates around three couples in the mining town of Rich Bar. At the core are Dame Shirley (Julia Bullock), a doctor’s wife, and Ned Peters (Davóne Tines), a black cowboy who escaped from plantation slavery. They forge a close friendship with growing hints of attraction. Dame Shirley was the pen name of Louise Clappe; her Shirley Letters to her sister constitute a major archive of life in gold country and provide much of the libretto. Dignified, perceptive, and humane, Shirley and Ned lament the contrast between the splendor of the California countryside and the mercenary society despoiling it. Two additional couples fill out the first act, their stories entangled in discriminatory practices of gender, nationality, and race. The Chinese immigrant Ah Sing (Hye Jung Lee), enslaved by sex trafficking, works as a prostitute at the raucous gambling house, the Empire Hotel. She deems the white miner Joe Cannon (Paul Appleby) a potential path to freedom, so strives for romance. The Mexican couple Josefa (J’Nai Bridges) and Ramón (Elliot Madore) work at the Empire as, respectively, a waitress and a card dealer; they keep their relationship secret, because “without a girl there can be no hotel, without a beautiful one there can be no business.” After Joe panics at Ah Sing’s displays of affection, Josefa must repel his ugly, drunken advances. The tensions that percolate through the first act coalesce into terrifying acts of nationalist violence in act 2. The major contours are rooted in a historical event that occurred on July 4th and 5th, 1851, in Downieville, California. Fueled by alcohol and jingoism, US miners, predominately white, attacked the town’s Mexican, Chilean, and Chinese [End Page 95] residents in an effort to drive them away and steal their claims. In the opera, Ned names this threat and condemns America’s whitewashed promise of freedom with text from Frederick Douglass’s searing speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” Cannon forces his way...

Introduction

Introduction Kalenda Eaton (bio), Michael Johnson (bio), and Jeannette Eileen Jones (bio) Buck: Which way are you ridin', Preacher? The Preacher: Well, that's not exactly settled in my mind yet. Buck: Well, you got three possibilities. The Preacher: Oh? Buck: North, south or east. The Preacher: What happened to west? Buck: We're going west.1 The 1972 film Buck and the Preacher tells the story of black migrants leaving the south in search of economic opportunity, self-determination, safety, and black power in the American West. Buck's (Sidney Poitier) declaration to the Preacher (Harry Belafonte) that he and his travel companions were "going west" (and implying that the Preacher should not accompany them) reads as a declaration and a provocation. As the film reveals, formerly enslaved Blacks imagined the West as a place where they could cut ties with the Old South and their former owners, and with the aid of Native Americans, establish all-black towns where they could thrive and escape Jim Crow. Blacks would go west and challenge anyone who attempted to thwart them. As a "black power" western in the revisionist tradition, Buck and the Preacher tapped into an over 100-year tradition of black performances and representations of the Black West as a site of resistance and becoming. Black communities and individuals occupied, defined, imagined, and deployed the Black West to their own ends, ever mindful that their presence in the West provided counter-narratives to the mythic Wild West [End Page 5] replete with white cowboys, pioneers, gunslingers, homesteaders, sex workers, and marauding "savage" Indians. In doing so, they not only demanded that their presence be acknowledged in Western narratives, but also critiqued the dominant white framing of the West as a utopian space for rugged individuals and frontier democracy. The cultural work performed by Buck and the Preacher and other black westerns echoed that of novels, museums, plays, paintings, photographs, nonfiction texts, and other mediums dedicated to preserving histories and articulating visions of the Black West. In the academy, the study of the Black West has primarily included historians, many of whom are concerned with correcting narratives of Western settlement featuring cowboys, Indians, and intrepid "pioneers." Interest in black cowboys, "black Indians," black homesteaders, and the famed Buffalo Soldiers fueled historical scholarship beginning in the 1970s. Kenneth Wiggins Porter's The Negro on the American Frontier and William Loren Katz's The Black West: A Documentary and Pictorial History both appeared in 1971. A year earlier, the University of Nebraska's PBS station NET had released a four-part documentary series "The Black Frontier" that sought to place Blacks firmly in the histories of the West. Nell Irvin Painter's Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976) and Robert Athearn's In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879-80 (1978) offered more critical analyses of black migration westward. Historians were not alone in paying attention to the black presence in the West in the 1970s, as the aforementioned Buck and the Preacher (a clear narrative break from John Ford's 1960 revisionist western Sergeant Rutledge) and several blaxploitation westerns—Soul Soldier (1970), The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), and Boss Nigger (1974), to name a few—sought to place Blacks (primarily men) at the center of cinematic Westerns. Documentaries like Black Rodeo (1972), narrated by Woody Strode the star of Sergeant Rutledge, drew on black cowboy histories to explain the significance of the New York rodeo invitational. The 1990s became the most significant decade for literary production, particularly by Black women, in the genre of western historical fiction. Writers produced reinterpretations of historical spaces, geographic migrations, and the realities of social relationships in the "new" frontier. Examples include Pearl Cleage, Toni Morrison, Jewell Parker Rhodes and others who turned their attentions westward in an attempt to reconstruct prosperous and thriving communities destroyed by white capitalism, racism, and terror. Other authors like Octavia Butler frequently positioned the west as a platform for Afrofuturism and reimagined black power.2 During this same period scholars produced multiple critical histories of blacks in the West—that is, histories that did not focus solely on including Blacks in Western historiography, but rather...

Myth in Black: Revisionismo ed epica in Django Unchained

This article aims to investigate the role of the German mythology in Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist western Django Unchained (2012). According to the following analysis, the director uses the western formula and aesthetics to characterize Django as a black cowboy in the antebellum south. However, while portraying the protagonist as a renovated champion of a displaced West, Tarantino resorts to the German epic in order to make Django an iconic hero like Siegfried, German emblem of morality and masculinity. As in the German legend – where the knight goes on a quest to rescue his beloved and prove his heroic skills –, Django overcomes several challenges to be finally recognized as an uncontested hero, emblem of manliness, strength, and moral.

Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, behind the Badge

Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, behind the Badge

Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, behind the Badge. Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles. Foreword by Albert S. Broussard

Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, behind the Badge. Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles. Foreword by Albert S. Broussard

Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, behind the Badge ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles

Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, behind the Badge ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles

Black Cowboys In The American West: On The Range, On The Stage, Behind The Badge

Black Cowboys In The American West: On The Range, On The Stage, Behind The Badge

Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, On the Stage, Behind the Badge ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles

Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, On the Stage, Behind the Badge ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles

Texas Cowboy’s Journal: Up the Trail to Kansas in 1868 by Jack Bailey (review)

Reviewed by: Texas Cowboy’s Journal: Up the Trail to Kansas in 1868 by Jack Bailey Deborah Liles Texas Cowboy’s Journal: Up the Trail to Kansas in 1868. By Jack Bailey. Edited by David Dary. Transcribed by Charles E. Rand. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Pp. 160. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) This trail diary by Jack Bailey, who apparently was a settler in Jack County, Texas, is currently the “the earliest known day-by-day account by a Texas cowboy of a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas during the period just after the Civil War” (xx). The rare glimpse into a seldom recorded world is a short and interesting read that covers his trip up the trail and back home again during the early post-war drives. David Dary’s introduction grounds the reader in the time period and provides some background information about Bailey. The daily log transcribed by Charles E. Rand follows Bailey’s original spelling, abbreviations, and format. Dary’s editorial notes add pertinent and interesting data about the many names and places mentioned throughout the three-month excursion from August 5 to November 7, 1868. As several historians have noted, there were many black cowboys who rode the trails during the post-war cattle drives. Bailey’s outfit had two in the ranks, and he witnessed other black men on the trail who were traders and soldiers. Bailey’s attitude was that of a former slaveholder and Confederate soldier in the post-war era. Despite those obvious sentiments, Bailey did not write anything negative about the abilities of the two black cowboys, Ben and Lewis. As a post-war source, this journal serves as a valuable record of this interaction, one that is rarely documented, and it provides credence to those historians who have previously recognized the value of black cowboys on the trail. On the other hand, he did write negatively about American Indians. His dislike and distrust of Indians can [End Page 324] be attributed to living in Jack County, where tension between settlers and the reservation Indians were commonplace. In addition to the valuable notations about race relations, the journal is a fine record of daily events on the cattle trail. Bailey wrote about difficulties with health, the weather, traveling, and the trials of men who worked alongside each other day in and day out. He observed and wrote about the women and children who rode with them and how much he missed his own family during his three-month venture. He also wrote about interactions between other cattle drivers they met en route to the Kansas markets, and how many of them were familiar to him, as they came from the northwestern frontier of Texas where he lived. Cowboys were notoriously reticent when it came to writing journals. Compared to the number of men and women who went up the trail, the scant accounts that exist are important records that describe a life that has been romanticized and exaggerated. This paperback reprint of Bailey’s journal is the third volume in the popular Western Legacies Series for the University of Oklahoma Press. As such, it is a welcome addition to a limited field for historians and layman alike. Deborah Liles University of North Texas Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Writing/Righting Images of the West

This short performative essay is a series of images and remembrances that offer an initial attempt at writing and righting the Black cowboy into the historiography of the West. Establishing a somewhat queer orientation to the West and Westerns, the essay situates a longstanding desire to be a cowboy.

The Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry (review)

Reviewed by: The Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry Edward T. Morman The Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry ( Baltimore and Greene Streets, Baltimore, Md.; http://www.dentalmuseum.org/) The National Museum of Dentistry is located, appropriately enough, at “the world’s first dental school,” the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery (founded 1840). It strives to be a repository of dental history and folklore, a teaching resource on oral hygiene, and a tribute to people and institutions important in dentistry. These goals are achieved with considerable success, in a pleasant two-story gallery adjacent to Davidge Hall (the University of Maryland facility in continuous use for medical education since 1812). Many of the museum’s exhibits feature primary source material, in settings designed to draw the interest of the casual visitor as well as the historian or dental practitioner.* Notable in this regard are the “Tower of Chairs,” the period dental office, and the displays of instruments and dental hygiene paraphernalia. The museum shows appropriate sensitivity to issues of race and gender. In an entertaining display on “Fabulous Feats,” the toothy achievements of a woman trapeze artist and a black cowboy are noted. And while there are areas celebrating women dentists and black dentists, more impressive to this reviewer was the emphasis placed on the dental hygienist—the occupational embodiment of preventive care, and a job category feminized from its inception. Popular culture is handled with good humor. A mock movie theater marquee provides opportunity to view excerpts of films featuring slapstick depictions of dentists, and a jukebox in the form of an open mouth gives the visitor of a certain age and nostalgic bent the opportunity to revisit old television commercials for toothpaste and mouthwash. The single least-successful area is “Faces Front and Center,” in which the smiling portraits of celebrities need to be updated. This display, moreover, fails to challenge the viewer to consider that the mouth and teeth are always seen within the context of the entire face. Darwin on the expression of emotions would have been a useful source here. Should this exhibit be revised, the curator would do well to pay attention to filmmaker Errol Morris’s recent discussion of the smiles seen in the snapshots taken at Abu Ghraib prison. Among the more satisfying smaller exhibits are areas dealing with the tooth fairy, cosmetic mutilation of the teeth, and teeth in religion (including a set of Andy Warhol silk screens of Apollonia, patron saint of dentistry). The George Washington gallery busts the myth of the wooden teeth and makes good use of portraiture to illustrate how dental problems affected Washington’s physiognomy. [End Page 380] Having failed to make advance preparation, this reviewer cannot report on the museum’s McCauley Library of the History of Dentistry, which houses an extensive collection of posters as well as “rare dental publications, photographs, and archival documents.” The recorded audio tour is well worth the extra dollar. Visitors seriously interested in understanding the exhibits should make the investment and would do well to leave themselves at least three hours to view everything. On the other hand, those with limited time can have a profitable experience in less than an hour. This museum makes much of its formal affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution, but perhaps the most important connection between the two institutions is that the late Audrey Davis, long-time curator of medical history at the Smithsonian, helped design the Baltimore facility. In many ways the dental museum reflects Davis’s museum skills and the breadth of her understanding of the history of science and technology. By a 2003 resolution of Congress, the Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry was made the official national dental museum in the United States. To the extent that the United States needs an official museum of dentistry, this one serves the purpose well. Edward T. Morman Jacobus tenBroek Library National Federation of the Blind Footnotes * Exhibits mentioned in this review were on display at the time of the reviewer’s visit. Exhibits may have changed between that time and publication. Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Entertaining Citizenship: Masculinity and Minstrelsy in Post—Emancipation San Francisco

Getting a glass of whiskey on the Barbary Coast had never been difficult. The gold rush meant, among other things, that libations would be plentiful in the towns and camps that sprung up throughout the new state of California. (1) But African American men, stepping into a bar during Reconstruction meant coming face to face with Jim Crow. By 1872, bar rooms and restaurants in the West's most populous city shunned African American patrons. In fact, many African Americans believed, according to San Francisco's black newspaper, The Pacific Appeal, that prejudice against color is now as bitter among proprietors of public as it was before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fifteenth Amendment. Colored men are liable to insult, by asking to be served with a meal, in almost any inferior restaurant in the city, quipped the editorial's author. California, of course, was not special in this regard. African Americans in every state in the nation faced Jim Crow restrictions in hotels, streetcars, bars, and cafes. But the state's reputation as a place free from the harshness of segregation and racialized violence made this treatment in public places noteworthy, and some, particularly insulting. In Washington, DC, in the previous summer, federal judges had ruled, in a lawsuit black Californians followed closely, that saloon keepers could no distinctions on account of color to whom they shall sell liquor. (2) If you could be served a drink in the nation's capitol, on the Mason-Dixon line, reasoned black men in California, surely they should be entitled to the same pleasure. Men and drink surfaced repeatedly in the pages of the state's black press during Reconstruction. In 1872 two African American men were scolded publicly disrupting a Republican meeting in San Francisco while intoxicated. Clearly, the Jim Crowed public facilities had not stopped black men from drinking. But pressure to exhibit the right kind of manhood, as befits new citizens, prompted the anonymous writer of the column about the drinking duo, To Be Regretted, to warn for the credit of the colored citizens at large, we hope that their friends will persuade them not to make themselves so ridiculous in a Republican meeting again. (3) The fact that these men were torchbearers of one of the city's Republican Club made the spectacle that much worse. Newly franchised and struggling to stake their claim in the state's Republican Party, some African American men worried that this type of behavior played into the hands of those who argued that black men were not fit to be citizens. Not at liberty to enjoy themselves in the city without being scrutinized, black men's leisure time, and how they spent it, spoke volumes about the limits of and possibilities a new kind of manhood. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the place of race in California's early popular culture. This essay examines spaces of public entertainment to ascertain what these sites tell us about black masculinity as it was shaped in the critical years after the Civil War, when African American men exercised new rights to the franchise. How have we understood blackness and masculinity in 19th century California? What does a study of theaters, parades, and celebrations reveal about manhood and citizenship? Studying race and masculinity in the U.S. West offers an opportunity to examine the varieties of masculine identities and stereotypes created in 19th century American culture. On the one hand, given the pervasive image of the black cowboy, one might assume that African American men exercised male privilege more freely in states and territories west of the Mississippi. Indeed, the possibilities to exhibit such manliness have been the source of celebration by 19th century black leaders and authors. Bragging about conditions in the Pacific Northwest during Reconstruction, black newspaper editor Horace Cayton, Sr., wrote, We are the new frontier and thousands of Negroes come to this part of the country and stand up like men and compete with their white brothers. …

Playing cowboys and Africans: Hollywood and the cultural politics of African identity

In his introduction to Africans on African-Americans, Yekutiel Gershoni relates a discussion he once had with the African historian L.H. Gann. The most popular films among African miners in Norther...

Black Cowboys of Texas

Black Cowboys of Texas