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. 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.

Excerpt from Goodwin's Official Annual Turf Guide, 1897, Vol. 1: 17th Year The only Advertising Medium which regularly reaches Breeders, Owners and Trainers of Thoroughbreds in every part of the country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In 1877 the members of the United States Senate postponed all business for the day so that they might attend a horse race—the iconic, polarizing post-Civil War event at the center of this story. The nation, still recovering from the depredations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed, recognized it as a North vs. South encounter, pitting New York’s powerful thoroughbred Tom Ochiltree and New Jersey’s Parole—owned by the ostentatious Northern tycoons Pierre and George Lorrilard—against the already legendary “Kentucky crack,” Ten Broeck—owned by the teetotaling, plain-living Frank Harper and ridden by black jockey and former slave William Walker—representing a former slave state and its Southern values. The race and the colorful cast of characters involved reflected the still seething America during one of the nation’s most difficult and divisive periods. Shrager presents a fascinating and heart-pounding piece of history exposing the racial and economic tensions following the Civil War that culminated in one final race to the end.