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.

In 1968, a few women, mockingly labeled "jockettes" by a skeptical press, had begun demanding the right to apply for jockey licenses, citing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in hiring based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. Most of their applications were rejected by racing's bureaucracy, which alleged that women were unqualified to participate due to "physical limitations" and "emotional instability." Female jockeys who attempted to ride met with boycotts by male jockeys. Onto this uneven terrain stepped 20-year-old Diane Crump, who had long since demonstrated her riding proficiency during a thousand workout rides on a thousand difficult Thoroughbreds ("I basically got on all the horses that no one else wanted to ride"). On February 7, 1969, having been granted a permit to ride at Florida's Hialeah Racetrack, Crump, surrounded by a protective phalanx of police officers, walked calmly toward the saddling enclosure as she endured heckles from the crowd. Diane's mount would not earn victory that day, but the young rider had earned a more fundamental prize: the right to compete in her chosen field. Just over a year later, on May 2, 1970, after 95 years and 1,055 all-male entrants, Diane Crump shattered tradition by becoming the first woman to ride in the Kentucky Derby. Over her career she amassed 235 wins.