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. “We’re cowboys for three generations back,” says Callies, 71, who runs the Black Cowboy Museum.
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.
Many Americans are surprised to learn that many enslaved Black men and women did the dangerous work of taming wild horses for white folks to ride and herding cattle, says Mia Mask, a film historian at New York’s Vassar College. They would compete on weekends to see who was the best at calf roping and riding, which grew into rodeos for prize money. Black men turned working with horses into careers once they were free.
That absence extended to decades of pop-culture movies and TV shows that told the story of the west. “It’s been a whitewashing of American cinema, and the western genre is part of that,” Mask says. “I’m always reminding folks that films are not the same as history, but films are where a lot of people become interested in learning more about history.”
When Black people were included in early western sagas, they inhabited demeaning, stereotypical roles: childlike, shuffling servants and strong silent workers. An early exception was Bill Pickett, a formerly enslaved man from Texas who invented rodeo steer wrestling and tamed wild horses with his brothers. Pickett became a western show performer and starred in a pair of movies in the 1920s. Another pioneer was Herb Jeffries, AKA the Sepia Singing Cowboy, a baritone jazz singer and actor who starred in Black westerns in the 1930s. But most Black actors didn’t get to star in major movies until the 1960s when, for example, Sidney Poitier appeared in Duel at Diablo.
And we now know that the Lone Ranger, a traveling white hero named Reed featured in movies, TV and radio dramas, was almost certainly inspired by legendary Black lawman Bass Reeves. In his 32-year career, deputy US marshal Reeves fought crime with several Native American partners and handed out silver dollars. “Bass Reeves is the closest person to resemble the Lone Ranger,” says Burton. “[He’s] much bigger. He is undoubtedly the greatest frontier hero in US history.” Burton detailed his adventures in the 2008 biography Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves, and David Oyelowo is starring in a Bass Reeves series on Peacock.
So what changed?
It’s always difficult to pin down when an awakening starts. Like a game of cultural Rashomon, every equestrian has a different perspective on what helped Black cowboy culture surface. Callies believes it started in 2017 when he appeared in the first season of the food history show High on the Hog. That’s when he shared the origin of the word “cowboy”, originally an insult reserved for Black men who worked with cattle.
The following year, Chicago-area folk musician Dom Flemons released Black Cowboys, a storytelling album of Black people who shaped the west. “The Black cowboy story is so beautiful because it’s tangible and relatable,” Flemons says. He notes that March 2019 was when Bri Malandro, a Dallas woman, started the Instagram account @theyeehawagenda. It documents happenings in Black, queer, cowgirl and celebrity worlds that helped bring about the current moment, including Black Rodeo, a 1972 documentary about Muhammad Ali visiting the first Black rodeo in New York City, and Pharrell Williams’ 2024 western collection for Louis Vuitton that hit Paris runways.
In April 2019, Lil Nas X paired with Billy Ray Cyrus to remix Old Town Road, a catchy, rap-country fusion that crowned Top 100 charts by Rolling Stone and Billboard. The song stirred controversy when Billboard pulled it from the country charts, saying “it does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music”.
Still, Mask believes that viral images of George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 made urban equestrians in places like Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Oakland impossible to ignore.
“For BLM, people came out to protest with their horses in a way that prevented the containment and intimidation of Black protesters,” Mask says. “That puts the protest in a different context.” As Oakland cowgirl Brianna Noble noted in 2020: “I’m just another protester if I go down there alone, but no one can ignore a Black woman sitting on top of a horse.”
Modern movies like Concrete Cowboy (2020), The Harder They Fall (2021) and Nope (2022) brought diverse Black equestrians to the big screen. But for the past 40 years, the Bill Pickett invitational rodeo, which travels the nation, has been the most enduring reminder of Black equestrian history.
Margo LaDrew, the rodeo’s national director of business development, says demand for tickets boomed in 2021, after the rodeo first aired on national TV thanks to a partnership with the Professional Bull Riders. “It happened to be the same day Juneteenth became a national holiday,” she says. People loved seeing the rodeo open with the Black national anthem, hearing the popular R&B music, and learning the history of the Buffalo Soldiers and Bill Pickett from the announcer.
“We tell history at our rodeo,” says LaDrew. “Looking at those kids’ faces when they come to the rodeo and they see cowboys in those outfits and they’re roping, we have heroes.”
Turman, co-grand marshal for Bill Pickett rodeos for nearly 40 years, believes Black people will keep flocking to the rodeos and donning western wear because they appreciate seeing people who look like them embodying the heroic cowboy ideal.
“It’s respect for your fellow man, a straight-up honesty,” says Turman, who also founded Camp Gid D Up to teach horse skills and values to urban kids in southern California. “It’s being able to look another person in the eye and speak directly with a firm handshake. And there’s a certain respect for the animals that are your partner in your work.”
After collaborating on Concrete Cowboy, Philadelphia equestrian Erin Brown partnered with filmmakers Ricky Staub and Dan Walser from Neighborhood Film Co to create the Philadelphia Urban Riding Academy. They teach riding skills to anyone interested to “help preserve the history and culture of urban cowboys in Philadelphia”.
Brown, AKA the Concrete Cowgirl, was just seven when she started winning equestrian hunter-jumper timed trials. Riding at the Fletcher Street stables with her father, an ironworker who owns a welding company, helped her get over her shyness. It also kept her safe. “A lot of my peers are no longer here due to gun violence and drug overdoses,” she says. “I had a responsibility to go to the barn every day and take care of my horse, so I wasn’t engaging in a lot of what my peers were doing.”
For all the current trendiness, Randy Savvy, the spokesperson for the Compton Cowboys, says he believes the vitality of Black cowboy culture is expanding horizons for Black youths, just like when they first saw Barack Obama in the White House.
“The kids in the community get fed a very particular image of who we are, who we’re supposed to end up becoming, and what we’re supposed to be interested in,” Savvy says. “And it’s such a refreshing, eye-opening shock value thing to see a Black cowboy. It opens their minds up.”