Black Jockeys

Black jockeys built American Thoroughbred racing as a profession and dominated the early years of the Kentucky Derby, winning 15 of the first 28 runnings between 1875 and 1902. Their disappearance was not a natural decline but a coordinated Jim Crow exclusion: licensing barriers imposed by white-dominated racing authorities, violent intimidation on the track, and owners’ retreat from hiring Black riders as the sport became wealthier and more segregated.

The record of Black jockeys at the Derby is clear: in the inaugural Kentucky Derby of 1875, 13 of the 15 riders were Black, and Oliver Lewis, born into slavery, rode Aristides to victory and set the template for the race’s prestige. Subsequent Black champions—including Isaac Murphy, Willie Simms and Jimmy Winkfield—were central architects of racing strategy, conditioning and style, even as the system that profited from their skill moved to shut them out.

1.Origins: Black horsemanship and the making of a profession

The skill base that produced Black jockeys came out of centuries of Black horsemanship on Southern plantations and farms, where enslaved and later free Black men handled breeding, training and riding of the region’s best horses. That labor quietly standardized techniques of breaking colts, pacing mounts and reading a track long before formal racing organizations recognized those techniques as a profession.

When organized Thoroughbred racing took shape in the 19th century, many of the riders with the deepest practical experience were Black. Contemporary accounts and later synthesis identify Black jockeys as among the first people in the United States to earn a living as **professional athletes**, drawing salaries, purses and contracts for their riding skill. In that early period, track owners and breeders hired Black riders because they wanted to win, and Black jockeys delivered.

2.Dominance at the Kentucky Derby

The Kentucky Derby, inaugurated in Louisville in 1875, makes the breadth of Black jockeys’ contribution visible in a single event. Of the 15 jockeys in that first Derby field, 13 were Black, a proportion that reflects how fully Black riders occupied the talent pool by that time. Oliver Lewis, an African American born into slavery in 1856, rode the colt Aristides to victory that day, winning the inaugural Kentucky Derby and fixing his name in the sport’s origin story.

Across the race’s first generation, Black jockeys repeatedly crossed the finish line first. They won **15 of the first 28 Derbies**, a span from 1875 to 1902 in which their skill was the decisive factor in the majority of the event’s outcomes. Riders such as William “Billy” Walker (Baden-Baden, 1877), Isaac Murphy (three Derby wins in 1884, 1890 and 1891), Willie Simms (Ben Brush, 1896; Plaudit, 1898) and Jimmy Winkfield (back‑to‑back wins in 1901 and 1902) became stars whose names circulated in Black newspapers and racing circles. Their training routines, race tactics and composure under pressure set competitive norms other jockeys followed.

This dominance was not limited to the Derby. Black jockeys were prominent in major stakes races across the country, and Black trainers were responsible for conditioning several of the winning horses in those early years. The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights notes that African Americans trained six of the first 17 Derby winners, underscoring that Black expertise extended through the entire racing operation.

3.The mechanism of exclusion: Jim Crow in the saddle

Despite this record of success, by the early 1900s Black jockeys are largely absent from American racing. The archive holds that this disappearance is the result of deliberate exclusion.

As Jim Crow laws spread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white control over racetracks hardened into a racial gatekeeping system. The Jockey Club, then a powerful governing body for the sport, used its licensing authority to make it “near to impossible” for Black jockeys to obtain or renew the credentials needed to ride, cutting off formal access to mounts even for established champions. At the same time, white jockeys engaged in on‑track violence, riding Black competitors and their horses into the rails, boxing them in, and threatening them with injuries that could end their careers.

Owners—responsive both to the licensing regime and to the physical dangers—grew more reluctant to hire Black jockeys, not because their skill had declined but because the racetrack had become a site of organized intimidation backed by segregationist norms. Scholars examining this period describe a process in which African American riders, who were winning Derbies throughout the 1890s, were “driven from American racetracks” over roughly a decade, ending with Jimmy Winkfield’s 1902 Derby win as a closing bracket on the era.

By the early 1900s, Black riders and trainers were effectively pushed out of a business that had simultaneously become wealthier and less accessible to working‑class Black communities. The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights observes that by that time, African Americans had been “pushed out of the business,” linking their exclusion directly to the changing racial and economic complexion of the sport.

4.Erasure and partial return

The exclusion was followed by a long period of narrative erasure. Mainstream histories of the Kentucky Derby and American racing often minimize or omit the fact that Black jockeys won more than half of the first 28 Derbies and that almost the entire inaugural field was Black. Black‑authored outlets and later digital projects, such as Soul Of America and heritage initiatives around the Derby, have worked to recover those names and numbers, insisting that the founding era of the race cannot be told without Black riders at its center.

In terms of participation, the gap is stark. A Black jockey has not won the Kentucky Derby since 1902, when Jimmy Winkfield rode Alan‑a‑Dale to victory and completed his back‑to‑back wins. For decades afterward, Black presence at the Derby was almost nonexistent. It was not until the year 2000 that a Black jockey, Marlon St. Julien, rode in the Kentucky Derby again, ending more than eight decades without a single Black rider in the starting gate. Patrick Husbands (2006), Kevin Krigger (2013) and Kendrick Carmouche (2021) have followed, marking a slow, partial return at the highest level even as systemic barriers in training pipelines, ownership networks and licensing structures persist.

The archive treats contemporary Black jockeys as heirs to a buried lineage: they ride in a sport whose early foundations were laid by Black men whose names were later suppressed. Efforts by Black journalists, historians and cultural organizations to honor Oliver Lewis, Isaac Murphy, Willie Simms, Jimmy Winkfield and others are part of rebuilding that lineage publicly.

5.Naming the exclusion plainly

The answer to “why are there no Black jockeys?” at the modern Kentucky Derby is therefore not a mystery but a documented process. Black jockeys did not disappear because they stopped winning or because interest waned; they were systematically excluded through Jim Crow governance of the sport, violent collusion among white riders, and owners’ decisions that prioritized racial order over merit.

This case stands as an exemplar of how a Black‑built institution—here, the profession of jockeying at the pinnacle of American racing—can be central at its founding and then nearly erased from its own story. Restoring Black jockeys to the center of Derby history is not revisionism; it is a correction that aligns the record with the documented facts of who rode, who won, and who was later pushed away.

The family archive is admissible here. Photographs, letters, deeds, church programs, funeral bulletins, business records, recordings — the things that were kept when no institution was keeping them. A keeper reviews everything before it is admitted, and your name stays on it.

6.References