The canon of books on the sport’s great jockeys adds a new title this year with the publication of Katherine Mooney’s “Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey,” part of the Black Lives imprint published by Yale University Press. This fresh look at the life of the country’s most famous African American jockey brings Murphy into fresh relief, offering more information on his family as well as his career spent balancing being black and a high-achieving professional athlete in the years immediately after the Civil War. 

Mooney is the James P. Jones Professor of American History at Florida State University. She grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, in a family that shows Saddlebreds and followed horse racing as a casual fan until she started her graduate work in pursuit of a Ph.D. As a scholar of 19th Century American history, Mooney decided to focus her work on horse racing after the Civil War, especially how former slaves navigated familiar roles in the sport after emancipation. Her dissertation became the book “Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack,” published by Harvard University Press in 2014. 

Ahead of the book’s release in early May, Dr. Mooney talked about this new series, the writing process, and her takeaways from this look at the life and career of this famed African American jockey.

Tell us about the Black Lives imprint from Yale University Press. What is the goal of this series?

Katherine Mooney’s Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey

The goal is to create really readable books that bring to light stories of African Americans that are well known, but with a new angle. Honestly, for the people at Yale University Press, Isaac Murphy feels less known, and they were drawn to this idea of the history of African American athletes and their importance. They were really interested in Murphy as sort of an early figure in that history. I think that was what sold them on making him one of the first people they covered.

Why did you choose Isaac Burns Murphy over other names like Oliver Lewis or William Walker? 

He's kind of the progenitor of most African American athletes in our cultural consciousness, at least. It's really interesting thing that like in the 1880s and the 1890s, racing is being used to shame other sports because it's the inclusive sport. It's the one where people really compete against each other on the basis of skill. But I thought it was so interesting that people were conscious of that at the time, and they were really holding up racing as this model, which is not usually right. We're so used to this whole narrative about racing is so snobby and racing is so exclusive, and racing is so prejudiced.

Talk about the research for this. What sources did you use to find this information? 

I was lucky in that recently so much has been digitized, and I was particularly lucky because it was COVID. It would have been impossible to do it any other way. When Pellom McDaniels published his book, he had the census, and he had some other stuff, but there were records that were not as available to him, and I was able to access those. 

I would say that the most important records are the records the government makes after the Civil War, where you're not really looking for Isaac Murphy, you're looking for his mother because she's the surviving parent. And as a researcher, America Murphy is a godsend because she's a single parent, her husband's dead. This is stuff we did not know because those records had not been available, buried in the National Archives, and now there they are on the Internet, and anybody who has [access] can look at them. This was helpful in terms of figuring out and contextualizing the stuff from the obituary from the Thoroughbred Record, which is what we've typically had. 

Also Newspapers.com and the huge growth of what's available there made it possible to just sit there and actually say I have looked at basically everything that we have available on the Internet that has Isaac Murphy's name in it. I found that he randomly [gave] this amazing interview to this reporter in St. Louis and [told] him all kinds of stuff that I had never seen before. And I don't think that would have been available five years ago.

Pellom McDaniels also has a book on Murphy. How does yours differ? What do you add to the canon of work on this famed jockey?

McDaniels was trying to do this very comprehensive thing, and he doesn't really have the sources to do that. I think it does suffer from the fact that he did not have access to those sources. And to some degree, it also suffers in that he was very wedded to his own ideas about what Murphy stood for in terms of Black masculinity and black sportsmanship. A huge chunk of that book is not actually about Isaac Murphy, but it's about America. 

But one of the things that came to me while I was writing it is it's also completely a story about Lexington and about Central Kentucky in some ways, because that's very much where he comes from. That's the community he lives in. And it's a story about how that town has this remarkable community of people of color who are living through the aftermath of the Civil War. They're living through the coming of Jim Crow. It's a story about him and his friends in that community. And if you're not sort of thinking about Lexington as a character in the story, then I think you miss part of that story.

Author Katherine Mooney, Ph.D.

You discuss the perceptions of Murphy in the turf media of the time and how that fits in with the politics of race in this era. We rarely hear from Murphy himself, though. Why? Did he leave behind any correspondence or other record of his thoughts? 

Part of it goes back to sources, but as far as I know, he did not keep a record. I can't tell you what he thought because I have absolutely no access to his inner thought, so some of the book is a way to write around that and [say] here's what I can tell you and here's what I can’t tell you. But they did interview him a fair amount, as much as they interviewed, say, Jimmy McLaughlin. I think they're as interested in him as they are in people of similar fame. 

I think there are, like, three big interviews, maybe four, in the course of his career, and I used all of them, but when you read them, there are times when you think that accords with what I know of his personality. Then so much of it is also the reporter telling you all the things that they think. So, what you end up with is this overwhelming sense of this guy who the way he comes off in an interview is like this very self-contained, but very self-confident person. And he really does, to me, sound like a great athlete in the sense that he's like, ‘Hi, I'm here. I am perfectly well aware of how good I am at this. Here is how I have budgeted out what I do. Let me explain it to you to the degree that I can, politely.’ Let's face it, this is sort of like talking to Bill Belichick about what he does, where he's going to tell you all the technical stuff.

Murphy’s career starts crashing down after his ride on Firenzi. What ultimately do you think led to his unfortunate end to his career? 

Everybody knows that all jockeys do this occasionally, using alcohol as a short-term stimulant because of low nutrition. The way it was presented was, if you don't know this, then you're not in the game. So, we all kind of acknowledge that, and we know sometimes it has an impact, but it doesn't mean anything about who they are. But then when he does that on Firenzi, suddenly it's, oh, he's a drunk. And I thought, whoa, what happened here? Because I don't think what had happened was that different.

He's taken his body to the limit repeatedly, and it's had significant impact. And I think that was probably the day where it was worst and worst at the wrong time, in the sense that everybody's watching a heavy betting race. It happened at the wrong time, and also the cumulative effect of doing really horrible things to your body for a long time, a total disaster right there. 

The thing that really strikes me about that whole episode is, this is like the same kind of thing that had happened to him and to other people before, definitely at the wrong time, turned up to 11, but they had a narrative about why stuff like this happened and they didn't use it. And instead, they're saying, ‘Oh no, Haggin needs to fire him. This is disgraceful. He can't possibly be associated with this.’ That was the part that I thought was way more interesting to me than there must be a plot, does he have an alcohol problem? Because I think the answer is pretty clearly, that if he had an alcohol problem, they all did, and no, I don't think he was poisoned by a bookmaker. I think the man destroyed his body and then it came back and bit him.

What does Murphy’s story show about racing in this era? How does his experience differ from and parallel the experiences of today’s African American jockeys? 

I'm sure those guys have historically and probably continue to push against racism at this point. They don't have the benefit of that sort of group memory of Black men at the track. Instead, they're pushing against the opposite, which is why Greg Harbut said, ‘we're going to run the horse in the Derby.’ And he had to explain that the thing that people are going to notice here is our presence, not our absence.

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To me, the striking thing about a lot of the really successful black horsemen now is how often they are second and third and fourth generation. To me, the thing that really is striking is they actually have a very similar pattern to Murphy in that they come from these communities and these families where this is the thing that you do and that they have sustained that and survived with that even through all the stuff that Murphy dealt with as the first casualty of Jim Crow. Now we're actually starting to see that they're still there. To me, I think Murphy would love that. 

What does work on the history of horse racing contribute to our conversations about the sport today?

I would say one of the reasons I do it is because one of the things that really draws me to the sport, in addition to the horses, is the history. I think racing has a history that is deeper and more exciting and more dramatic and richer than any other sport. For me, that's why I do it. That's part of what drew me in the first place and made me a fan. 

If we're going to be in this perpetual crisis where we're worried about attendance and we're worried about people not understanding the sport, if we want to protect the sport, we need to make clear why people should love it. Why not foreground this thing that draws people to it? 

And that makes racing unique, I would argue. It has a longer history than any other sport in America. Maybe we could think about, what was it like when racing was the mega sport? What choices were made? How was it organized? Because I do think that a lot of racing marketing is relatively short sighted, and looking at it in a longer trajectory would be helpful.

Ultimately, what do you want your readers to take away from this book?

I want them to take away a sense of two things. I want them to take away a sense of Murphy as a real person, an extraordinary person, but a person who was living through this particular context. If you understand him as a real person, you are honoring his legacy, but also in that sense, maybe understanding more about the truth of American history. 

I would also say I would like people to take away a sense of racing as this thing that is important and powerful and something that is worth our time and our attention and that is so beautiful and so meaningful. And that's both for people who aren't in the sport but also, for people who are because we forget that or we undersell it or we're short sighted about it. 

That's why I ended it that way. People act like we don't know what Isaac Murphy thought of racing. It was the job he had, and it was the job men like him had. I don't necessarily think he was sentimental, but he loved those horses, and he loved the people that he worked with, and I think that's not different from people now. 

Isaac Burns Murphy (1861-1896) won three Kentucky Derbys, the Travers Stakes, the Kentucky Oaks, and many more of the sport’s famed stakes during his nearly two-decade career as a jockey. He was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1955. Pre-order “Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey,”  by Katherine C. Mooney from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, and the Yale University Press.