When black cowboys paraded through Harlem with Muhammad Ali

The afternoon of Friday, Sept. 3, 1971, was beautiful and sunny in Harlem as residents lined the streets and hung their heads out of second- and third-story windows to watch a three-mile parade of cowboys make their way through the city on horseback. These were not the cowboys New Yorkers were accustomed to seeing on television or the silver screen, though. They were black cowboys, and a day later, more than 10,000 people — many of whom had never seen a rodeo, much less an all-black rodeo — made the short walk across the Triborough Bridge to Randall’s Island for the Black Western Cultural Show and Wild West Rodeo, or what became known as a “rodeo with soul.” Outside of Downing Stadium (since demolished), they bought programs for $1 and cheap straw cowboy hats for children along with other Western-themed novelty items. Inside, many of the cowboys from out West were competing on grass instead of dirt for the first time and finding it a rather slick surface for calf and team ropers to stop their horses. United Press International reported that the purpose of the event was “to show ghetto-bred youngsters that there are black cowboys” from Texas, Oklahoma, California, Illinois and Michigan, along with Connecticut, New Jersey and even New York. The Raleigh, West Virginia, Register ran the story ran under a headline that read I Thought They Were All White. More accustomed to running rodeo stories, The Dallas Morning News headline simply read Black Cowboys. Muhammad Ali was there and the Associated Press wrote that seeing the legendary fighter-turned-war protester-turned-civil rights activist “excited even the hard-bitten youngsters of the Harlem ghetto.” The history of black cowboys intersects with America’s struggle for racial equality, human rights and social justice. New York’s first black rodeo brought out more than 50 of the best black cowboys, who otherwise would have been competing in smaller, less publicized and often overlooked events. The whole weekend was chronicled in a documentary titled Black Rodeo that has since defined the legacy of this historic event...MORE