Oliver Lewis, Aristides, and the Jockeys Who Were Erased
Near Louisville, Kentucky
On May seventeenth, eighteen seventy-five, a nineteen-year-old jockey named Oliver Lewis rode a chestnut colt named Aristides to the finish line of the first Kentucky Derby, setting an American record for the mile-and-a-half distance. The winning trainer was Ansel Williamson, also Black. Of the fifteen jockeys in that inaugural field, thirteen were Black.
This is not a minor footnote. These men were the professionals of the sport. They had learned to ride on the horse farms of the Bluegrass, working as enslaved people or as the children of enslaved people. Their expertise was the foundation of American thoroughbred racing. The Kentucky Derby was built on their backs, literally.
Isaac Murphy won it three times. Born in Frankfort, Kentucky, in eighteen sixty-one, the son of a man who died as a Union Army prisoner of war, Murphy adopted his grandfather's surname when he began racing. He won in eighteen eighty-four, eighteen ninety, and eighteen ninety-one, a record not matched until nineteen forty-five. At his peak he earned between ten thousand and twenty thousand dollars a year in salary alone, making him one of the highest-paid athletes in the United States. His career win rate of forty-four percent remains among the highest in jockey history.
What ended it was not age or injury. It was Jim Crow.
Through the eighteen nineties, white jockeys used physical intimidation at the rails, crowding and bumping Black riders, sometimes forcing horses into barriers. Track owners began accepting segregated competition. State legislatures passed laws restricting Black jockeys' licenses. Jimmy Winkfield won the Derby in nineteen oh one and again in nineteen oh two, becoming the last Black jockey to win the race. Blackballed by owners after a contract dispute, amid a racing establishment increasingly hostile to Black jockeys, he left the United States and raced in Europe.
From nineteen twenty-one to two thousand, no Black jockey rode in the Kentucky Derby. The horse racing establishment that Black men had largely built spent most of the twentieth century excluding them. Isaac Murphy is buried in Lexington. His grave was unmarked for decades.
