"I Ride to Win": Narrative and Power at the Nineteenth-Century American Racetrack

In the 1880s, American racetracks had been integrated workplaces for well over a century. Some of the most celebrated horsemen of the antebellum period had been African-American slaves. Always popular, racing in the years after the Civil War emerged as a national obsession, a topic for press coverage and conversation among people in all walks of American life, and the great stars of the track became notable public figures. Some of the best known and most highly skilled of these men were from the first free generation in their families. Black reporters, political activists, and racing enthusiasts constructed around horsemen narratives of respectable living in a world of integrated competition. Though their profession was often associated with vice, black horsemen served as significant figures in narratives of attainment in the black community. But black trainers and jockeys also became the subjects of stories told among whites. At first, such stories were closely akin to tales of happy subordination often deployed during slavery to neutralize the potentially disruptive autonomy of enslaved horsemen. But as white Americans grasped that the expertise of slaves had in turn produced success and wealth for their sons, as they came to understand the significance that black Americans saw in horsemen, they altered their narratives. Increasingly, black horsemen became the subject of narratives designed to erase their individuality, to explain all their behavior as a result of biologically and socially determined racial characteristics. At the racetrack, Americans saw in microcosm the integrated world that Reconstruction could make, and they struggled to build or to destroy that world, using narratives as weapons. Examining this particular American cultural site reveals just how crucial storytelling was in reifying racial hierarchy after Reconstruction and shaping both the Jim Crow system and the efforts of blacks to combat it.