Hey, I hope everybody is having a great weekend. It is Kentucky Derby weekend, so we thought this might be a good time to revisit previous hosts Sarah and Deblina's episode from eleven on Jimmy Winkfield, who won the Kentucky Derby twice and no other black man has won the Derby since. We also talk about the Derby in our episode the Kentucky Derby's First fifty Years, which you can find in our archive if you want some more Derby stories today, So put on your fancy hat and enjoy. Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from house stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to blame a choko reboarding and I'm say and the Kentucky Derby is coming up on May seven, and so I thought this would be an okay time to confess that I have an inexplicable bowl fascination with horse racing. Really surprised me about you you told me this earlier in the day. Yeah, I don't even know what it is. It's not like I mean, I've ridden horses before, but I wasn't really very much into it growing up. I had some friends who were, but even they weren't into racing, so I don't really know what it is except for just the stories behind the jockeys, behind the horses and the trainers. It always seems whenever I tune into the Kentucky Derby every year, I hear all these stories of triumph over adversity, and I don't know great comebacks. I imagine you have like a secret hat collection you bring out for the Kentucky Derby, Sarah, I only wish. But before we go any further, for those who aren't familiar with the Derby, it's one of the classic American horse races and probably the most widely known in the US. It started in eight seventy five and it takes place annually the first Saturday in May at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky. The race stist In says about one point to five miles one mile and a quarter and it's often called the most exciting two minutes in sports. Yeah, and like I mentioned, we do associate things like big hats with the Kentucky Derby, mint juleps, high rollers, that kind of thing. It's a very elite event and at least in the last one hundred years or so. It's not that racially diverse. Certainly that's not the way you think of it. But as we're gonna learn, there was a time in the early days of the Derby when African American jockeys dominated the US horse racing scene. Yeah, and so here we're going to talk about the last black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby, Kentucky native actually, whose name was Jimmy Winkfield. And we'll take a look at his short but successful US career and the events that brought that to a close, and his remarkable experience as abroad. But first, um, we want to look a little bit at this history of African Americans and horse racing, so we can trace African Americans participation in this board to colonial times when the British brought their passion for horse racing to America, and according to an article in The Smithsonian by Lisa Kay Winkler, even founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson frequented the track, and former President Andrew Jackson had his own thoroughbreds and black jockeys so very much a part of our an illustrious start but the first black jockeys were slaves, and they got their skills and their affinity for horses, their connection to horses from doing sort of the menial we're cleaning the stables or grooming the owners valuable animals. And Winkler points out that being on the racing circuit once, once black jockeys did start making it big, gave them a sort of false sense of freedom. It was one of the few ways that they could achieve real status, and a lot of them did. They went all the way to the top in American horse racing. In the first Kentucky Derby in eighteen thirteen, out of fifteen jockeys were black, and among the first twenty eight Derby winners, fifteen of them were black. So they were they were dominating the horse racing scene. Yeah, exactly. And this was the environment that James Winkfield was born into on April twelfth, eighteen eighty two, in Kentucky, and he was the youngest son of George and Victoria Winkfield, who had a total of seventeen kids. They were farmers, basically sharecroppers, and lived in a shotgun shock so some of the kids actually had to spill out on the porch at night to sleep. Yeah, but little James definitely got interested in horses and racing early, probably in no small part because he was growing up in bluegrass country and he heard he probably saw the horses and also heard the stories of black jockeys making a name for themselves and getting big, and lucky for him, he didn't get big. He's stayed small, which is of course a requirement for professional jockeys. Even though he had some siblings who were six ft tall, this is quite a discrepancy because by his teen years he was only five ft tall and less than one pounds, so perfect build for a jockey. Yeah. And he started out just bugging other groomers in his area until they finally gave in and let him do some of their work for free. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me if you're one of those workers. But Jimmy then got hired on as a groomer and an exercise boy, so he got his own gig and this is how he got his experience in training and kind of got discovered just riding horses as an exerciser. And there were some trainers who were looking out for opportunities all the time. To turn riders into jockeys, looking for people who just seemed to have that natural talent. And that's how Jimmy got his first break in at age sixteen. Yeah, so he rode a race at Chicago's Hawthorn race Course. But it didn't turn out to be the big break he was really looking for it. In fact, it was quite a disaster. His horse broke next to last at the start, and then when he thought he saw an opening, he broke fourth from the rail and cut across the path of three horses and he took them all down in the process and got suspended for a year because of it. He came back though in eighteen nine, strong as ever. Yeah, he started winning races in Chicago. For example, in nineteen hundred he rode in his first Kentucky Derby, and that was out of four races four Kentucky Derby races. I should say that he would ride in total. In nineteen hundred he placed third. The next two years he placed first in the Kentucky Derby, first on a horse called His Eminence and then on Allan a Dale, And this made him only the second jockey to win two successive Derby's and I mean there's still really aren't that many jockeys who can claim that our feet indeed, and in nineteen o three he finished second because he made his move too soon, and it was a loss that always bugged him. I mean, he was hoping to go for three in a row there, it seems. Yeah, I've read that he actually talked about that loss until his death. You know that he should have won it, Yeah, the one that going away. So by that time, the US horse racing scene was already changing thanks to racism, segregation, Jim Crow laws and the economy me played a part. Two recessions at the time really shrunk the number of race tracks and the attendance at the race tracks that were still open. And they were also anti gambling groups going around, so that was further shutting down the number of race tracks that were operating. Yeah, definitely, they went down from three fourteen tracks in eighteen ninety to twenty five by nineteen o eight, so really big dive and white jockeys also didn't like competing with black jockeys for the best mount so at times there was outright violence. I mean during races on the track, black jockeys would sometimes we pushed towards the rail um. There was even a riot in Chicago between the white and the black jockeys. Yeah, so times were definitely changing, and you can really tell. Even though Winkfield one more than one hundred and sixty races in nineteen o one, Goodwin's annual Official Guide to the Turf admitted his name, so he he wasn't even a player even anymore, even though he was still winning. Yeah, and perhaps more seriously, or definitely more seriously, I should say, he received death threats from the ku Klux Klan. So it was getting really hard for a black jockey to work in the United States anymore. And all those reasons were contributing for sure. But he really sort of put the final nail in his own coffin for his US career because in nineteen o three, he was scheduled to ride for one owner in the Futurity Stakes in New York City and then he accepted a three thousand dollar offer to switch horses and ride on the favorite. And this was a big faux pot. I mean, as you can imagine, switching horses at the last minute, and it really hurt his reputation. Yeah, so after the horse switch incident, Winkfield's number of rides dropped by a third. So he ended up moving to Russia in nineteen o four, where he accepted a position with an American owned stable, and there his career really took off again. His first year there he won the Czar's trip Crown, which is the Moscow, the St. Petersburg and the Warsaw Derby's and he was also the nineteen o four Russian national writing champion. Yeah, and over the years he just kind of kept on, winning the Moscow Derby four more times on one horse alone, and then several other times on different mouths. He rode on and off for different owners of Polish Prince the German Baron, so he wasn't just riding in Russia. He was riding in Austria and Germany and France too, and making a lot of money doing it. Yeah. His salary at one point was seventeen thousand roubles, so it would have been equal to about eight thousand, five hundred dollars at the time per year, plus ten percent of every purse that he won, so he was pretty well off to say the least. He was living in this fancy schmancy hotel, the National hotel in Moscow and having caviare for breakfast. As we know, though, by nineteen seventeen or so, there was trouble brewing in Russia and the Bolsheviks and the Communists are getting organized, and the racing community was really at risk because it was something that rich people did. It was a symbol of the aristocracy, and so Winfield, to protect himself had to walk around in tattered clothing to avoid getting arrested by Bolsheviks. I still think that's quite I don't know, it's it's hard to imagine this five foot tall guy walking around and what did they think of him? Like he would still stick out? I think definitely. He was working in Odessa for Prince Louma, miss Key of Poland and nineteen nineteen when the Russian Revolution finally caught up to him, when they started hearing the sound of cannons, he and the rest of the racing community, which included horsemen and their families and about two fifty two and sixty horses something in there, they all took off an escaped to Poland. It was a really hazardous journey one thousand, one hundred miles to Warsaw. They had to cross the Transylvanian Alps, and they had to actually unfortunately eat some of the horses along away because they got desperate for food. But they did make it eventually. Yeah, and once he was in Poland, Wingfield again resumed his riding career and started to recoup his fortune, most of which he lost when he left Russia. Even though he was getting older, he did become a successful writer again. He continued as a jockey through the nineteen twenties. He won several stakes races and altogether he ended up winning two thousand, six hundred races in his entire riding career. That was one amazing thing I thought about this story. I kept expecting some sort of sad end, but he keeps bouncing back time after time. He does. In two even when he was as he was building up his racing again and still writing, he built a stable in a home near Paris in Mason Lafitte. He had a little family there with him too, by then, a son and a daughter with his third wife, who was an exiled Russian aristocrat named Lydia de Mickowitz. So when he finally retired from writing in nine teen thirty, around the age of forty eight, he decided to devote his life entirely to training horses at his stable in France, so he stayed put there, settled there instead of traveling around racing all the time, and he trained his own horses and horses for other owners too, and he ended up doing really well by it. But unfortunately he loses his fortune once again when the Germans invade France in ninety one and the Red Cross evacuates his family to the US. He's home, so he's back home again. And black jockeys had pretty much disappeared from the racing scene by the early twenties, and Winkfield was looking for work and signed up with the Works Progress Administration working on a road crew and later had to work as a groom and an assistant trainer for a living, So I mean a groom. That's back to where he where he started as a kid. Finally, though, he got to return to France in nineteen fifty three and start up his operation, his racing and training stable again, and he died in France March nineteen seventy four at age one, again just bouncing back. It's so impressive that he had he had it in him to keep going and try again. Yeah. It was a phenomenal life and a phenomenal career really and very impressive. But it took Winkfield a long time to get recognition that he deserved in his home country. In the US, there's a story that's often told about he and his daughter attending the nineteen sixty one Kentucky Derby. Actually it's really sad. They were invited to a Sports Illustrated event, a dinner at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, but they almost got turned away at the door by the doorman, and they had to have him go check several times and insists that they were guests and they were supposed to be there, and they finally got in. But then even when they did get there, they were essentially ignored by the people at the dinner. The dinner kind of the people at the dinner kind of came up to them and said high and shook hands, and then they didn't talk to anyone the rest of the time. His daughter said in a two thousand two NPR Weekend Edition interview that the only person who talked to us was a previous jockey who had won the derby, and that was Roscoe Goose. He was the only one who was friendly enough to talk to us. Nobody else talked to us the whole time. That's so sad and tragic and disappointing. I guess, very that's the perfect way to describe it. Disappointing, And I think you mentioned that. I thought this was a neat counterpoint to it. Even though he's so disrespected at this event, he said he still really enjoyed the race because that's his element. He liked it, he liked being there. Again, Yeah, from what I've read, he really enjoyed being at the race and kind of didn't care that people had treated him that way, or really didn't seem to care. I guess because he had been through so much in his life anyway, Transylvanian Alps probably puts things in perspective. Yeah, that would definitely change your perspective on the whole thing. I think that he was more embarrassed and worried about his daughter in that situation, necessarily than himself. But regardless, things have changed a lot over the past decade. Wingfield finally got inducted into the National Racing Hall of Fame in two thousand four, and in two thousand five, the House of representatives passed a bill honoring him, and in two thousand Marlon St. Julian became the first African American to ride in the Derby. Since there's been a few since then, so maybe things are starting to change, starting to get back to how they were at the end of the eighteen hundreds. Yeah, it's interesting to think of going backwards as progress, but I guess in a weird way, that's kind of what it would be. Maybe. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. We are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History. All over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on thiss and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com. M

Hey, I hope everybody is having a great weekend. It is Kentucky Derby weekend, so we thought this might be a good time to revisit previous hosts Sarah and Deblina's episode from eleven on Jimmy Winkfield, who won the Kentucky Derby twice and no other black man has won the Derby since. We also talk about the Derby in our episode the Kentucky Derby's First fifty Years, which you can find in our archive if you want some more Derby stories today, So put on your fancy hat and enjoy. Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from house stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to blame a choko reboarding and I'm say and the Kentucky Derby is coming up on May seven, and so I thought this would be an okay time to confess that I have an inexplicable bowl fascination with horse racing. Really surprised me about you you told me this earlier in the day. Yeah, I don't even know what it is. It's not like I mean, I've ridden horses before, but I wasn't really very much into it growing up. I had some friends who were, but even they weren't into racing, so I don't really know what it is except for just the stories behind the jockeys, behind the horses and the trainers. It always seems whenever I tune into the Kentucky Derby every year, I hear all these stories of triumph over adversity, and I don't know great comebacks. I imagine you have like a secret hat collection you bring out for the Kentucky Derby, Sarah, I only wish. But before we go any further, for those who aren't familiar with the Derby, it's one of the classic American horse races and probably the most widely known in the US. It started in eight seventy five and it takes place annually the first Saturday in May at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky. The race stist In says about one point to five miles one mile and a quarter and it's often called the most exciting two minutes in sports. Yeah, and like I mentioned, we do associate things like big hats with the Kentucky Derby, mint juleps, high rollers, that kind of thing. It's a very elite event and at least in the last one hundred years or so. It's not that racially diverse. Certainly that's not the way you think of it. But as we're gonna learn, there was a time in the early days of the Derby when African American jockeys dominated the US horse racing scene. Yeah, and so here we're going to talk about the last black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby, Kentucky native actually, whose name was Jimmy Winkfield. And we'll take a look at his short but successful US career and the events that brought that to a close, and his remarkable experience as abroad. But first, um, we want to look a little bit at this history of African Americans and horse racing, so we can trace African Americans participation in this board to colonial times when the British brought their passion for horse racing to America, and according to an article in The Smithsonian by Lisa Kay Winkler, even founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson frequented the track, and former President Andrew Jackson had his own thoroughbreds and black jockeys so very much a part of our an illustrious start but the first black jockeys were slaves, and they got their skills and their affinity for horses, their connection to horses from doing sort of the menial we're cleaning the stables or grooming the owners valuable animals. And Winkler points out that being on the racing circuit once, once black jockeys did start making it big, gave them a sort of false sense of freedom. It was one of the few ways that they could achieve real status, and a lot of them did. They went all the way to the top in American horse racing. In the first Kentucky Derby in eighteen thirteen, out of fifteen jockeys were black, and among the first twenty eight Derby winners, fifteen of them were black. So they were they were dominating the horse racing scene. Yeah, exactly. And this was the environment that James Winkfield was born into on April twelfth, eighteen eighty two, in Kentucky, and he was the youngest son of George and Victoria Winkfield, who had a total of seventeen kids. They were farmers, basically sharecroppers, and lived in a shotgun shock so some of the kids actually had to spill out on the porch at night to sleep. Yeah, but little James definitely got interested in horses and racing early, probably in no small part because he was growing up in bluegrass country and he heard he probably saw the horses and also heard the stories of black jockeys making a name for themselves and getting big, and lucky for him, he didn't get big. He's stayed small, which is of course a requirement for professional jockeys. Even though he had some siblings who were six ft tall, this is quite a discrepancy because by his teen years he was only five ft tall and less than one pounds, so perfect build for a jockey. Yeah. And he started out just bugging other groomers in his area until they finally gave in and let him do some of their work for free. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me if you're one of those workers. But Jimmy then got hired on as a groomer and an exercise boy, so he got his own gig and this is how he got his experience in training and kind of got discovered just riding horses as an exerciser. And there were some trainers who were looking out for opportunities all the time. To turn riders into jockeys, looking for people who just seemed to have that natural talent. And that's how Jimmy got his first break in at age sixteen. Yeah, so he rode a race at Chicago's Hawthorn race Course. But it didn't turn out to be the big break he was really looking for it. In fact, it was quite a disaster. His horse broke next to last at the start, and then when he thought he saw an opening, he broke fourth from the rail and cut across the path of three horses and he took them all down in the process and got suspended for a year because of it. He came back though in eighteen nine, strong as ever. Yeah, he started winning races in Chicago. For example, in nineteen hundred he rode in his first Kentucky Derby, and that was out of four races four Kentucky Derby races. I should say that he would ride in total. In nineteen hundred he placed third. The next two years he placed first in the Kentucky Derby, first on a horse called His Eminence and then on Allan a Dale, And this made him only the second jockey to win two successive Derby's and I mean there's still really aren't that many jockeys who can claim that our feet indeed, and in nineteen o three he finished second because he made his move too soon, and it was a loss that always bugged him. I mean, he was hoping to go for three in a row there, it seems. Yeah, I've read that he actually talked about that loss until his death. You know that he should have won it, Yeah, the one that going away. So by that time, the US horse racing scene was already changing thanks to racism, segregation, Jim Crow laws and the economy me played a part. Two recessions at the time really shrunk the number of race tracks and the attendance at the race tracks that were still open. And they were also anti gambling groups going around, so that was further shutting down the number of race tracks that were operating. Yeah, definitely, they went down from three fourteen tracks in eighteen ninety to twenty five by nineteen o eight, so really big dive and white jockeys also didn't like competing with black jockeys for the best mount so at times there was outright violence. I mean during races on the track, black jockeys would sometimes we pushed towards the rail um. There was even a riot in Chicago between the white and the black jockeys. Yeah, so times were definitely changing, and you can really tell. Even though Winkfield one more than one hundred and sixty races in nineteen o one, Goodwin's annual Official Guide to the Turf admitted his name, so he he wasn't even a player even anymore, even though he was still winning. Yeah, and perhaps more seriously, or definitely more seriously, I should say, he received death threats from the ku Klux Klan. So it was getting really hard for a black jockey to work in the United States anymore. And all those reasons were contributing for sure. But he really sort of put the final nail in his own coffin for his US career because in nineteen o three, he was scheduled to ride for one owner in the Futurity Stakes in New York City and then he accepted a three thousand dollar offer to switch horses and ride on the favorite. And this was a big faux pot. I mean, as you can imagine, switching horses at the last minute, and it really hurt his reputation. Yeah, so after the horse switch incident, Winkfield's number of rides dropped by a third. So he ended up moving to Russia in nineteen o four, where he accepted a position with an American owned stable, and there his career really took off again. His first year there he won the Czar's trip Crown, which is the Moscow, the St. Petersburg and the Warsaw Derby's and he was also the nineteen o four Russian national writing champion. Yeah, and over the years he just kind of kept on, winning the Moscow Derby four more times on one horse alone, and then several other times on different mouths. He rode on and off for different owners of Polish Prince the German Baron, so he wasn't just riding in Russia. He was riding in Austria and Germany and France too, and making a lot of money doing it. Yeah. His salary at one point was seventeen thousand roubles, so it would have been equal to about eight thousand, five hundred dollars at the time per year, plus ten percent of every purse that he won, so he was pretty well off to say the least. He was living in this fancy schmancy hotel, the National hotel in Moscow and having caviare for breakfast. As we know, though, by nineteen seventeen or so, there was trouble brewing in Russia and the Bolsheviks and the Communists are getting organized, and the racing community was really at risk because it was something that rich people did. It was a symbol of the aristocracy, and so Winfield, to protect himself had to walk around in tattered clothing to avoid getting arrested by Bolsheviks. I still think that's quite I don't know, it's it's hard to imagine this five foot tall guy walking around and what did they think of him? Like he would still stick out? I think definitely. He was working in Odessa for Prince Louma, miss Key of Poland and nineteen nineteen when the Russian Revolution finally caught up to him, when they started hearing the sound of cannons, he and the rest of the racing community, which included horsemen and their families and about two fifty two and sixty horses something in there, they all took off an escaped to Poland. It was a really hazardous journey one thousand, one hundred miles to Warsaw. They had to cross the Transylvanian Alps, and they had to actually unfortunately eat some of the horses along away because they got desperate for food. But they did make it eventually. Yeah, and once he was in Poland, Wingfield again resumed his riding career and started to recoup his fortune, most of which he lost when he left Russia. Even though he was getting older, he did become a successful writer again. He continued as a jockey through the nineteen twenties. He won several stakes races and altogether he ended up winning two thousand, six hundred races in his entire riding career. That was one amazing thing I thought about this story. I kept expecting some sort of sad end, but he keeps bouncing back time after time. He does. In two even when he was as he was building up his racing again and still writing, he built a stable in a home near Paris in Mason Lafitte. He had a little family there with him too, by then, a son and a daughter with his third wife, who was an exiled Russian aristocrat named Lydia de Mickowitz. So when he finally retired from writing in nine teen thirty, around the age of forty eight, he decided to devote his life entirely to training horses at his stable in France, so he stayed put there, settled there instead of traveling around racing all the time, and he trained his own horses and horses for other owners too, and he ended up doing really well by it. But unfortunately he loses his fortune once again when the Germans invade France in ninety one and the Red Cross evacuates his family to the US. He's home, so he's back home again. And black jockeys had pretty much disappeared from the racing scene by the early twenties, and Winkfield was looking for work and signed up with the Works Progress Administration working on a road crew and later had to work as a groom and an assistant trainer for a living, So I mean a groom. That's back to where he where he started as a kid. Finally, though, he got to return to France in nineteen fifty three and start up his operation, his racing and training stable again, and he died in France March nineteen seventy four at age one, again just bouncing back. It's so impressive that he had he had it in him to keep going and try again. Yeah. It was a phenomenal life and a phenomenal career really and very impressive. But it took Winkfield a long time to get recognition that he deserved in his home country. In the US, there's a story that's often told about he and his daughter attending the nineteen sixty one Kentucky Derby. Actually it's really sad. They were invited to a Sports Illustrated event, a dinner at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, but they almost got turned away at the door by the doorman, and they had to have him go check several times and insists that they were guests and they were supposed to be there, and they finally got in. But then even when they did get there, they were essentially ignored by the people at the dinner. The dinner kind of the people at the dinner kind of came up to them and said high and shook hands, and then they didn't talk to anyone the rest of the time. His daughter said in a two thousand two NPR Weekend Edition interview that the only person who talked to us was a previous jockey who had won the derby, and that was Roscoe Goose. He was the only one who was friendly enough to talk to us. Nobody else talked to us the whole time. That's so sad and tragic and disappointing. I guess, very that's the perfect way to describe it. Disappointing, And I think you mentioned that. I thought this was a neat counterpoint to it. Even though he's so disrespected at this event, he said he still really enjoyed the race because that's his element. He liked it, he liked being there. Again, Yeah, from what I've read, he really enjoyed being at the race and kind of didn't care that people had treated him that way, or really didn't seem to care. I guess because he had been through so much in his life anyway, Transylvanian Alps probably puts things in perspective. Yeah, that would definitely change your perspective on the whole thing. I think that he was more embarrassed and worried about his daughter in that situation, necessarily than himself. But regardless, things have changed a lot over the past decade. Wingfield finally got inducted into the National Racing Hall of Fame in two thousand four, and in two thousand five, the House of representatives passed a bill honoring him, and in two thousand Marlon St. Julian became the first African American to ride in the Derby. Since there's been a few since then, so maybe things are starting to change, starting to get back to how they were at the end of the eighteen hundreds. Yeah, it's interesting to think of going backwards as progress, but I guess in a weird way, that's kind of what it would be. Maybe. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. We are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History. All over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on thiss and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com. M