(and that one day a black man will be able to wear a cowboy hat into a grocery store without people looking at him like he was 'joking'.)
Rodeo cowboy Abe Morris ---->
Today in honor of Martin Luther King the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo features the top black cowboys in the world competing in the Martin Luther King African-American Heritage Rodeo of Champions.
Cowboy laments blacks' lost links to rural past.
At the National Western Stock Show & Rodeo, retired rodeo champ Abe Morris needs only a nod of his black cowboy hat and his broad smile to be welcomed into the chute area where professional bull riders gather before their rides.
"If I put on this cowboy hat and go down to the grocery store in my neighborhood, people would look at me like I'm joking," said the rodeo announcer, author and one of the rare African-American professional rodeo cowboys of his era — 1977 to 1994.
Morris said he thought back then that by now, African-Americans would fill rodeo lineups as black fans were exposed to the sport the way he, his cousins and his friends had been while growing up in New Jersey. They scrambled to ride bulls. But of the 47 riders during last Tuesday night's stock-show rodeo, only Jamon Turner of Denver is black.and broncs in the weekly rodeo near their homes, he said, the same way many in their generation waited turns to shoot hoops on inner-city playgrounds.
When the West was won, African-Americans were on the front lines, scholars say. One of every three cowhands was African-American, according to Denver's Black American West Museum.
Whole Western towns were populated by African-Americans. The ghost town of Dearfield was famous not just as an African-American community but also as the place where dryland farming was introduced to the state. The practice has produced millionaires across the Plains ever since.
