Friday, March 22, 2013

America's forgotten black cowboys...

Quentin Tarantino's Oscar-winning Western, Django Unchained, is one of relatively few Hollywood films depicting a black cowboy. In reality there were many, some of whose stories were borrowed for films.

The most common image of the cowboy is a gun-toting, boot-wearing, white man - like John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood.

But the Hollywood portrayal of the Wild West is a whitewashed version of the reality. It is thought that about a quarter of all cowboys were black.

Like many people, Jim Austin - a college-educated, 45-year-old businessman - hadn't heard about the black presence in the Old West.

The discovery inspired him and his wife Gloria to set up the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It pays tribute to some of the forgotten black cowboys - men like Bill Pickett, a champion rodeo rider who invented bulldogging, a technique where he would jump from a horse on to a steer and take the animal down by biting on its lip. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Trayvon Martin: The myth of US post-racialism...
  2. Lynching in the age of colour blindness: a crime against humanity...
  3. Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice...
  4. 6 cops, 59 shots, 43 wounds, 1 dead black man...
  5. David Icke on "John Wayne America"

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