The only book to tell the story of the contemporary Black cowboy experience––and the only one to feature photographs––The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America published by George F. Thompson Publishing presents over 100 color and black-and-white images by Ron Tarver that convey the beauty, romance, and visual poetry of this way of life and its rich heritage. Although African-American cowboys have long been a fixture on the American landscape, few people are aware of their enduring contributions to western history and the settlement of the frontier, and of their unique culture that continues to thrive today in urban as well as rural areas all over the country.
The Long Ride Home contains beautiful, compelling, and often surprising contemporary images of Black cowboy culture that Tarver shot on assignment for National Geographic and The Philadelphia Inquirer as well as personal projects. Examples include photos of thousands of visitors flocking to tiny Okmulgee, Oklahoma, for the country’s largest Black rodeo, where some of the finest African-American rodeo cowboys compete. Another image shot in Harlem, New York City, features an abandoned lot once covered with broken glass and litter that has been cleared for an annual rodeo.
In one particularly powerful photo, a lone cowboy rides past a four-story mural of Malcolm X in Philadelphia, while elsewhere a young man shoots basketball as his horse waits at the edge of the inner-city court. On a dirt lot in Houston, a young Black cowgirl, dressed in regular clothing except for her boots, practices roping. Others feature cowboys waiting to bolt out of the gate at the rodeo, while others are in the ring, rising high in their saddles or contorting every which way to stay on their rearing horses in the face of the charging bulls. There are peaceful images, too, of riders moving through beautiful rural landscapes.
The images in The Long Ride Home affirm a varied and thriving culture of Black-owned ranches and rodeo operations, parades, inner-city cowboys, and retired cowhands––as well as Black cowgirls of all ages. Viewed together they question our long-held notions of what it means to be a cowboy, and with that, what it means to be an American.
The Long Ride Home couldn’t be more timely, coming on the heels of recent films such as Lil Nas X’s 2019 hit, time-travel western, Old Town Road, and Idris Elba’s Concrete Cowboy (2021). Elba’s film was based on Greg Neri’s book, Ghetto Cowboy, about the contemporary African-American cowboy culture of Philadelphia, and was shot in some of the same neighborhoods where Tarver made some of his images. The widespread interest in learning more about the Black experience in America sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement makes this book an especially important contribution to Black as well as American history.
Ron Tarver : The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America
Published by George F. Thompson Publishing
Essay by Art. T. Burton
Conversation with the Author by Elizbeth Cheng Krist
Cloth (PLC) with French-fold jacket; 92 pages; 110 color and black-and-white images
$55.00
http://www.gftbooks.com/
