Black Cowboys

An interesting article on black cowboys, then and now.

From The Undefeated -

Fred Whitfield and the Black Cowboys of Rodeo
The champion calf-roper is a legend and an outlier
BY PAUL WACHTER

The cowboy is an iconic American figure and in popular mythology almost always a white one. For every Django or Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman’s character in Unforgiven) there are hundreds of white gunslingers. But of the “estimated thirty-five thousand cowboys that worked the ranches and rode the trails between 1866 and 1895, researchers have calculated that the number of black cowboys ranged from five thousand to nine thousand, with the high number representing 25 percent,” wrote Tricia Martineau Wagner, an author of several books about the West, in Black Cowboys of the Old West.

http://theundefeated.com/features/fred-whitfield-and-the-black-cowboys-of-rodeo/