Following Snoop Dogg, Sisqo & Bobby Brown’s appearance at the CMT Music Awards on Monday, Angel and I thought black cowboys would make a great Black History Spotlight this week.
Cowboys and the West play an important role in Americana, but do you know the role black cowboys and buffalo soldiers have played in history?
Rough Riders and Black Cowboy Legends acknowledges the contribution they have made to the success of America.
In pop culture, images of black cowboys have been scarce, giving a false impression that blacks were not among the men and women who settled the West. In fact, there have been thousands of black cowboys.
Blacks came to cattle country most often as slaves, brought by white landowners who hoped to take advantage of the fertile Texas soil to grow cotton.
At the start of the Civil War in 1861, Texas had over 180,000 black inhabitants. The U.S. government formed regiments known as the United States Colored Troops, which were composed of black soldiers led by white officers.
After the war, Congress reorganized the Army, authorizing the formation of two regiments of black calvary with the designations 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry, and four regiments of black infantry, designated the 38th, 39th, 40th and 41st Infantry Regiments (Colored). All of these units were composed of black enlisted men commanded by white officers and, occasionally, black officers such as Henry O. Flipper, who was the first black American cadet to graduate from the United States Military Academy, also known as West Point.
Until the early 1890s, these regiments served at a variety of posts in the Southwestern U.S. and Great Plains regions. They participated in most of the military campaigns in these areas and earned a distinguished record. Thirteen enlisted men and six officers from these four regiments earned the Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars. In addition to the military campaigns, the “Buffalo Soldiers” served a variety roles along the frontier from building roads to escorting the U.S. mail.
After the Indian Wars ended, the regiments continued to serve and participated in the Spanish-American War, where five more Medals of Honor were earned.
In 1971, Paul W. Stewart founded the Black American West Museum to collect, preserve and disseminate the contributions of blacks in the Old West.
As a child growing up in Iowa, Stewart enjoyed playing cowboys and Indians with his friends. They assured him there were no black cowboys and he was forced to play the role of the Indian. It wasn’t until he reached adulthood that Stewart discovered this was not true and began a lifelong search for stories, photographs, clothing, memorabilia and papers to document the existence of black cowboys in the West.
The collection served as the beginning of a small museum that opened in the basement of Denver’s Clayton College. Today, the Black American West Museum has become a well-known destination point for visitors from around the world for its photographs, artifacts and historic documentation on blacks in the West.
Black Past, Black Cowboys
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Concrete Loop will feature ‘Black History Spotlights’ each week. These features honor black people through the years and submissions are welcome.
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excellent post!!! i love being black!!!
@ 58. We actually did do a piece on The Black Wall Street…
http://concreteloop.com/2...otlight-black-wall-street
Make sure you check out all our other BHS features here:
http://concreteloop.com/c...y/black-history-spotlight
@ JUDAH. You should do a blog. Start off slow (on your time) and just do you. I actually look forward to your comments on certain topics.
Smart move,keep a ticking time-bomb at a safe distance,b/c you don’t know when it is about to go off!
Krayzie Bone, Ghetto Cowboy movie coming soon! Ya’ll check it out when it drops!
Check out Bill Pickett’s Black Rodeo if you have the chance. I know it travels and comes to different towns. It comes to Maryland in September. I also know it goes to Texas as well. I went and it was a great time. Gotta love a black man on a horse. mmm mmm good.
Lmao @63.
@39
Actually, you are talking about the Moors. Who are Arabs from Northern Africa. And I was talking abou the whole Cowboy style, not herding animals. Look at a Mexican cowboy and look at an American cowboy. They took the style and everything else. The word Buckaroo(cowboy) is derived from the word Vaquero.
Thank you Concrete Loop for being you. You guys are always on your global grind.
@67
Sorry sir, the Moors were not Arabs. That’s more caucasian confusion. The white man attempts to make people who don’t know any better believe that the Moors were Arabs or “Berbers” because people go by the assumption that the race that presently inhabits a land is the same as the race that inhabited it in antiquity. The origin of the term “Moor” is from the Greek “Maur” or “Mauros” which means “negro”. Alexander the Great’s top general was a man named Clitus Niger or in the Greek, Clitus Mauros, meaning Clitus the black. The white man’s own linguistic etymology exposes his lies. Even to this day, one of the words for blacks or negroes in Spanish is “Moreno” which is derivative from “Moor”. When you do your research, you’ll see that Spain was conquered by the Moors in 711 A.D. led by a Moor that converted to Islam named Tariq who was a Hebrew Israelite of the tribe of Simeon. You can read that in Allen H. Godbey’s book “The Lost Tribes a Myth” and Rudolph Windsor’s book “Babylon to Timbuktu”. In the English, names like “Moore”, “Moorehead”, and “Morrison” are all indicative of the original black Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Germanic tribes. You can see the coat of arms of the blacks that ruled Europe in books like “Nature Knows No Color Line” by J.A. Rogers and “African Presence in Early Europe” by Ivan Van Sertima and it will show you. As a matter of fact here in New York, if you look at the cover of the New York Post today, dated 4/18/2008, you will see that the Pope has the coat of arms of the pre-Renaissance black popes at the top of the cover page. Blacks ruled Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance in what the white man calls the “medieval period” or the “dark ages”. We were known as the Vikings, Celts, Scythians, Huns, Anglo-Saxons. etc.
In regards to the style of dress, that style is indicative of both the blacks and the Mexicans because we’re both the same people. The Mexicans of Native American, not Spaniard, descent are known in the Bible as the Tribe of Issachar, while the black Americans are the Tribe of Judah. The vests that the cowboys wear was always worn by our people in different incarnations. During the middle ages it was known as the “jerkin” and the pirates, who were negroes, also wore it. The collared shirts were worn, the bandanas (known as “bonnets” in the Bible), and what are now known as “panchos” are nothing but outer garments in the scriptures (Ex 28: 39-42, Lev 8:13, . This is why the Native Americans of North, Central, and South America are known for sowing fringes on their garments (Numbers 15:38,39, Deut 22:12).
@69
Actually they called them Moros because they where Muslim.
And yes I know Spain was conquered by the Moors, but not all of it. Just the South.
How are blacks and Mexicans the same people? Most Mexicans are part Native American/Aztec/Mayan and Spaniard.
@70
Sir, please cite references for that, because I’m citing references for mine and if you’re going to attempt to refute them, please don’t expect me to take your word for it. Give me the etymology of the word “moor”. I’m guessing that you’re a hispanic. Are you telling me that “moreno” is not a spanish word for negro? Let’s be truthful. All of Europe was conquered by blacks. Look up the derivation of the word “barbarian”. It means “woolly-haired”, not only those of a strange language. The people called Moors today in reference to antiquity happened to be blacks that converted to Islam. All the ruling families of Europe were black, whether they were muslim or Christian. This is what the Renaissance was about. The purposeful whitewashing of our history out of the annals of Europe.
The Mayans are the tribe of Zebulon and the Aztecs are the tribe of Issachar of the nation of Israel. They are the Israelites of the Bible. They, like all Native Americans, got here by boat which is detailed in the Apocrypha II Esdras 13:40. The so-called Native Americans are the Northern Kingdom that was removed out of Israel by the Assyrians in the mid 8th century B.C detailed in II Kings 17th chapter. The American Blacks, Haitians, and West Indians are the southern Kingdom or Kingdom of Judah. This is why the scriptures state and prophecy of the slave ships and how many of us came here as refugees from Europe when the white man rose back into power during his Reconquista and Renaissance (Deut 28:68). When you examine the hispanics and blacks, we have the same spirit. We’ve just been separated by ignorance and the curses that the Lord said that he would bring upon us for not keeping his laws.