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…

The post The Lost World of 1970s Black Rodeo appeared first on Texas Monthly.