Meet and Greet: Katherine C. Mooney w/ Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey

About the Book:

Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes—and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all.

At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences.

This biography uncovers the history of Murphy’s troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. In following Murphy’s personal story, we can also trace two of the great stories of change in nineteenth-century America: the debates over what a multiracial democracy might look like and the battles over who was to hold power in an economy that increasingly resembled the corporate, wealth-polarized world we know today.

About the Author:

Katherine Mooney is James P. Jones Associate Professor of History at FSU. Her work mainly focuses on the history of the American South and the history of sports. Her new book is Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey.