Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts tagged as “black cowboys”

GBN’s Daily Drop: Learn About Mary Fields aka “Stagecoach Mary” – 1st Black Woman Contracted to Deliver U.S. Mail

GBN’s Daily Drop: Learn About Mary Fields aka “Stagecoach Mary” – 1st Black Woman Contracted to Deliver U.S. Mail

By goodblacknews on March 12, 2022

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast is based on the Saturday, March 12 entry in the “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022 about Mary Fields aka “Stagecoach Mary” the formerly enslaved woman who delivered mail for the U.S. Postal Service in the Old West:

You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Saturday, March 12th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.

Nicknames in the Old West had to be earned, not given. “Stagecoach Mary” was no exception. After the Civil War, the newly freed Mary Fields worked as a groundskeeper at a convent.

After clashing with several nuns who objected to her smoking, drinking and gun-toting gruffness, Fields accepted a donated stagecoach from a sympathetic Mother Superior and used it to pursue a new line of work.

In 1895, Fields became the first Black woman to get a postal service contract to deliver the U.S. mail. With her guns and tough demeanor, “Stagecoach Mary” unfailingly protected her route from bandits and became beloved by locals in Cascade, Montana.
To learn more about Stagecoach Mary, you can read Deliverance Mary Fields, First African American Woman Star Route Mail Carrier in the United States: A Montana History by Miantae Metcalf McConnell from 2016, the 2019 children’s picture book Fearless Mary: Mary Fields, American Stagecoach Driver written by Tami Charles and illustrated by Claire Almon, or the 2007 book African American Women of the Old West by Tricia Wagner on which Mary graces the cover.

You can also watch 2016’s True First: African American Legends and their Untold Stories documentary on her on AllBlk via Amazon, or listen to the very informative 2021 episode about Mary on the podcast Black Cowboys.

Links to these and other sources are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing.

Intro and outro beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot. Additional music permitted under Public Domain license: “Maple Leaf Rag” composed by Scott Joplin.

If you like these Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.

For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.

Sources:

(paid links)

South Central Black Cowboys Documentary ‘Fire On The Hill’ to Debut at Los Angeles Film Festival on Sunday (VIDEO)

By goodblacknews on September 18, 2018

by Tambay Obenson via shadowandact.com

Making its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) this Sunday, September 22 at the LAFF, is director Brett Fallentine‘s Fire on the Hill, a feature-length documentary that tells the intriguing story of the last public horse stable in South Central Los Angeles called Hill Stable, where a relatively unknown culture of urban cowboys is under threat, with focus on the lives and struggles of 3 inner-city cowboys.

The western-documentary’s synopsis reads: South Central Los Angeles was once home to one of the most recognized cowboy communities in the Nation. Yet after decades of urban development and rising street gang activity, this community – which had produced world champions – shrunk to all but a one-block horse stable known as “The Hill.” When a mysterious fire destroys the Hill Stable in 2012, the future of this once thriving culture finds itself at the brink of vanishing forever.

The film follows three cowboys in the wake of the fire. Ghuan, seeing the fire as an opportunity to resurrect the stable in his own vision must win over the broken cowboy community and hunt down the land’s estranged owner before developers get to it first; Chris, a rising bull rider from Compton, enters into his rookie year of professional rodeo and discovers that the L.A. streets aren’t so easy to leave behind; and Calvin, having found freedom on the back of a horse, must choose between the cowboy lifestyle and his family when his inner demons come back to haunt him.

This genre-bending documentary shines a new light on what it means to be a “cowboy” in America today, depicting a Los Angeles that has rarely been seen before.

Fire on the Hill is a Preamble Pictures Production in association with RYOT, Contend and Enzo, and is written, directed and produced by Brett Fallentine.

For festival tickets and other info, visit the LAFF’s website. Check out the trailer below:

Source: https://shadowandact.com/exclusive-trailer-poster-premiere-for-laff-bound-south-central-black-cowboys-doc-fire-on-the-hill

The Cowgirls of Color: Black Women's Team is Bucking Rodeo Trends

By goodblacknews on November 22, 2016

Pinky, Pennie (in background) and KB calm their horses before riding in the grand entry. (Photograph: M Holden Warren)

article by Annalies Winny via theguardian.com
The Cowgirls of Color are frustrated. It’s the final stop of Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo and the only all-female team has had a difficult first ride, making their chances at a victory very unlikely. “The whole point was to win, not just to be in [the event] because we’re girls,” says KB, a 39-year-old legal administrator who has been riding with the team for a year and a half.
In a sport dominated by white men, the all-female, all-black team is a rarity. At the Bill Pickett rodeo, the only black rodeo in the country, high-octane events such as bull riding and steer wrestling remain almost exclusively male. But every year brings more female contestants than the last.
Since the team formed two years ago, they have set out to prove that they’re more than just a novelty team – that they can beat their male-dominated competition in the most intense events and go on to win thousands of dollars in prize money.
When they first started riding as a team just two years ago, “we were terrible!” says KB. “But I wanted to master it. I wanted to compete on a larger scale where I [could] make money.”
Selina “Pennie” Brown, Sandra “Pinky” Dorsey, Kisha “KB” Bowles and Brittaney Logan met through a veteran horseman, Dr. Ray Charles Lockamy, at a riding event in Maryland. Despite being relatively new to the sport, they decided to form a women’s team to compete in the Bill Pickett rodeo, with Lockamy as their coach. Only Pinky had competed in rodeo events as a teenager. “I was the only black person there,” she says.
Like most equestrian sports, rodeo has always been mostly white. Black cowboys competed in rodeos from the 1940s, but tales of corrupt scoring and judges literally turning their backs on black contestants proliferated for decades thereafter, stalling the growth of the sport among black riders. Black cowboys who entered rodeos “would be discriminated against in ways that were supposed to be subtle”, says Carolyn Carter, the general manager of the Bill Pickett rodeo. In 1968, the legendary bull rider Myrtis Dightman was advised to “turn white” if he wanted to claim the top prizes.

Documentary “The Forgotten Cowboys” Explores Lives and History of America’s Black Cowboys

By goodblacknews on November 21, 2012
Jason Griffin (center) is one of the stars of "The Forgotten Cowboys," a documentary film by John Ferguson and Gregg MacDonald which follows the lives of black cowboys in the U.S.Jason Griffin (center) is one of the stars of “The Forgotten Cowboys,” a documentary film by John Ferguson and Gregg MacDonald which follows the lives of black cowboys in the U.S.

(CNN) — Jason Griffin straps his right arm in bandages, preparing himself to grip the reins a wildly bucking bronco. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a rough beard, he steps into his cowboy boots, fits a Stetson hat and heads out to meet his mount in the rodeo arena.  Griffin is a four-time world champion bareback bucking horse rider — competing in a sport that began in the 19th century heyday of the Wild West.  With each victory — he has also won three all-round rodeo championships — the Texan raises awareness of a strong tradition which is rarely seen in the many novels, films and television series dedicated to the tales of the old West: The historic story of America’s black cowboys.

On cinema screens and paperback covers, the cowboys of old were heroic, hard-bitten and — almost always — white. In reality, the American West of the 1800s was traversed by an assortment of black, white, Mexican and Native American cattle hands. Contemporary records are rare but historians now estimate that up to one in four Texan cowboys was African American, while the number of Mexican cowboys was even greater.

John Ferguson and Gregg MacDonald’s documentary film — and multimedia project — “The Forgotten Cowboys” follows Griffin and other contemporary black cowboys as they gain a following competing at rodeos and go about their working lives.

Watch online: the video trailer for the documentary “The Forgotten Cowboys”