The rise and fall of one of America’s first Black sports
celebrities  Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still
reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black
jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in
America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were
internationally famous, the first African American superstar
athletes—and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless
other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all.
 At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of
Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over
freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was
drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences. Â
Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy’s troubled
life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. In
recounting Murphy’s personal story, she also tells two of the
great stories of change in nineteenth-century America: the debates
over what a multiracial democracy might look like and the battles
over who was to hold power in an economy that increasingly
resembled the corporate, wealth-polarized world we know today.
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