Civil Rights and the First African-American Superstar Athlete

200 West Park Avenue,Tallahassee FL 32301

10 February, 2022

Description

A talk by Dr. Katherine Mooney, presented in-person at Leroy Collins Main Library and by Zoom Isaac Murphy, born in 1861, became one of the most famous men in 19th-century America. This talk explores how he became the first African-American athletic superstar, winning three Kentucky Derbys and countless other stakes races. Murphy’s fame also put him in the middle of debates about freedom and equality for people of color after the Civil War. Looking at him and his family shows us how those debates affected the lives of everyday people in small towns in the South and continue to shape our lives today. Dr. Katherine Mooney James P. Jones Associate Professor of History, Florida State University A Louisiana native, a graduate of Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis, Katherine Mooney is interested in the cultural history of inequality in the United States–how it is imagined and made into political and legal discourse, how it plays out in people’s daily lives. She primarily works on the history of slavery and its legacies. Her book, Race Horse Men, examines the generations of black men who worked with Thoroughbred horses from the colonial period to the 1920s. She is presently at work on two new projects, a biography of one of the first African-American sports heroes, Isaac Murphy, and a project about ideas of gender and how they map onto animals in the United States. Publications: Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack Ruined By This Miserable War: The Dispatches of Charles Prosper Fauconnet