The History of African American Horse Racing

"It's a great story. And it's just not your, not that there's anything wrong with it, but it's not your average," says author Isaac Johnson. "I thought, okay, I need to like figure out what this tells us about 19th century America", he adds of the enslaved men who were national celebrities in the 1850s. The main prestige tracks in America before the Civil War all kind of end up in the South; farms producing some of these horses are in Kentucky and also in Alabama and Louisiana.