The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America

About

About the Author
Ron Tarver comes from a family of African American cowboys. He grew up in Fort Gibson, a small agricultural community in rural northeastern Oklahoma. His grandfather, a member of the Black Freedman of the Cherokee Tribe, was a working cowboy during the 1940s, and Tarver spent many long, hot summer days hauling hay and working on local farms and ranches, occasionally rounding up stray cows. Tarver has distinguished himself in the field of fine-art photography. In 2021, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, in Creative Arts Photography and he has been in more than thirty solo and eighty group exhibitions. His photographs are also in numerous collections, including the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Oklahoma History Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, State Museum of Pennsylvania, and Studio Museum in Harlem. As a long-time staff photographer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, he shared the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his work on a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system, was nominated for three additional Pulitzers, and was honored with awards from World Press Photos and the Sigma Delta Chi Award of the Society of Professional Journalists. Tarver is currently Associate Professor of Art at Swarthmore College. He is co-author, with journalist Yvonne Latty, of We Were There: Voices of African-American Veteran from World War II to the War in Iraq (Harper Collins, 2004), which was accompanied by a traveling exhibition that debuted at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Tarver’s website.

About the Contributor
Art T. Burton retired in 2015 after spending thirty-eight years in higher education as a professor of history at Prairie State College and South Suburban College and as an administrator in African-American Student Affairs at Benedictine University, Loyola University Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of several groundbreaking books on African-American history in the West, most recently Cherokee Bill: Black Cowboy-Indian Outlaw (Eakins Press, 2020) and Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves (Bison Books, 2022).

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Praise

“Ron Tarver was one of the earliest photographers to dedicate himself to documenting the lives of Black cowboys, which he has done for thirty years. As a boy growing up in Oklahoma surrounded by ranchers, farmers, and horsemen, many of whom happened to be African American, he understood their culture not as a Hollywood concept but as a demanding way of life. His images of urban cowboys, rodeo riders, and ranch hands radiate an intimacy born of trust often nurtured over generations. The Long Ride Home celebrates the heritage and the enduring resilience of these Black cowboys, who may have surfaced into popular culture awareness only in the last few years but who actually helped shape the American West more than 150 years ago.”
—Elizabeth Cheng Krist, Senior Photo Editor, National Geographic Magazine

“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.”
—Loeil de la Photographie (read the full review here)

My Place

I usually don’t think of places that inspire my work but rather the people in those places. If I had to pinpoint a specific place, it would be under the shade tree that stood in front of my father’s “shop” in the yard of our home in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. My family called it the shop because that is where he repaired televisions and radio as his side hustle and where his darkroom was. I remember hot hazy evenings sitting under that tree with my mother, Roberta, and occasionally my father, Richard, eating cold watermelon and musing about whatever came to mind.

My father started a photography business during the 1940s, years before I was born, that lasted a decade or so, but, in that time, he photographed the Black side of town. He was not a famous photographer. His work was not known outside of Fort Gibson, but his photographs did mean something to the people who lived there. The pictures my father made are not just pictures. They are documents, forged in tiny specks of metallic silver, that protect the legacy of this Black community and the people who made it. They speak to the larger history of Blacks in the region who were enticed to Oklahoma Territory by the offer of free land to non-Indians. By the late 1880s, Blacks had established more than fifty all-Black communities. When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, it inherited these communities, making it the state with the most all-Black towns.

I was introduced to photography in that darkroom at the invitation of my father to watch the water (developer) and you’ll see a ghost appear. When I saw that image develop, I was hooked. Photography became my lifelong passion.

The images of people in this book are born from the passion and dedication my father instilled in his photographs. I hope they serve as lasting documents for those of African descent who celebrate their proud Western heritage.

Copyright © 2024 Ron Tarver. All rights reserved.