The Black Track

Before the roses, before the grandstands, before horse racing became one of America's most celebrated sporting traditions, there was the barn.

And in that barn were the Black horsemen who built the sport.

The Black Track: How Black Jockeys, Trainers, Grooms, and Stable Hands Built American Horse Racing restores the overlooked history of the Black riders, trainers, grooms, stable hands, exercise riders, clockers, and caretakers whose labor and brilliance shaped American horse racing from its earliest foundations.

Long before the Kentucky Derby became a national spectacle, Black horsemen were already reading the horse, preparing the race, carrying the risk, and mastering the track. In 1875, the first Kentucky Derby made that truth impossible to ignore: Oliver Lewis, a Black jockey, rode Aristides to victory; Ansel Williamson, a Black trainer born into slavery, prepared the winning horse; and thirteen of the fifteen jockeys in the field were Black.

But this is not only a story of victory.

It is also a story of labor, exclusion, memory, and repair.

Jarrett J. Jackson takes readers beyond the winner's circle and into the stable, where Black knowledge was passed from hand to hand. He follows the rise of legendary figures such as Isaac Murphy, Willie Simms, Jimmy Winkfield, Edward Dudley Brown, Dudley Allen, Will Harbut, Eddie Sweat, and many others, while also honoring the unnamed workers whose care made champions possible.

With poetic force and historical clarity, The Black Track examines how Black horsemen stood at the center of American racing, how Jim Crow and money changed the color line, and how public memory narrowed a story that was never complete without them.

This book is for readers of Black history, sports history, Kentucky history, labor history, and anyone who wants to understand the people behind the spectacle.

The public remembered the horse.

The record remembered the owner.

The photograph remembered the silks.

But the horse remembered the hands.