More than a century before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, black athletes were dominating America's first national sport. The
Oliver Lewis was champion jockey of the Kentucky Derby in 1875 with a winning race time of two minutes and 37 seconds. Jockey Willie Simms won in 1896, bringing
Isaac Burns Murphy (1861–1896) was one of the most dynamic jockeys of his era. Still considered one of the finest riders of all time, Murphy was the first joc
Born into an African American sharecropping family in 1880s Kentucky, Jimmy Winkfield grew up loving horses. The large, powerful animals inspired little Jimmy t
The life of Jimmy Winkfield is an exuberant epic: the seventeenth child of Kentucky sharecroppers, he was the last black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby, and s