Today's Kentucky Derby is a multi-million-dollar spectacle
incorporating corporate sponsorship, worldwide media coverage, and
an annual citywide festival in Louisville, Kentucky. Over its
nearly century-and-a-half, the Kentucky Derby has grown to be one
of the biggest sporting events of the year, attracting 150,000
spectators at the track and nearly 15 million television viewers on
the first Saturday each May. But 1875, the year of the first Derby,
was a different time. The Louisville Jockey Club, which would one
day bear the name "Churchill Downs," was a small structure that
might, on its best day, provide seating and standing room for
12,000 spectators. The grandstand was plain and functional, and
included a section reserved for bookmakers, whose trade was legal,
and who operated in the open. Perhaps most significantly, the
majority of jockeys in the race were Black, in stark contrast to
the present-day Derby, where participation by African-Americans is
rare. In The First Kentucky Derby, racing historian Mark Shrager
examines the events leading up to the first "Run for the Roses,"
the unsuccessful plot hatched by the winning horse's owner to fix
the race, and the prominent role played by African-Americans in
Gilded Age racing culture-a holdover from pre-emancipation days,
when slaves would be trained from birth to ride for their wealthy
owners, and would grow up surrounded by the horses that would be
their life's work.
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