Professional Bull Riders: American rodeo and its history of black athletes

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Mitchell placed 16th at last year’s PBR finals

Ezekiel Mitchell pauses for a moment when asked to describe his toughest opponent.

He eventually opts for a nine-year-old. Admittedly one with a steely glare backed up by 121 stones of slabbed muscle.

“I would have to say Sweet Pro’s Bruiser,” he tells BBC Sport. “The power and sheer athleticism of him, he’s able to do things some bulls just can’t. If you’re just a millisecond too late, he’s put you on the ground.”

There is no choreography to their dance. Mitchell relies on deep-seated muscle memory and pure instinct to counter the steps of the wheeling, convulsing bull below.

“Once you get in the bucking chute, your subconscious mind clicks in and your conscious mind clicks out,” he says.

“It’s taking complete and utter chaos and trying to control it for eight seconds. It’s unreal.”

Mitchell, from Rockdale, Texas, is the only black American in pro bull-riding’s top 50 ranked riders.

At 23 years old, he’s already encountered forces less obvious, but no less powerful than Sweet Pro’s Bruiser in his life and career so far.

The odds didn’t use to be so stark.

When the American Civil War ended in 1865, many of Texas’ slave-owning settlers returned home from fighting for the Confederacy to be confronted by a newly freed black workforce, knowledgeable in ranching.

Modern barbed wire, which made containing cattle easier and cheaper, had yet to be invented and the major railroads that transported them large distances had yet to stretch as far as Texas.

The master-slave relationship morphed into one of employer-employee as black men, still struggling to find work in many other sectors, were hired to care and transport herds.

Nat Love, born in 1854, was an African American cowboy whose autobiography was published in 1907 (available here: https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/natlove/natlove.html)

Soon after, it is estimated that one in four cowboys in the West was black. That ratio was significantly watered down when the era was recreated in popular culture, however.

There are some exceptions. Bill Pickett was a celebrated black rodeo performer in the early 20th century. Historian William Katz wrote about the history of the black cowboy in the 1970s. In the 1980s, American novelist Larry McMurty won a Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove, which featured a black cowboy character.

But in the American imagination, a cowboy was a white man.

“We grew up with the idea of a white cowboy, the idea that a cowboy would look like John Wayne or a the guy in the Marlboro cigarette ads,” explains Walter Thompson Hernandez, journalist and author of The Compton Cowboys.