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Preakness History: Simms Made History And Changed The Way Jockeys Ride

Our readers here at the Paulick Report seem to love a good lookback at horse racing history. In considering the best subjects for our 2020 Triple Crown coverage, this seemed like a good time to make note of the crucial role Black horsemen have played in the early days of our sport, and in this series of races. Many of the sport's most revered heroes around the turn of the 20th century were ridden, cared for, trained, and sometimes owned by Black horsemen whose equine expertise sometimes stretched back generations. While some, like jockeys Jimmy Winkfield and Isaac Murphy, have been the subjects of well-researched biographies in recent years, others may be less known to racing fans. It is clear that their contributions played an essential role in the lives of horses that became influential in American Thoroughbred history and bloodlines.

Today, we conclude our series on Black horsemen of Triple Crown history. You can access our Derby profile of Ansel Williamson here and our Belmont profile of Edward Dudley Brown here.

If you've ever looked at an oil painting depicting a racing scene from the 1800s, you've probably noticed that the riders don't look much like modern jockeys. They seem taller, with legs hanging down the sides of their horses and may be depicted leaning forward slightly or sitting straight up as though they are gentlemen out for a forward canter behind foxhounds.

Many historians have credited Tod Sloan with popularizing the modern riding position, in which a jockey takes short stirrups and crouches low over the horse's withers, but one of America's early Black jockeys also had an influence in changing the way horses are ridden in races.

Willie Simms was part of the second wave of Black horsemen after the end of slavery, and he was given a leg up by men who had started their lives and racing careers in slavery. Born in 1870 outside Augusta, Ga., Simms was initially said to be attracted to racing because at a young age he was fascinated by the rainbow of brightly-colored silks that whipped around racecourses. He first began riding races at 17 and burst onto national racing scene at the age of 21 when he won the 1891 Spinaway aboard Promenade and went on to become the fifth-leading jockey in the nation.

His talent was quickly recognized and he was given a $10,500 retainer by owner Pierre Lorillard – a fee bigger than that of white competitors at the time. Besides Lorillard, his list of clients included every major stable owner of the age, highlighted by John E. Madden, James R. Keene, and August Belmont. He picked up steam rapidly in the early 1890s, winning the Belmont Stakes in back-to-back years with Commanche and Henry of Navarre and the Kentucky Derby in 1896 with Ben Brush, the favorite horse originally owned and trained by Edward Dudley Brown. (Brown sold Ben Brush before the Derby, but the horse was the centerpiece in his career, which included time as a rider, a trainer, and an owner.)

Simms is also the only Black jockey ever to have won the Preakness, which he did in 1898 with Sly Fox. As such, he's also the only Black rider to have won the three races now recognized as the Triple Crown, although not in the same year.

For the first 11 years of the publication of Goodwin's annual turf guide, the leading rider spot was a Black jockey five times, with Simms picking up the title in 1893 and 1894.

Due in part to his overwhelming success in the States, Sloan talked Simms into taking his tack to England. Historical accounts depict Sloan, who was white, as having a complicated relationship with race, openly using racial slurs to and about his Black valet but kicking back for a beer with Simms after the races.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Black riders were much less common in England at the time than they were in the States, and Simms' welcome wasn't an entirely pleasant one. The crowd gawked at him as he went to the post, and the press sniffed disapproval at his presence on the course. Once they got a look at the way he rode, their disapproval deepened to horror.

It seems unlikely that Simms was the first or the only race rider to shorten his stirrups and crouch over his horses. Sloan was already doing it back in the States, and before him, top jockeys Abe Hawkins and Gilbert Patrick (“Gilpatrick”) probably also hovered over their horses from time to time. Originally, the style actually came from races between the precursors to Quarter Horses in colonial times or even from certain Native American riding styles, according to writer Edward Hotaling in “The Great Black Jockeys.”

It was a logical move – the rider's weight would be distributed across the top of the saddle through the stirrup leathers, rather than a dead weight over the center of the horse's back, and a crouch allowed the rider to be more aerodynamic and balance more securely. These arguments were immaterial to the very traditional British racing scene at the time. The low, squat way a rider with “the American seat” balanced on a horse drew people to liken Simms to a monkey balancing on a stick (though it's unclear how much of the comparison was related to racism and how much was a commentary on his equitation). Even upon his death, that's the descriptor reporters would harken back to.

If his reception troubled him, you wouldn't know it from Simms' performance – he became the first American rider (of any color) to win a race in England aboard an American horse for American connections. Despite the accomplishment, he didn't pick up as many mounts in England as he could in America, so he came back to the States, where he was edged out for that year's riding title by fellow Black jockey “Soup” Perkins.

Jockey Willie Simms (at center)

When Sloan brought the same technique to England a couple of years later, it was met with disapproval but ultimately grudging acceptance, given Sloan's success – and, possibly, the fact he was a more acceptable color to the audience.

Simms' victories on the track paid him well – by one estimate, he's thought to have raked in $20,000 a year at the height of his career (over $600,000 in today's money). He had no family and invested his winnings well, buying real estate wherever he could. He purchased an estate in his hometown of Augusta with a gymnasium, riding stable, and a six-horse carriage. He wasn't alone in his arrival to wealth thanks to riding races – his generation of riders in particular, who had been born after the end of slavery and able to keep their own winnings from the beginning, inspired not just adoration from fans of the turf but upward mobility. Not everyone liked that.

Turfwriter Hugh Keough was open about his hostility and discomfort with the rise of Black jockeys in the sport.

“The praise that was bestowed upon the colored jockeys for their skill was accepted as a compliment to the entire race, and the porter that made up your berth took his share of it and assumed a perkiness that got on your nerves,” he wrote.

“Since jobs as Pullman porters were highly valued and often depended upon the ability to assume a posture of servility for the delectation of any white ticketholder, it seems highly unlikely that Keough actually saw real evidence that railroad porters' behavior changed depending on the performances of Black horsemen,” opined Katherine Mooney of Keough's assertion in her book 'Race Horse Men'. “But Keough believed that he saw it, because he was afraid that he might. And that was all that mattered.”

As time went on, white discomfort with Black success in racing grew. While fans of the sport might be in awe of a jockey's magical abilities with a horse, they were also threatened by this shift in the power balance – not just that Black riders could beat white riders on the turf, but that they could accumulate wealth, be proud of their accomplishments, and [potentially] use that success to push back against Jim Crow laws that kept things very much separate and unequal. White riders began targeting Black jockeys in races with dangerous crowding, boxing in, and other tactics they hoped would make their rivals give up, pull up, or be injured or killed. (To say nothing of the risk to their horses.) They began warning owners not to hire Black riders – a combination, perhaps, of racism and a desire to eliminate fearsome competitors.

Of course, this would later spill over into licensing decisions. Gradually, commissions stopped granting licenses to Black jockeys until they slowly disappeared from the starting gate.

As for Simms, he was reported to have retired around 1903 due to weight struggles. In 1907, the man once ranked as the top jockey in the country was barred from racetracks after he allegedly provided a counterfeit ticket when trying to attend the races at Gravesend. According to a report from The Brooklyn Citizen, Simms had supposedly lost his fortune to gambling by then and was attending the races as a tout. When racing officials learned of this, they revoked his complimentary entry badge he had previously held. Simms denied the story. He died of pneumonia in 1927 – by which time Black jockeys were a rarity, according to one report of his career published shortly after his death.

Simms was inducted into the National Museum of Racing's Hall of Fame in 1977. He remains the only Black rider to have won all three Triple Crown races.

Thanks to the Keeneland Library and the International Museum of the Horse's Chronicle of African Americans In The Horse Industry project for their assistance in research for this series.

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The Sculptor In The Tack Room: Horses Kept Calling Maksimovic Back To The Racetrack

Great writers such as Red Smith and Damon Runyon always maintained the best stories were on the backside of racetracks. If they had known Djuro “Max” Maksimovic, they would have pointed to him as proof. Arguably (or maybe inarguably) Max was the most unusual man ever to walk a backside shedrow.

I came to know Max through a phone call from David Schneck, racetrack representative for the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association, whose office on the Churchill Downs backside was next to the 12 foot by 12 foot tack room that was home and hearth to Max.

David called me to tell me about a clay sculpture Max created of jockey Isaac Murphy astride 1884 Kentucky Derby winner Buchanan. The hope was that a story in The Blood-Horse would generate interest and funding for a bronze casting. The goal was to see the casting displayed permanently in the Kentucky Derby Museum at Churchill Downs or even the National Museum of Racing in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

There may have been an ultimate and ulterior goal, however, that was far more important: to see a gifted man find what he had lost on the backside.

I met Max, at the time a groom for then-trainer Steve Penrod, in David's office after morning work for barn workers, which ends around 11 a.m. and begins at anywhere from 4 to 5 a.m.

Max's lined, goateed face was quintessentially Slavic, and he was a Serb from what was then Yugoslavia. If you were casting extras in a movie about Lenin-era Russia and the Russian Revolution, Max would be an easy choice.

His goateed face was also that of an artist and an intellectual. His eyes were squinted, like many whose work is outdoors, and they shone and flashed as he spoke. His tanned skin was acquiring the sags and wrinkles that await most of us in old age. He was 60 at the time. If you saw a photo of Max with a neutral background or in an environment away from the racetrack, you might place him mentally in a museum gallery or an artist's studio. A backside of a racetrack is the last place you'd expect to find him.

You most definitely would not have placed a former Fulbright Scholar there.

Giftedness with sculpting was manifest early in his life through a literally crafty means of subterfuge to avoid finishing meals as a child. He described himself in childhood as a “bad doer,” racetrack parlance for a horse that doesn't eat well.

“I would take pieces of bread and form small animal figurines. My parents would be so taken with what I had made, they would forget I was supposed to be eating the bread,” he recalled with a laugh.

An early interest in horses may have come from his father's position as chief veterinarian in a still horse-drawn Yugoslav military after World War II.

His father's position also brought him before Marshal Tito, president of Yugoslavia, when he was hospitalized as a child, and the legendary national leader visited the hospital for the kind of appearances heads of state make for photo opportunities.

“When Tito came to visit I was introduced to him as 'our little sculptor,'” Max recalled. “Tito asked if I needed anything and I said, 'Yes. I don't have any clay.'

“He snapped his fingers and one of his aides wrote something down on a pad. I was teased by the other kids that Tito would forget. Then the clay arrived from Italy.

“It was the best clay there was.”

In Max's accented English he became, in his words, “some kind of child prodigy.” Entered in a competition for art students in Max's native city of Belgrade, his entry was declared Best in Show, but he almost didn't collect his award. The judge called his mother to tell her work entered under Max's name was indeed, the most outstanding, but there was a problem: they didn't know if Max had really sculpted it. After all, he was only nine years old competing against the best Belgrade art students, some who were twice his age.

“My mother called this lady and sent me to see one of the judges with some clay,” he said. “I told this lady I'd make her anything she wanted me to make and I made her a cow. I did it in two minutes with ears, split hooves, tail, and horns.

“She said, 'That's all I need to see.'”

Max received the award.

Max's first experience with horses was when his father was assigned to duty with a Yugoslav military detachment in Burma. It was there that a teenaged Max joined a riding club and wound up driving trotters in harness racing. Returning to Yugoslavia after his father's posting, Max was accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Max related how he never really tried at his studies although finishing at the top of his class. This was a precursor of things to come in his life — “My mind was on horses.”

It was on completion of academy studies that a Fulbright Scholarship became part of Max's story. It took him to Boston University to study sculpture, but only for one year. Iron Curtain Yugoslavia blocked customary two-year tenures for nationals receiving a Fulbright in fear that they would not return home.

Max left the university after one year — to lead horses in the shedrow of barns on the backside of Suffolk Downs in Boston.

The reasons for this destination rather than a studio or even a teaching position in America or back home in Yugoslavia are open to a lot of speculation among friends and others who came to know Max. He shrugged with a mixture of both regret and resignation over a lifetime spent on the racetrack.

“If I had to live my life all over again, I would try the art way,” as he described it. “I probably would, but…” He never finished the sentence.

Art, however, found Max on the backside. One day at Churchill Downs, a horse owner and client of Steve Penrod saw Max creating a clay horse for a child.

“She watched me and asked if I would be so kind to make her one. Later, she went to an art store and bought me some clay.

“It sat around and I never did anything with it.”

Two years later, the late wife of Steve Penrod told Max that the owner was dying of cancer.

Others in the KTA office looked away and I shut off a tape recorder as Max wept for several minutes. Collecting himself, Max recounted that the owner, before her death, came out to Churchill Downs to see a sculpture of a horse Max created for her before she died. She loved it and paid for two castings, one for her and the other for Max to keep. The cost was easily in the thousand of dollars.

The casting initiated a return, of sorts, to his gift. Churchill Downs commissioned Max to create a bust of Julian “Buck” Wheat that is in the trainer's lounge. But before that, a documentary on Isaac Murphy gave him an idea for the sculpture of the jockey and Buchanan.

I remember well walking the few steps from the KTA office to the tack room where Max was living to see the sculpture. It sat on a wooden table, approximately three feet long and perhaps 18 inches high. Its size dominated the small room but was in strong contrast to clothing hung on hooks around a closet-less room meant for tack–bridles, saddles, the accouterments for an animal.

A closer look at Max's sculpture

I was speechless at the grace, accuracy, and artistry of his sculpture.

The work galvanized Max in a way far different from how he was in the interview next door. He began to talk about the art of sculpting in a kind of soliloquy.

“What sculpting is about is fear of mistakes popping up after it is cast. As long as I can see something that needs correcting, I won't let it go.” He talked about staying away from the work and not even looking at it, which is hard to imagine in the cramped room. “You keep working at it and leaving it till you can't do anything more.”

He used the words “mortally afraid” as he talked about “construction failures” that can cause a sculpture to fall to one side before it is cast.

“I have to make sure it stands right and has balance, then the right proportions–the proper length in the legs, the right-sized head.” With passion and an absence of self-consciousness, he said he was “bound to the suspensory ligaments and the musculature.”

I wrote a 550-word story for the old “People” column in what was the Derby results issue of The Blood-Horse. It is the largest-selling edition annually for the magazine and it was the best chance for exposure and a casting of Max's statue.

For a few of the 12 years that followed, I checked with David on Max's piece. We both gave up on the piece ever being cast after a time, and it still sits in the storage room where David lives.

David texted me last week that Max had died, one of the victims of the coronavirus.

Looking at photos of Max and the sculpture, there is a parallel between the work and this man's life. The sculpture may never be cast; Max's life was never cast into a role befitting his gift.

Neither is finished, perhaps.

The piece remains, as it is now, in clay rather than bronze, a tribute waiting to be made to a black jockey of great historical importance. Recognition of the role of African Africans in racing (and their elimination, largely, at the turn of the 20^th century through discrimination) has immense value, particularly in current times of racial strife. Cast and placed in the Derby or Saratoga museums, it could both preserve history and carry a vision of a future for African-Americans in racing.

For Max, it addresses and might answer a question one fellow racetracker had that all of us who knew him asked: “What's a man that talented doing on the backside?”

The answer, perhaps to come with a permanent casting of Murphy and Buchanan, is Max may find himself where we all believed he should have been all along — in a museum, finishing his life, even after death, “the art way.”

Ken Snyder is a Kentucky-based freelance turf writer whose work has appeared in a number of horse racing magazines. He currently is a regular contributor to British-based Gallop Magazine.

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Derby History: Ansel Williamson, The Former Slave Who Trained The First Kentucky Derby Winner

Our readers here at the Paulick Report seem to love a good lookback at horse racing history. In considering the best subjects for our 2020 Triple Crown coverage, this seemed like a good time to make note of the crucial role Black horsemen have played in the early days of our sport, and in this series of races. Many of the sport's most revered heroes around the turn of the 20^th century were ridden, cared for, trained, and sometimes owned by Black horsemen whose equine expertise sometimes stretched back generations. While some, like jockeys Jimmy Winkfield and Isaac Murphy, have been the subjects of well-researched biographies in recent years, others may be less known to racing fans. It is clear that their contributions played an essential role in the lives of horses that became influential in American Thoroughbred history and bloodlines.

Today, the Paulick Report continues our series on Black horsemen of Triple Crown racing history which we started before the Belmont Stakes with a profile on Edward Dudley Brown. If you missed it, you can access that piece here.

In a normal Kentucky Derby year, one of the most popular places for that perfect pre-race selfie is the Aristides statue which overlooks the paddock at Churchill Downs. Aristides is well-known in racing circles as the winner of the first Derby in 1875, but beyond this point of trivial pursuit many people don't know much about him – including the role Black horsemen played in getting him to the post that day.

Of the 15 horses who went to the post that first Derby Day, 13 did so with Black jockeys, including the eventual winner. Aristides had Oliver Lewis aboard, who was legged up by a former slave named Ansel Williamson.

Williamson was born an enslaved person in Virginia around 1810. The earliest accounts of his career as a trainer don't appear until the 1850s, by which time he was in Alabama, where he was enslaved as a trainer by T.G. Goldsby. It's likely his experience with horses started well before age 40. Williamson's specialty during this time was training horses for three-mile heats, including the nationally-known runner called Brown Dick.

Williamson was then sold to A. Keene Richards, for whom he trained Australian and Glycera. Richards, who was based in Kentucky, would become known as an influential breeder. Interestingly, Richards was perhaps best-known for importing a number of Arabian horses into the United States to reinvigorate what he saw as an inferior, weakened Thoroughbred which had strayed too far from its roots. The Thoroughbred of the time, in Richards' view, lacked durability and stamina of days past (sound familiar?). Richards' view of stamina was a minimum of a four-mile contest, which he judged the English Thoroughbred could not withstand without injury. The horses resulting from Richards' breeding experiment would unfortunately become spoils of the Civil War, which broke out just after he imported and bred Arabian stallions to Thoroughbred mares.

By now, having developed a reputation for his horsemanship skills, Williamson was sold in 1864 to Robert Alexander, owner of Woodburn Farm. Alexander seems to have had a fondness for Williamson before this, naming a colt Ansel after him in 1856. While at Woodburn, Williamson trained Asteroid, who was one of the most successful racehorses of his day, undefeated in 12 starts and earner of $9,700 by the time of his retirement.

Of course, Williamson made the move to Woodburn in the thick of the Civil War, when both the Confederate and Union armies were constantly in search of horses. According to Katherine Mooney's 'Race Horse Men,' Southern Thoroughbred owners were particularly nervous throughout this period, as horses were generally perceived as symbols of the Confederacy, making them attractive trophies for Union forces.

Writings from the period recall one nighttime raid on Woodburn by Confederate guerrilla Bill Quantrill, who rode with his men to the door and demanded horses. It seemed Quantrill was familiar with racing and with Woodburn, because he began requesting specific animals. Williamson negotiated with Quantrill in the dark and when the soldier requested Asteroid, quick-thinking Williamson was able to pull a young horse from a nearby stall who, under the cover of night, looked passable for Asteroid. Although Quantrill made off with 15 of Alexander's runners, he didn't get the stable's biggest star.

What Williamson may have felt in those moments, or indeed his feelings on any part of his career, is mostly absent from available historical accounts, which was true for many of the period's Black horsemen. There are small glimpses into the personalities of some, with jockeys more commonly being described in detail than trainers. In fact, their being noted at all was offensive to some turf devotees after their emancipation.

An artist's depiction of Aristides

“Freedom was a daily series of tiny revolutions,” Mooney wrote in 'Race Horse Men.' “The world had fundamentally changed, as the Spirit of the Times impatiently reminded its readers, after the magazine received a few letters from racing enthusiasts uncomfortable with Black competitors. Their scruples were ridiculous, the Spirit scoffed. 'Does any man with a pennyweight of brains think the less of Charles Littlefield or Gilpatrick because they ride against Abe or Albert or Alexander's Dick?' Between the rails of the racetrack, at least, Black men were to be the acknowledged equals of white ones.”

After the Civil War, this designation came in one small way to Williamson, who took his last name upon being granted his freedom. Many Black jockeys and trainers, like those noted in the quote from the Spirit of the Times, were identified only by their first name, but the Spirit printed Williamson's full name along with his horse's entries, just as it did for white trainers.

One account recalls a Spirit reporter rushing over to Abe Hawkins, the most famous of the very first well-known Black jockeys, to shake his hand in the crowd at the Jersey Derby. It seemed that by the end of the war, those who knew horses respected the immense talent of Black horsemen, even if they couldn't see them as equal people.

Williamson worked for Alexander after emancipation, and later went to train for H.P. McGrath of McGranthiana Farm. Williamson wasn't the only former Alexander employee who ended up at McGranthiana – Edward Dudley Brown, eventual trainer of Ben Brush and Plaudit, also worked there. It was common then, as it is now, for trainers and riders to mentor each other, and it seems Williamson nurtured Brown's early career as a rider. Brown began as a jockey before he was a trainer, and presumably his association with Williamson continued to benefit him when he transitioned to training. Brown mentored William Walker, the Black jockey who rode Baden Baden to victory in the Derby when he was still a teenager.

“In freedom, older men could pass on their skills to younger ones and hope to see privilege and experience accrue increasing rewards over the generations,” wrote Mooney. “Free men could afford to think of themselves as friends, colleagues, and mentors, as members of a group governed by more than individual interest.

“Williamson and others with insider knowledge also tried to take care of Black horsemen outside their immediate circle. Black men laid their money down at the betting windows with assurance, because they had inside information that had come from African American trainers and jockeys.”

When Williamson brought Aristides to the post at Churchill (then called the Louisville Jockey Club), the horse was not expected to win. Aristides had been entered as a pacesetter for McGrath's other runner, Chesapeake. He was small, and he was a front-runner in what was then a 1 ½-mile race.

Lewis took Aristides to the lead as he'd been instructed by McGrath, maintaining good position and a little surprised that after half a mile he'd had no challengers. Chesapeake, who had broken poorly, was no threat. Legend has it Lewis could be seen looking around, somehow spotting McGrath in a crowd reported to number 10,000, and hearing McGrath call out “Go on!” Lewis slipped the reins and on Aristides went, down the stretch and into history.

Williamson's name appears in relatively few modern books on Derby history outside of a passing mention in a table of past winners. In one, it's misspelled as Ansel Williams in both the index and his single mention in the entirety of the main text – an insult if ever there was one. Most racing historians would say however that his legacy wasn't really Aristides so much as the superstar Asteroid, who made his name known far and wide, to people he'd never met. His mark on the sport also includes Tom Bowling, Merrill, Virgil, Aaron Pennington, Susan Ann and yes, — Chesapeake. As a trainer, he won the Belmont, Travers, Jerome, Phoenix, and the Withers.

Williamson was inducted into the National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame in 1998.

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Campbell: Should The Derby Be Cancelled? It Depends On Who You Ask

Tradition is a fickle thing to unpack. It provides comfort and regularity, yet it also reflects cultural events or moments that are mired in the past and unwilling to change. Like anything, tradition is in the eye of the beholder, especially in an age of judgement and cancel culture. The Kentucky Derby continues to straddle a line where tradition both assists and hinders the perception of it.

This is crystallized in 2020, considering the current political and social situation in Louisville, Ky., where people are asking: Should the Kentucky Derby tradition be interrupted in light of racial unrest there? Should Churchill Downs bend to pressure by cancelling next week's most well-known event in Thoroughbred racing?

For those on both sides of the question, the decision might seem uncomplicated. Fans of the sport, bettors, and members of the industry have weathered cancelations and economic hardship, and the desire to see their signature event go off without a hitch would be a bright spot in a tough year. The Derby was pushed back in May due to COVID-19, so they argue it needs to proceed as planned. Churchill Downs (CDI), whose bread and butter is its share price, relies on the race taking place. For owners of horses competing in stakes races next weekend, there is a lot of economic value tied up in the results of those races. This is a must for them.

On the flip side, there are activists who think it's just too much pomp and circumstance. For them, the race is part of Louisville's prejudiced past, starting as it did just after the Civil War. Tensions over race relations recently caught up to the city, not for the first time, with protests over the no-knock warrant that led to the death of Breonna Taylor back in March at the hands of the Louisville Police Department. Organizations like Black Lives Matter view events like the Derby as ill-timed, considering that Taylor's case remains unresolved and no arrests have been made of the officers responsible for her killing.

Some see a society that is still grappling with pain, suffering, and traditions (like the Derby) that are infused with white privilege. Others argue that these maladies have nothing to do with horses racing around a track, and the American people deserve to have an escape from the pressures of the politics of race. It is Labor Day weekend after all, they say.

The event itself is a party related to opulence, and although it is an economic juggernaut for the town, some think that there is not much to celebrate. That is understandable, and certainly, when it comes to civil liberties, their right to protest is not constitutionally unfounded. Groups like Justice and Freedom Coalition in Louisville want answers. They are tired of the status quo and see the brutal murder of Breonna Taylor as just another example of racial injustice — unchecked police power. For them, another Derby is part of Louisville's attempt to preserve its “status quo.”

From the standpoint of Thoroughbred racing and the engine that makes this sport go, the argument on the other side of the rail is clear. The Derby is necessary because of the handle it generates, the purses doled out, the effects on breeding operations, and in a year when Grade 1 races are scarce, the chance to improve one's stock beyond the day. Maybe more importantly, is the employment it generates for people of all colors who are linked to the Derby and its undercard.

Another major concern is that if the Derby runs, will it elicit the opportunity for undue violence? Churchill Downs has pledged major security around the track, and this will certainly include Louisville Metro Police. Increased police presence could dissuade violence or it could be more apt to spark it. This situation has all the makings for a chaotic scene like those we have already seen in Minneapolis, the Pacific Northwest, and more recently, in Wisconsin.

Both sides remain in their corners, with little dialogue seeking to illuminate the other's position. Based on these divisions, maybe what we really need is some perspective. After all, this isn't the first time that an aspect of the Kentucky Derby has meant drastically different things to different people. Let's not forget that “My Old Kentucky Home,” which is played during the post parade at the Derby. The song was introduced to Derby tradition by Matt Winn back in the 1930s, and while it may come from a highly racialized past, it was initially inspired by one of the most important pieces of literature in American History—Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852).

Stephen Foster, who wrote the lyrics (and who now has a stakes race named for him at Churchill Downs), sought to evoke the idea of redemption from the slaves' perspective. The song (with words “Good Night!,” added to the end) became an anthem for abolitionism, but it was also co-opted by racist organizations long after the Civil War. The all-white Kentucky Legislature made it the state song in the late 1920s, and the word “darkies” continued to be a part of it well into the 1980s. Listeners in the modern age receive the lyrics differently, depending upon what they know or believe about the origin of the words, and often conferring their own feelings onto the symbolism of the song.

When it comes to the way opponents and proponents are thinking of this year's Derby, I would counsel both sides to exercise caution. It is not too late for CDI to broker some type of compromise with the protestors that have marched this week outside their gates. Maybe they should have considered such a move instead of the deafening sound of silence? If overtures were offered by CDI, they were not publicized. CDI chief executive officer Bill Carstanjen appeared earlier this week on national television to assert that the local community “overwhelmingly” supports holding the Derby, but if there's a dialogue between CDI and the protest groups or plans to formally observe Louisville's struggles or Taylor's death during Saturday's events, Churchill is not telling the public about it. All we can hope for is that a peaceful demonstration will not spill over into something violent.

In the interim, no matter what position we take on this question, remembering the past can be fruitful. Understanding that tradition is in the eye of the beholder can only help in these fragmented times.

J.N. Campbell is a turfwriter based in Houston.

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