This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
Children in 1950s America grew up with a distinct image of the Old West through television heroes like the Lone Ranger, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp and Hopalong Cassidy. They all had one thing in common, apart from always prevailing over the bad guys: They were white.
Native-American actors had parts but rarely, if ever, did any of these shows include a Black actor as hero, villain or anything in between. That produced what historians have long recognized as a white-centric version of America’s westward expansion, especially from Hollywood.
The author C.T. Kirk and other historians posit that at least one in four cowboys was Black, many of them former slaves escaping the lingering cruelties of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow years.
“It was the narrative of television to push toward the all-American family as white,” said Kirk, author of the 2020 book, “How the West Was White-Washed.” “The idea was to take the importance off of one demographic to focus on another. The Western theology was that it was the white man’s burden to settle the West, and everybody else was barbaric.”
Black actors had been part of the nation’s movie industry from the early years of the 20th century. Their projects, known as “race films,” many of them westerns, such as “Harlem on the Prairie” in 1937, featured Black casts playing almost exclusively to Black audiences. Films from the major studios were almost exclusively white, with only the occasional African-American actor before cinema slowly began integrating over the second half of the century, featuring such prominent actors as Woody Strode and Sidney Poitier.
More and more these days, museums have taken up the cause of dispelling the perception cultivated by the entertainment industry of a whites-only West. With a variety of exhibitions, they are educating visitors to a more accurate telling of Western history by showcasing the role Black people played in everyday life across territories that would later become states.
For nearly a year through early April, the Witte Museum in San Antonio presented a Texas-focused exhibition on the Black cowboys who worked on ranches and cattle drives. Many of the cowboys later became ranch owners, lawmen, rodeo stars, entrepreneurs and entertainers.
Major parts of that show are now moving to the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles as part of a wider exhibition that follows Black people as they moved westward from Texas cattle ranches through the latter decades of the 19th century. The Autry’s “Black Cowboys: An American Story” opens on June 14, and shows how they helped develop the West. Their presence echoes today through the participation of Black people in rodeos, ranching and acting, and through Western-based themes in the music of recording artists such as Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion and Lil Nas X.
“I think we want to remind people that the history, and really the myth of the West and of America, is much more complicated and a great deal more diverse,” said Stephen Aron, the president and chief executive of the Autry, reflecting on the misperceptions of a white-settled West. “The reality, in fact, is far more reflective of America, then and now.”
Curated by Joe Horse Capture, vice president of Native Collections, and the senior curator Carolyn Brucken, the Autry show extends the Witte exhibit well into the 21st century in California. While many Black Westerners worked on the cattle trails, others found jobs on farms or helped build the railroads. It was menial labor for many, but some became ranch owners and entrepreneurs, the forebears of current California and Los Angeles area community groups such as the Compton Cowboys and Urban Saddles, which use horseback riding to promote the contributions of Black people in Western culture.
Visitors to the Autry will learn about Bill Pickett, a Texas cowboy who invented rodeo bulldogging in the 1880s and later became one of the country’s early African-American performers in Black-cast movies. Allen Allensworth, born a slave in 1842, became a military chaplain after the Civil War, rising to lieutenant colonel, making him the highest-ranking Black person in the U.S. armed forces at the time. Two years after retiring in 1906, he founded a Black settlement in California’s San Joaquin Valley known as Allensworth. It remains a dot on the map today, with a population of 457, according to 2024 census figures, although less than five percent were African-American.
The exhibition also celebrates women who embody Black roles in cowboy traditions. Bridget “Biddy” Mason, a midwife and entrepreneur in mid-1800s Los Angeles, became the matriarch of a family that operated a livery stable and cattle-sale business that employed nearly a dozen cowboys. DeBoraha Akin-Townson became the International Professional Rodeo Association western region champion in 1989 and a year later the first Black cowgirl to reach the association finals. Chanel Rhodes’s work as a horse trainer and equestrian led her to open a business in 2021 making wigs as decorative manes for horses.
As Black people became ensconced in the western expansion, they experienced the same joys and tribulations as whites, a history unknown, even, to many contemporary African Americans, said Alaina E. Roberts, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “I’ve Been Here All The While,” a study of Black people and Native-Americans in the post-Civil War era.
“African Americans don’t know any more about their history than any other group,” she said. “They’re going through the same education system that is not telling them about it.”
The Autry Museum was founded in 1988 by Gene Autry, the “Singing Cowboy” whose radio, film, recording and television career beginning in the 1930s made him one of America’s most recognizable entertainers. He also owned professional rodeo companies and the Los Angeles Angels baseball team.
The museum opened with his personal art and memorabilia as the foundation for a permanent collection. Today, its 100,000 square feet celebrate all aspects of Western culture through artifacts, photos, drawings and paintings, including a rich focus on Native American culture and essential elements of Western life for all who lived it — horses, firearms, ceramics, jewelry, Hollywood memorabilia and clothing: One exhibit in Black Cowboys will feature costumes worn by Black cast members of the 2021 western, “The Harder They Fall.”
The timing of the Black Cowboys exhibition has an ironic twist that is not lost on museum officials. While more than two years in the planning, the opening comes as American businesses, education institutions and government agencies are eliminating programs that embrace diversity, equity and inclusion in their hiring and operational practices. There are also ongoing debates over the starting point of American history — at the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619. Only the second acknowledges the role that Africans played in America’s beginnings.
Exhibitions like Black Cowboys, Aron said, underscore a truer American history, that it was not only whites leading America’s Manifest Destiny in the 19th century.
“If we provide some new thinking about the way in which we’ve remembered or misremembered our history, that would be a valuable contribution as well as a valuable takeaway,” he said. “I think museums do best when they spark conversation, when they provoke people to think anew and push people to ask questions.”
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