Sep 2

Sep 2 Episode 7: The Color of Fame

This episode continues my genealogical journey while exploring what recognition and representation means on a personal, familial and Diasporic level. Interviews with Linda White of the Smoot Family and Zann Nelson, a Culpeper Historian discuss and highlight the untold stories of Black horsemen via my ancestor, Charles Smoot. Special guest, poet, author and educator Darius V. Daughtry of the Art Prevails Project helps us with the language to understand the grief we feel in the aftermath of losing Chadwick Boseman while hailing the resilience of the human spirit and Blackness.

Special Guests: Zann Nelson, Linda White, Darius V. Daughtry

Music: Show Intro, Power by Kudo NYC; Levels by Yung Kartz; Streets by Yung Kartz; Love Chances by Makaih Beats; Show Outro by Kevin Wheeler

Deeper Dive……

The family said, “he worked with horses.” But, little did they know he was an award-winning horseman who battled racism by beating the best of them.

Charles and George Smoot of Waterloo were brothers you would have been reluctant to contend with when it came to horse racing. On the 1920 census of Waterloo, the census taker records George Smoot at age 15 as a stable boy, but he was already en route to becoming a famous jockey who would race much further and beyond the community of Waterloo, Fauquier County Virginia. Charles Smoot, his brother was an award-winning steeplechase jockey, and he was also family. He was born around the early 20th century, on April 11, 1898. His mother was Mollie Bailey and his father was Henry Smoot who both resided in the Black community of Waterloo. Charles Smoot and I are family from two lines - the Smoots and the Baileys. However, I am not a direct descendant, he is a part of my lateral lines - meaning his father, Henry Smoot, was the brother of my great-grandfather, Joeseph Marshall Smoot, who he not so affectionately called “Old Black Joe” and his mother, Mollie Bailey was the sister of my great-grandmother, Rachel Bailey. As stated in an earlier blog, the Lawsons, Baileys and Smoots would be a family that would closely intertwine and rewind and recoil themselves around each other for more than a century-and now we are lovingly cousins in multiple ways . But, Charles Smoot, who would actually be my first cousin- twice removed, thanks ancestry.com for that calculation. Charles Smoot would never actually go on to have known children. But Charles Smoot, belovedly called “Charlie” would have a different type of legacy, and one almost completely lost until the last year. You see, Charlie was the Black man ripping up the horse race track, winning awards left and right at a time when racism was so restricting, so blatant that they openly called him names like “monkey” as he whooped their tails coming across the finish line first. On one occasion while working for Marion Scott Dupont ‘s stable, she threatened to pull her horses from a race if Charlie Smoot was forbade to ride.

Charlie Smoot was perhaps one of the last well-known Black jockeys from that era. Black men were once synonymous with horsekeeping, and stable culture, but the tightening of Jim Crow and segregation at the end of the 19th century pushed Black men and their expertise out of the stables, making it a predominantly white sport and culture. Black men once dominated the sport- winning the Kentucky Derby and other well-known races. In the first Kentucky Derby, 13 out of 15 of the riders were Black men. This was a sport once dominated without question by African-American men and after the Civil War, Black men continued to lead the sport. The horse racing of yesteryear was America’s most popular sport. During enslavement, Black men were the go-to on horses, they were the riders, the trainers, the groomers. They knew the horses as they were the group who spent so much time with them.

But racism, both institutional and otherwise, stripped away the right of Black jockeys to run. They were forced off the track, jeered at, hit with whips while on the track that were to be directed at horses and they were restricted from mounting horses at various races until it became widespread. Churchill Downs which was enriched and embedded with the expertise of specifically African-American riders came to a racist, screeching halt, and from 1921 to 2000, no Black jockey would run until the color line was rebroken by Marlon St. Julien at the turn of the 21st century.

So, Charles Smoot’s award-winning steeplechase runs came at a very critical and restrictive time in American history. Black men had been forced off the track, but Charlie was still out winning and running. I did not learn about Charles Smoot from family lore immediately. It was a post placed in a Culpeper County newspaper that would eventually 15 months later put me on the track to Charlie, linking me with additional family members and more.

Historian Zann Nelson’s Culpeper article searching for descendants of Charlie Smoot, put her in contact with Linda White, a cousin who I had met virtually years ago in 2012 on 23andme. But, just as I began my research on the ground with AAHA, I met Linda White in person. It was Linda White in July 2018, when we met for the first time since that email in exchange in 2012, that began to describe Charlie Smoot and an exhibit honoring Black jockeys to be held at Montpelier.

Charlie Smoot was doing the thing. I find references to him in more than a 100 articles from the New York Times to the Wilmington California Daily Press. He was an artist and athlete at the Steeplechase, an even rarer presence for African-Americans in the horse industry by this period. But Charlie Smoot would go on to win the 1916, 1926, and 1933 Beverywyck Steeplechase.

He was rated as the “Best Steeplechase Runner” of his time.