What can a horse teach us about freedom, heritage, and community? This Juneteenth reflection explores the enduring legacy of Black cowboys, the history of Black rodeos, and the cultural traditions that have celebrated freedom on horseback for generations. Through personal experiences with mustang training, visits to historic Black Western sites, and the living traditions of Juneteenth rodeos, the article highlights how horses remain a powerful connection to Black history, resilience, and belonging. The ride is more than recreation—it is remembrance.
The article also examines how Black equestrian traditions continue to thrive through rodeos, riding clubs, museums, and community spaces that preserve stories often overlooked in mainstream narratives of the American West. From the historic Boley Rodeo in Oklahoma to modern Juneteenth celebrations across the country, these gatherings demonstrate how culture, skill, and community are passed from one generation to the next. As Juneteenth reminds us of the long journey toward freedom, these traditions show how that freedom is honored, sustained, and celebrated today.
Every June, before the summer heat settles in for good, the arena has a particular quality in the early morning. The light comes in low and direct, and the air still holds some of the night’s cool. True Haven, my mustang from the Twin Peaks Herd Management Area along the California-Nevada border, is already watching me when I walk in. She has that stillness that some horses carry, the kind that is actually full attention. She reads the barn. She reads me. She waits.
I have been thinking about June, and what it asks of us.
On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to deliver the news that enslaved people were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two and a half years earlier. The word had been held back. When it finally reached Texas, the celebrations that began were immediate and enormous, and they have never really stopped. Juneteenth is now a federal holiday, observed by millions of Americans. But in the communities that created it, the traditions built around it go deeper than a date on a calendar. For generations of Black Texans and their descendants across the South and the West, one of the most enduring expressions of that celebration has been the rodeo.
Black Cowboys and a Tradition of Freedom
The story of Black cowboys in America is older and more central to Western history than most people learn. After the Civil War, formerly enslaved men who had spent their lives handling horses, cattle, and the tools of ranch work brought those skills directly into the cattle industry. Historians have documented that roughly one in four of the cowboys who worked the great cattle drives of the late 1800s were Black. Their expertise was not incidental. It had been built across generations of people whose relationship with animals and land was not a choice but a condition of survival. They knew how to read a horse, how to move cattle across difficult terrain, how to handle weather and river crossings with livestock in tow. When freedom came, they took those skills and worked them for themselves.
The Juneteenth rodeo grew directly from this history. Long before the United States officially designated June 19 as a federal holiday, Black communities across Texas had been gathering to celebrate freedom with rodeo competitions dating back to the late 1800s, according to the Bullock Texas State History Museum, which holds records of this tradition. The events drew skilled riders and ropers from across the region. They were also social occasions: food, music, family reunions, and the long unhurried pleasure of being in community with people who shared your history.
The competitions were serious. Saddle bronc riding, bareback riding, barrel racing, roping. Black cowboys and cowgirls who were excluded from mainstream rodeo circuits competed at their own events and earned reputations that spread well beyond their immediate communities. Among them was Myrtis Dightman, known in the rodeo world as the Jackie Robinson of Rodeo. Texas Standard has explored the broader history of these athletes through the photographic work of Sarah Bird, a Texas writer and former photojournalist who documented Black rodeos extensively as a graduate student in the late 1970s. Her photographs, published as a collection called Juneteenth Rodeo, preserve what those gatherings felt like: the horses in motion, the families in the stands, the particular combination of competition and celebration that has always defined this tradition.
The Arena as Community
What has always struck me about the Juneteenth rodeo tradition, when I read the accounts and look at the photographs, is how thoroughly the event was embedded in community life. The rodeo was the anchor, but around it was everything that makes a gathering matter: the cooking fires and long tables, the conversations that stretched across generations, the elders watching from the shade, the children doing what children always do at an outdoor celebration, which is find their own participation and stay until someone makes them leave.
“In my book, “Nature Swagger,” Suzette Chang writes about the Boley Rodeo and Parade in Boley, Oklahoma, the oldest African American rodeo in the nation, founded in 1903 when the town itself was established.”
She describes hundreds of high-stepping horses guided by young Black riders, dance groups in full motion, families settled into lawn chairs with Bid Whist games and plates of food. Everywhere she looks, she sees herself. That quality of a space where the talent, the tradition, and the community all belong to you, where you do not have to explain anything or account for your presence, is what the Black rodeo circuit has offered for over a century.
Also in “Nature Swagger,” Virgil Baker writes about the Bay Area Black riding community he was part of for decades, built around a barn in Richmond, California, run by a couple named JJ and Melvin who had come from Louisiana. At their peak, the weekend campouts they organized drew as many as eighty people. Fish fry on Friday night. A long group ride on Saturday morning. Community breakfast on Sunday. Four hundred participants over the course of a year. It was equestrian life woven together with the food, fellowship, and rhythm of a tradition that people kept because it gave them something real.
Last month, the Outdoor Afro board was in Denver for our retreat, and we had the privilege of a private tour of the Black American West Museum in the Five Points neighborhood, led by the museum’s Board Chair, Daphne Rice-Allen. The museum is housed in the former home of Dr. Justina Ford, the first Black woman physician in Denver, and it was founded by Paul Stewart, who spent decades collecting photographs, artifacts, and personal stories to document the contributions of Black Americans to the history of the West.
Each room in that house holds a different part of the western record: Buffalo Soldiers, Black homesteaders, ranchers, lawmen, rodeo competitors, cowboys. Photographs, artifacts, tools, clothing, the material proof of people whose contributions shaped this country’s history and whose names took generations to reach the archive. Moving through those rooms with Daphne as our guide, I thought about Suzette Chang at the Boley Rodeo, and Virgil Baker at the barn in Richmond, and all the communities that kept this tradition alive through decades when the broader culture was not paying attention. The museum holds what they kept.
The same trip took us to Lincoln Hills, about 38 miles from Denver in the Colorado mountains. Founded in 1922, Lincoln Hills was the only Black-owned resort west of the Mississippi during the decades when Black Americans were excluded from most public recreational spaces. Langston Hughes came here. Zora Neale Hurston. Duke Ellington. For generations of Black families from Denver and beyond, it was a place to fish, hike, camp, and ride horses in mountain country that welcomed them.
Staff and board members from Lincoln Hills Cares, the not-for-profit that now stewards the land and its legacy, organized a special horseback riding experience for our group, weaving the property’s history into every mile of the ride. Three Outdoor Afro staff and board members rode with me through that landscape. There is something that happens when you ride a horse over ground like that. You feel what it meant to be there.
That ride planted something in us, too. Outdoor Afro has been developing a vision we call Home Place: a permanent property where our community can gather, learn, heal, and connect with the natural world in a space that is fully ours. The vision is rooted in my own childhood experiences on my family’s land in Lake County, California, where the property was a vibrant hub of culture, food, and outdoor life. Home Place would extend that spirit to a broader community.
We envision it as a retreat and gathering space for staff, volunteers, partners, and community members. A learning environment for outdoor education, conservation, and leadership development. A healing space grounded in rest, reflection, and the kind of deep hanging out that restores you. A recreation hub for activities like hiking, birdwatching, camping, and riding. Standing on the ground at Lincoln Hills, on land that was set aside specifically so Black families could do exactly what we did that day, made the vision feel less abstract and more possible. That is what the right piece of ground can do. It gives you the shape of the thing you are trying to build.
What the Mustang Has Been Teaching Me
My own relationship with horses deepened significantly when True Haven came into my life. She is a mustang from the Twin Peaks Herd Management Area, a Bureau of Land Management wild horse range in the high desert. Through the BLM mustang adoption program, horses from these ranges find their way to owners who commit to the patient, particular work of building trust from the ground up.
My trainer has been consistent about what this work requires: show up the same way every time. Quiet hands. A seat that follows the horse without gripping or bracing. Presence without pressure. The horse learns to read you before you learn to read the horse. What she learns, very quickly, is whether you are actually there.
True Haven is not interested in my schedule. She is interested in whether I am present, whether my hands are steady, and whether I can be the person she can trust in the arena. I have found this clarifying in a way that is hard to describe to someone who has not worked with horses. The animal requires honesty. She is a more reliable indicator of my own state of mind than I am. When I arrive at the barn carrying something unresolved from the day, she knows it before I have finished tying her lead.
The fundamentals my trainer emphasizes do not look dramatic from the bleachers. Low hands, a deep seat, quiet legs while loping. These are not show moves. They are communicating. The horse feels every shift in your weight, every tightening of your grip, every moment of distraction. Learning to be steady for her has made me steadier in other ways, too. The lesson transfers.
“June is the month when I feel this practice most fully. The longer days give more morning light, more time in the arena before the heat comes on, and more space to let the ride settle before the rest of the day begins.”
And June carries, for me, the weight of what June 19 means: the announcement of freedom in Galveston, and the communities that began celebrating that freedom on horseback and have not stopped.
The Horse as Living Heritage
What strikes me, thinking about all of this in the arena with True Haven, is how unbroken the thread actually is. The Black cowboys who drove cattle across Texas and the Great Plains in the 1870s and 1880s were the grandsons and granddaughters of people who had handled horses under the most brutal conditions imaginable, and who had passed that knowledge down anyway. The Juneteenth rodeos that those same communities began organizing were a way of saying: what we know, we keep. What we can do, we celebrate. The skill belongs to us.
That continuity has sometimes been invisible in mainstream accounts of American history. The thread is unbroken regardless. It shows up in the Black riding clubs that formed in cities across the country through the 20th century. It shows up in the annual gathering at Boley, Oklahoma. It shows up in the BLM mustang adoption program, where people like me encounter the wild land and its animals and choose, deliberately, to enter into a relationship with them.
The horse as heritage is not a metaphor. It is a literal and ongoing practice. And June is when I feel it most clearly, because June is the month that carries both the longest light and the deepest reason to ride.
Juneteenth 2026: The Tradition Is Alive
This June, Black Rodeo USA returns with its 2026 theme, “Reliving the Ride, Reimagining the Legacy!”, featuring events in Florida and other states across the country.
The 8 Seconds Rodeo brings professional Black rodeo athletes to urban venues, with an event at Portland’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum on June 21, 2026.
Closer to home, the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo comes to Oakland, California, as it does every year. I have attended for years, and it remains one of the most joyful and grounding events on my calendar: the skill, the community, the particular feeling of watching Black riders compete on home ground.
Across the South and the West, Juneteenth rodeos in local communities continue the practice that began in Texas in the 1800s: gathering on horseback to celebrate what was declared on June 19, 1865, and to demonstrate the skill that has been passed down through generations.
If you have not yet attended a Black rodeo event, June is the time to change that. The skill on display is earned, and it shows. The atmosphere is the particular combination of sport, celebration, and homecoming that the tradition was built to provide. Bring your appetite, your patience, and your full attention. You will not regret it.
For those who ride, or are thinking about starting, June is a generous month for lessons. Many equestrian centers offer spring and summer beginner programs, and the longer days give you real riding time before the afternoon heat arrives. Look for a barn that is patient with beginners and whose horses seem settled and well cared for. Ask about the trainer’s approach before you commit. A good equestrian experience starts with a good fit.
What June Invites
“I think of Juneteenth as a month-long invitation. The date matters, but the feeling it carries extends through all of June: the longest days, the full summer opening, the sense that something has arrived, and the time is right to gather.”
The outdoor tradition that Black Americans built around this holiday, beginning the moment the word of freedom finally reached Texas, is one of the most joyful and instructive traditions in American cultural history. It says: we are free, and we know what to do with freedom. We gather. We eat. We compete. We ride.
True Haven will be in the arena on the 19th. I will be there with her. Some days, the ride is the remembrance.
