The Lost World of 1970s Black Rodeo

“I didn’t know there were Black cowboys.”

I was standing in a darkroom, and my friend, the new lab monitor, was hovering over my shoulder. He had just caught sight of the faint tracings of a ghostly image of a bronc rider emerging from the print I was swishing through a bath of photo-developing solution.

He could perhaps have been forgiven for his ignorance. This was 1978, back in the day when the general public believed that the job description for cowboys began with “Must wear big hat and boots” and ended with “Only whites need apply.”

It was exhilarating to have the photographic proof that this impression was deeply mistaken. Unfortunately for me, an impoverished recent journalism graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, that proof was trapped on negatives and in tiny canisters of undeveloped rolls of film that I had shot at Black rodeos.

Photography used to be an expensive and laborious proposition. It involved film, paper, chemicals, trays, drying racks, enlargers, and loads of gear I was way too broke to afford. But those trapped images haunted me, begging to be released. Luckily my buddy allowed me to slip into the UT photo lab when he was on duty to work on my “renegade rodeo stuff.”

“Renegade” was how I described the rodeos that didn’t fit the standard mold: the ones for prisoners, police officers, youths, girls (yes, it was called “girls’ rodeo” back then), Indians (yes, they used that term), old-timers, and gay cowboys. I photographed them all. I even heard of a nudist rodeo. In California, naturally. But I never got close enough to that one to learn the true meaning of bareback riding—to say nothing of rawhide.

My interest was not, primarily, in what happened in the arena. In fact, as an animal lover, I would have preferred that most of the events didn’t take place at all. No, what intrigued me was witnessing how each group remade this most American, most mainstream of pastimes (largely created, let’s recall, by Mexican vaqueros) in its own image. The best of all the “remakes” I documented were those created at Black rodeos held in tiny rural outposts when, with a few exceptions, Black competitors weren’t welcome at white rodeos in Texas. The events I documented exuded a vibrancy, a joy that made them more compelling than any of the others. Almost more reunion than rodeo, each celebrated community as much as competition. Friendship and fun were always the grand prizes.

Which isn’t to say that every cowboy and cowgirl who paid an entry fee didn’t ride or rope with a fierce determination to win, sometimes displaying supreme rodeo mastery. Take the cowboy whose image had surprised my friend in the darkroom. I’d photographed him a few weeks before, when he was competing at a legendary venue, the Diamond L Ranch arena. Then located on far South Main outside of Houston, the fabled Diamond L was the epicenter of the Gulf Coast rodeos—some called it the Soul Circuit—that I was concentrating on. As I sloshed the photo to and fro in the developer solution, ripples washed over the image that materialized in the reddish glow of the safelight. Like a corny effect in an old movie, it pulled me back in time to that sultry evening when, because I didn’t have a serious telephoto lens, I was, as usual, standing inside the arena far closer to the broncs and bulls than any city girl should be.

A night rodeo. A bronc ride.

The horse. A gleaming streak of furious muscle, all four hooves off the ground.

The rider. A study in old-time rodeo cool. Dressed in an immaculate white shirt, tie knotted at his collar, a stogie planted casually in his mouth, spurs raking the points of his mount’s shoulders, he was leaning back as easy as a kid on a rocking horse. I had frozen him in a moment of pure rodeo perfection, forever extending his free arm upward for what all rough-stock riders are taught to reach for: a handful of sky. 

In his mid-forties, he was a legend nearing the end of his career. Born Taylor Hall Jr., in 1932, and known on the circuit as Bailey’s Prairie Kid, he was as real a cowboy as ever sat a saddle. After competing in hundreds of rodeos, he retired a few years after this magical night from a sport in which thirty was considered dangerously geriatric for rough-stock riders. In later years the Kid would be honored with membership in the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Cowboys of Color Hall of Fame.

Yet Hall and other equally skilled Black cowboys didn’t register as “official” cowboys with my friends back home. There was no malice in their befuddlement. We were simply in a moment when the mainstream definition of cowboy was still a couple of years away from being stretched enough to include even the word “urban” (which, in 1980, would mean city boys like John Travolta’s Bud Davis, honky-tonking at Gilley’s in Urban Cowboy). 

Between then and today—when Beyoncé has teamed up with Willie Nelson for a couple of tracks on an album with the word “Cowboy” in the title, and most of us know that enslaved Texans (and, later, freedmen) worked livestock on the state’s vast ranches and plantations—the mainstream paid little attention to Black cowboy culture. Documentation of these long chapters in the history of Black Americans in the West is sparse.

It was clear to me in that long-ago time that the story of Black cowboys and cowgirls was a tale that had not been told outside of their communities. Their contributions, their heritage as westerners, their expertise with livestock, their very existence had gone unrecognized by too many for far too long.

Fired by a sense of urgency and convinced that Black buckaroos would be welcomed into the pantheon of western heroes the instant my photos were published, I spent much of the next two years grinding out the miles between Austin and towns such as Egypt, El Campo, Fresno, Kendleton, Pin Oak, Plum, Spring, and Sugar Land. 

I photographed lots of performers, and some legends. Along with the impeccably smooth Kid, I was extremely fortunate that the Godfather of Black Rodeo, Rufus Green Sr., took me under his wing. Green earned his title as much for his majestic spirit and mentorship of younger champion ropers as for his phenomenal roping skills. He was among the first rodeo cowboys to break the sport’s color barrier, becoming a member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. I also caught Archie Wycoff, featured along with Muhammad Ali in the 1972 documentary Black Rodeo, pulling off prizewinning rides on bulls and broncs at the Diamond L.

But my big score was snapping Myrtis Dightman. Known as the Jackie Robinson of Rodeo, Dightman was the first Black cowboy to compete in the National Finals Rodeo. He would go on to compete in six more National Finals and earn spots in the ProRodeo and Bull Riding halls of fame. But Dightman didn’t compete in the nonprofessional rodeos I documented. He came to arenas such as the Diamond L as a friend—one who helped awed young riders set their riggings and strategize on how best to avoid being a “two-jump chump” who got pile driven by some rank, sidewinding bull. Even when surrounded by worshipful hands who wore T-shirts emblazoned with his likeness, Dightman was kind, patient, and utterly unassuming. Epitomizing all that was most enticing about Black rodeos, he was there for fellowship.    

After a night at the Diamond L, or a day at a jackpot roping—where the winners split the entry fees instead of a rodeo putting up a purse—at the Pin Oak community arena, I’d rush back to Austin with my canisters of undeveloped film. Unfortunately, by 1980 I no longer had a friend who could sneak me into the UT darkroom. On top of that, a couple of the magazines I had been freelancing for went out of business without paying me, and I was forced to take a state job to afford groceries and photo supplies. For a year I printed and submitted, sending off copies of my favorite photos to book publishers around the country. I waited for their enthusiastic acceptances. 

They never arrived. Instead came various versions of the verdict: “There is no audience for a book like this.” There isn’t enough “interest in the topic.” In short, the message from the publishing industry was that Black cowboys are an anomaly that the country is not ready to see. (I also submitted a proposal to Texas Monthly—but, I later learned, to the wrong person, a sometime writer at the magazine who told me that it already had a rodeo story in the works. When that article appeared, in late 1979—written by the person who had blown me off!—it didn’t include a single nonwhite cowboy or cowgirl.) 

For more than four decades, my prints and negatives languished in boxes beneath my bed. And then, four years ago, in a pandemic-inspired fit of house cleaning, I pulled them out, gazed at them for the first time in a long while, and realized that somehow, some way, I had to return those images to the communities whence they’d come. Knowing that I would never again breathe the toxic air of a darkroom, I donated my work to the Southwestern Writers Collection, in San Marcos. There the peerless archivist Carla Ellard and her team of wizards digitized a significant portion of my collection. A dear friend, the legendary photographer Will van Overbeek, then lent his artistry to the resurrection. The files Will returned to me came to life on the screen of my laptop like kidnapped children who had finally been ransomed.

The happy ending to my nearly half-a-century journey with Black rodeo is that the University of Texas Press will publish the collection this month. The images, though taken over several years at many arenas, are sequenced in the book to re-create a day at what was always the high point of the year, a rodeo held on Juneteenth. Hence the title “Juneteenth Rodeo.”

Best of all, those images will now be released into a world that is not only reclaiming the lost heritage of Black pioneers in the West but rejoicing in it. The recently published photo book Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture, films such as Concrete Cowboy, and the TV series Lawmen: Bass Reeves are all part of the widespread media coverage celebrating the history of Black Americans in the West. And nowhere is that celebration more evident than in rodeo. From the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo that tours the country to the triumphs of the many cowboys and girls of color now competing in events sanctioned by the PRCA, the contemporary Black rodeo scene is thoroughly documented.

The lack of extensive documentation for the long years when the concept of a Black cowboy was regarded by many as an anomaly is a gap in the historical record that I hope these images help fill. They capture the final days of a time when the sport was still rooted in the business of ranching—when many, if not most, of the competitors had grown up riding and roping and when rodeo skills were honed not on the back of a mechanical bull but in the saddle of a horse the cowboys had most likely broken and trained themselves. I photographed men and women who knew how to rope, dope, brand, and dehorn a steer. It was a world that will never again have the same players or the same pressures and limitations that made these particular rodeos the most vibrant, the most jubilant of them all. 

It was a world where joy was the ultimate triumph.  

This essay is adapted from Juneteenth Rodeo, © 2024 by Sarah Bird, which will be published by the University of Texas Press on June 4.

This article originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “A Handful of Sky.” Subscribe today.