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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Tomorrow is the 149th running of the Kentucky Derby and we can all look forward to this familiar sound.

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Alison Stewart: The derby is America's longest-running sporting event and expected 150,000 people will descend on Churchill Downs to watch the famous race. This year, there are no Black jockeys competing in the race, but back in the 1800s when horse racing was its most popular in this country, Black jockeys worn is rare. The most famous Black jockey was Isaac Murphy, a man who was born into slavery in Kentucky on the cusp of the Civil War, but he grew up as one of the first generations of Black people to live in freedom after emancipation.

That doesn't mean he didn't face obstacles and discrimination throughout his life on and off the track. As a child, Murphy loved horses and quickly fell into the horse-racing lifestyle as a jockey and his home city of Lexington. He would ride some of the greatest horses, become an international celebrity, and went to win three Kentucky derbies, a record he held until 1948. A new book, Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey, tells Murphy's story. Its author, Katherine C. Mooney, is professor of history at Florida State University, joins me now on the eve of the Kentucky Derby. Professor, welcome.

Katherine C. Mooney: Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: What was the role of horse racing in American culture at its peak in the 1800s?

Katherine C. Mooney: I think we have to remember, this is before the NFL. It's before the NBA. It's before the NCAA. If you can imagine all the energy that goes into all those things compressed into one space, that space is horse racing. It is the mass audience sport of its time.

Alison Stewart: When you think about the longer history and the contributions of Black people in horse racing, how would you categorize it?

Katherine C. Mooney: Well, I think we have to talk about two stages of it. One is that even before folks like Isaac Murphy, there are generations of enslaved men who were doing most of the work, particularly in the South where a lot of the breeding and initial work of those horses is being done. You have this incredible story of generational expertise, and then by the time Murphy is born, memory, memory of that kind of work. Then you have this brief period and reconstruction where those guys are able to take their work and benefit from it.

They really become superstars. Then you have the period after the real imposition of Jim Crow, where top-line, public-facing jobs like trainers and jockeys in the Kentucky Derby become very difficult to get. Black men continue to work at the track, but they don't have the same kind of recognition. I always think as somebody who works on Black jockeys in the 1800s that it's important to point out that Black people continue to be really important on the track. They continue to have multi-generational stories. It's just that they've done it in the face of really significant obstacles.

Alison Stewart: Isaac Murphy was born into slavery in early 1861. What do we know about the early years in his life?

Katherine C. Mooney: Well, what we know about him we know because his mother must have been a really extraordinary person. His father dies in the service of the Union Army when he's only about three or four. His mother, who was herself enslaved, moves him into Lexington, which is like the market town in their area. As far as we can tell, that's where she moved him because that was where there were schools that were open to him.

We know she starts her own business. We have records of that. We have records of her applying for her husband's pension, and then we have census records of him being in school. We have the deed of the house she bought. She is really the person who's leaving a trail. The trail she's leaving is the trail of somebody who, and she was only in her early 20s, is embracing the possibilities of freedom and the possibilities of what equality could be.

Alison Stewart: She had a great name too, America.

Katherine C. Mooney: Yes. If you're a fan of symbolism, she's kind of where it's at.

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Alison Stewart: America Murphy Burns. There was some confusion over Isaac Murphy's name though. What was the confusion?

Katherine C. Mooney: Well, he later said that he was named for an uncle. I wondered if it was one of her brothers who'd been sold away because there's no record of him by the time Isaac's born. When he's little, he goes by his father's name. He's a junior, so he's Jeremiah Burns, Jr., but then when he's about 11 or 12, he starts going by Isaac. I guess that's his uncle's name.

Then when he first becomes a professional horseman, when he's only 14 or 15, he goes by his father's name. He goes by Burns. Very quickly after his first victory, he decides he wants to be named Murphy professionally. The story always goes to that is because he's taking his grandfather's name. In the research I've done, what I thought was so interesting was by the time he gets on a horse, his grandfather's been dead for a little while as far as we know.

I think it's possible that when he was little, they told him, "Oh, you're going to be a jockey." That was like a bond between them, but it seems to me that maybe that's just the way people in the 19th century understood that story and that what he was doing was taking his mother's name because she was the parent who shaped his life in such important ways. Professionally, he takes her name and lives under it for the rest of his life, so he's Isaac Murphy.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the book, Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey. It's out now. My guest is Katherine Mooney, professor of history at Florida State University and the author of the book. What was his breakthrough in horse racing? How did he break through?

Katherine C. Mooney: Well, he first gets on a horse when he's 12. Famously, he falls off. It was obviously incredibly dangerous. He was doing incredibly dangerous work with relatively few safety precautions. Anybody who's been watching morning footage of the Kentucky Derby now knows that getting on racehorses is not the safest job in the world. When he was 18 after he'd been riding for quite a while pretty successfully, he gets his first major victory, which is the Travers Stakes of 1879. While the Kentucky Derby is first run in 1875, the Travers at this point it's a much bigger deal. It's the big New York race of the summer, and that really is when he breaks through into the stratosphere.

Alison Stewart: What was it about his riding style? What was he known for?

Katherine C. Mooney: Well, I think he's known, first of all, for being very tactical, which is interesting that the papers are willing to talk about that, which I was clocking that they're talking about this young Black man. The first thing they tell you is how shrewd and thoughtful and strategic he is. They're thinking about him as an intellectual force and not just a physical force, which I think is important.

Throughout his career, he's really famous because he does use that tactical ability. He tends to be very gentle and careful with a horse. His horses don't usually win by a lot. In fact, people who have money on him are often like, "Oh, you're going to give me a heart attack, man," because the horses win, but they don't win by a lot. Famously, there are people who complain because they say, "Oh, it's just that he likes to do that. He likes to create drama."

Alison Stewart: When you say he was a tactician, what's an example of that?

Katherine C. Mooney: Often, what he does, and this is a really unusual ability and it's one of the reasons he's so good at his job, is he is able to judge from watching a horse, how fast that horse is going to be able to go, and for how long. He can then assess in his mind, "Okay, the horse I am riding can do this distance in this time. That horse is going to be two seconds slower or three seconds slower or half a second slower."

He can actually gauge how fast he's going in the moment so that he's very carefully clocking out, "Okay, we did this eighth of a mile in this. We did this eighth of a mile in this," and he's doing the math throughout. He knows basically by the time he gets to the end, "This is how much my horse can still do. This is how much that other horse can still do." He's doing all this riding a 1,000-pound animal going between 30 and 40 miles an hour. It's an extraordinary set of gifts that he has.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned him being covered in the paper. He was on the front page of The New York Times at one point. How did Isaac Murphy feel about all the attention?

Katherine C. Mooney: I wish I knew. He is, I think just in terms of personality, a very introverted guy. Also, one of the struggles of writing the book is there are really no personal material that he left. He's living out of a suitcase for eight months of the year, so I guess it's not a shock. I have to say that later in the writing process, I began thinking that he talks a lot about how tiring his job is. He's very open about the physical demands of it and how hard they are and how exhausting they are. I began to wonder if he felt it was socially acceptable to talk about that because other jockeys did.

People knew about how hard physically this sport was, but it was not socially acceptable to talk about being scrutinized. When he talks about how tired he is, I wonder if part of that is being so tired of being looked at, not just by white audiences, which he certainly is and he held up as this symbol of Black success. That is very double-edged. He's also constantly being called upon to represent African Americans and to do that in a very respectable and creditable way. I think that, just in the end, was such a difficult thing to do because he took that job so seriously.

Alison Stewart: He also had to maintain a certain weight. He would often nearly starve himself. From what you're researching on that, how did this lifestyle impact his health? Was it prevalent in the horse racing at the time or was there something, particularly to him, that he was obsessive about?

Katherine C. Mooney: I think most jockeys then and now struggle with weight, but some are more fortunate than others because they're just smaller people. He was not that tall, but he was kind of broad and stocky. He was always going to struggle more perhaps than some people. He's not unique. The folks in that position really are fighting a losing battle because they're trying to hold their weight down pretty far. For instance, he probably is meant to weigh like 140, 150 pounds. To work optimally, he has to ride at 110 or 105.

That's incredibly difficult to do. I would point out, that also means that he actually can't ride a lot of races. Because in those days, they do a lot of inter-age competition. They have big weight allowances, so he's often locked out of races where, for instance, younger horses might carry as little as 75 or 80 pounds. The struggles here are, I think, common, but he has a particularly difficult time with it. It, in the end, devastates his health. He dies of heart failure when he's 35 years old. It's really impossible for me to believe that that's not a major contributing factor.

Alison Stewart: He was a celebrity. He was an international celebrity, yet he was in financial difficulty later in his life. How was that possible that he ended up in such financial trouble?

Katherine C. Mooney: Well, I would say a couple of things about that. One is that he, throughout the later stages of his career, was constantly looking ahead to stay in the industry. He's thinking about what he's going to do next. What he wanted to do was train and then take younger horses, develop them, sell them for profit. He had friends who did that. As anybody who does that for a living can tell you, that's very risky, and it can be very expensive.

I would not be surprised if that had some financial consequences for him. I think, more broadly, there's an issue, which is that he doesn't talk about this, but some other jockeys do, that as somebody who is making just for that time, an incredible amount of money, right? He's making basically professional athlete money now by the standards of his time. You're constantly being called upon to assist people, to be a community supporter.

Also, you have seasonal employment, but you're trying to provide year-round security to a lot of people. That can be very difficult. More broadly, the thing that I thought about and the reason that I think he may really have gotten in trouble and that the same thing happens to other horsemen that people talk about, "Oh, wow, but he always had this huge roll of cash." I thought, "Well, he had that because that was it."

Alison Stewart: That was all he had.

Katherine C. Mooney: That's it. Once it's gone, it's gone. It's not in a bank. It's not creating interest, right?

Alison Stewart: It's a fascinating book, a fascinating man. The name of it is Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey. It is by Katherine Mooney. Katherine, thank you so much for sharing your writing with us.

Katherine C. Mooney: Thank you so much for having me.

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