Cleo Hearn
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
The curator of Black Cowboys, the latest special exhibition at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Right Museum, wasn’t sure how many of Texas’ cowboys have been Black. But he estimated that number at about a third of them were through history.
The new exhibit tells the fascinating stories of Black cowboys who rode the range throughout Texas history, and it reveals many surprises that really should be no surprise at all — such as the fact that many of Texas’ earliest cowboys were slaves.
“Enslaved people of African descent worked with horses and cattle from their arrival in New Spain in the late 1500s to emancipation in 1865,” according to notes by curator Ronald Davis II included in the exhibit.
For some, the topic of slavery brings up images from and life on a southern plantation. But that’s not what slavery actually looked liked, especially not in Texas. And when we think of the Hollywood western set in Texas, we think of a heroic white man on horseback.
Hollywood mostly ignored the stories of the Black men, women and children who lived and worked on cattle ranches and led the cattle drives across the state and up the Chisholm Trail.
Davis also notes that Black children worked alongside parents and family members on ranches and farms while the white children of ranch owners attended school. So skills needed for a cattle drive and to perform other ranching tasks were passed down in Black families, from one generation to the next, ensuring Black cowboys would always be among the best in Texas.
I asked Davis if he knew of descendants of slaves who still ranched. He pointed to the story of Jack, a man born into slavery in 1829. After emancipation, Davis said, many of the former slaves didn’t talk about their life under captivity. And many — like Jack — were just known by a first name, making it almost impossible to track family ties.
Jack and the Mavericks
The story of the name of Dallas’ basketball team traces right back to the story of Jack, who worked on the ranch of Samuel and Mary Maverick. Jack was left on the ranch to manage the herd.
Jack sent word back to the Mavericks that their cattle were unbranded. Under Texas law, unbranded cattle could be claimed by anyone who branded them. Locals began calling unbranded cattle and motherless calves “mavericks.” Today the word refers to people rather than cattle and means “independent and nonconformist.”
Interesting that a word meaning independent has its roots in slavery.
Davis noted that some slaves in Texas even acquired their own herds of cattle that they kept when they were emancipated. As early as the 1830s, Black men and women purchased land, cattle and horses and created legacies that were passed down through generations.
After the Civil War, Black cowboys remained essential to the Texas economy. From the end of the Civil War until the 1890s, when railroads came to Texas, the largest number of animals in human history were driven up the trails from Texas to provide the country beef for food and horses for transportation.
The exhibit explains how the Black cowboys were usually the first to ford streams and rivers along trails including the Chisholm Trail, which started in South Texas and ran through Fort Worth to Abilene and Wichita in Kansas. The railroads headed east and west through Kansas and Missouri, which sent the cattle to large cities.
Once the animals were sold, the cowboys made the 800 mile trip back to Texas.
According to an account written in 1910 by Hector Bazy, who became a cowboy after emancipation, white and Black cowboys “made no color distinction when out on the plains.”
While he saw little discrimination among cowboys, there was plenty of discrimination at the end of the trail.
Once, when Bazy was trying to sell some of his horses, the buyer suspected the animals were stolen — for no other reason than Bazy was Black. Bazy was arrested, but his honest reputation among prominent cattlemen convinced the buyer to drop the charges.
A section of the exhibit is devoted to rodeo and Black rodeo star Cleo Hearn. He first competed at the Mesquite Rodeo the year it opened in 1958.
The Mesquite Rodeo was never segregated. But the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, founded in 1896, was, and it didn’t integrate until the 1960s when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forced desegregation of public spaces.
Hearn made history a number of times, including as the first Black man to win a national calf roping competition and for organizing the first rodeo in Harlem in New York City.
That rodeo became the subject of a 1972 documentary.
Hearn was inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame in 2023.
Black Cowboys remains on exhibit at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, 300 N. Houston St., through April 18. The museum is open daily 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and closed Tuesdays. Adult tickets are $19 and include the special exhibit.