“No Justice, No Derby”
The Kentucky Derby will, to the surprise of many, be run this Saturday at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky. The 150,000 or so rich fans and assorted hangers-on will be absent, however – no fancy hats and $1,000 mint juleps this year.
Louisville (population 600,000+, of whom around 25% are Black; the Black poverty rate is 35%) had originally planned to have 23,000 spectators, but due to Covid-19 and pressure from local activists, this plan was squelched. So there will be no one there.
Readers will recall that Louisville was also the site of the police killing of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, an EMT who was shot in her own home while in bed last March 13 when three LMPD officers broke into the home with a no-knock warrant and her boyfriend (who wasn’t even the person they had a warrant out on) fired a shot believing that intruders had broken in (he also called 911 to report a break-in). The police officers then fired 20 rounds. Breonna was hit (at least) five times, and survived for a few minutes while her boyfriend was frantically calling in the shooting.
As of early August, the city had undergone 75 days of protest, with the core demand that the police who killed Taylor be arrested and charged with murder (to date, one has been fired and another two have been reassigned to admin positions; that’s it). The LMPD has been typically unforthcoming about the incident – they were searching for two drug dealers (neither of them, however, were at the home – one was a former boyfriend who’d left some time previously, and he was already in custody when the warrant was [incorrectly] executed) and purportedly suspected Breonna’s home was being used as a drug drop. (It also seems possible that they hadn’t bothered to verify whether the ex-boyfriend still lived there at all.)
“No justice, no Derby” is the latest meme in Louisville, joining “Say Her Name”, as activists condemn the decision to go ahead and hold a “celebratory event” as if nothing had happened in the city.
The Derby is the first of the three “Triple Crown” thoroughbred horseraces held each spring in the U.S., and is traditionally held on the first Saturday in May; the second is the Preakness Stakes ([Pimlico] Baltimore, Md, held on the third Saturday in May), and the third is the Belmont Stakes ([Belmont Park], Elmont, NY). If a three-year-old wins all three races, then they become the “Triple Crown” winner; only 13 horses have won it. The stud fees for winners – which is where the real money is to be made – can reach $200,000, and a stallion may “cover” (live breed with) as many as 200 mares a season in North America, and then travel to South America and do the same again – for a total of $8,000,000 in a single breeding year. [The race itself has a winnings pool of around $2 million, two-thirds of which goes to the winner.]
In a city whose large Black population continues to grieve an entirely unjustified / unwarranted killing of a young Black woman who was loved and known in her community, it seems like pouring salt in the wound to hold the Derby at all – nearly all the economic benefits to the city will be lost anyway due to the absence of spectators, and it’s very hard to comprehend the reasoning behind the decision at all – the official public statement was insensitive:
“Officials’ unprecedented announcement in late August, which described the Derby as ‘a time-honored American tradition … about bringing people together,’ did little to quell efforts to boycott or disrupt it.”
The bitter irony of it all is that while today, thoroughbred horseracing is a rich man’s sport, with tickets starting at around $1500 for a halfway decent view of the track (2019 prices) – no one from the city’s Black community can enjoy the event, and all it causes is a weekend of traffic nightmares in the lower middle-class mixed-race neighborhood surrounding the Downs), during the first quarter-century of thoroughbred racing in the U.S. at Churchill Downs, Black jockeys reigned supreme, actually winning the Derby 15 times between 1875 and 1902. In a very real sense, they made the sport we know today.
But as in so many other fields of endeavor, once big money came into play (betting, buying-selling the horses themselves), the Black jockeys were forced out of the sport. Between 1921 and 2000, not a single Black jockey rode in the race.
“‘Like too many things in America, what African Americans helped start and what African Americans helped become a powerhouse in the economic field, we were excluded from once money was made,’ said Lamont Collins, founder of Louisville’s Roots 101 African American Museum. ‘And that’s the truth of the Kentucky Derby.’”
Jecorey Arthur, a 28-year-old musician who recently became the youngest person ever elected to the Louisville Metro Council:
“Arthur had pushed for Saturday’s race to be canceled unless it barred spectators. Some people reacted as if he had spoken blasphemy, he said, because the race is ‘just such a sacred time for our city. But what they fail to realize is that it has never been sacred for us, for over 100 years now, because we haven’t been included in that celebration. We haven’t been included in that economic impact. We haven’t been included in Louisville.’” [Emphasis added]
We’re reminded of reporting and stories we’ve read about Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood (Tulsa Race Massacre, late May – early June 1921), when the city’s “Black Wall Street” was burned to the ground within the space of about 48 hours, never to recover. And we’re reminded of a story we commented on recently, that about environmental racism in Richmond, Virginia – remember the Black neighborhood featured in that story? Its name was Gilpin, and it too had once been dubbed “The Black Wall Street” of Richmond.
If we were in a position to do something concrete right now, we’d try to organize a movement to found a Black bank again on Chicago’s South/West Sides – and, if Illinois ever gets its Community Bank of Illinois (its public bank, owned by the public and run for the public benefit), we’d lobby at the Statehouse for a dedicated revenue stream to be directed towards backing loans to Black small business owners and would-be owners, and a mortgage stream dedicated to supporting home loans in Illinois’ poorest zip codes, nearly all of which are Black or majority-Black. And if we had power at the national level, well, we’d support federal legislation outlawing single-home zoning in residential areas throughout the entire country, with the goal of achieving fully-integrated, mixed-income housing everywhere, in every city.
And that’s just the start of what we’d do if wishes were horses.
The Derby and Louisville elite who took the final decision about holding the Derby on Saturday have made a grave error. Holding the Derby is wrong politically, it’s pointless from an economic standpoint, and it’s morally culpable.
Our “Further Reading” section today is devoted to two really excellent and deeply moving remembrances of Breonna Taylor, one by her Mother and the other by her sister, 20-year-old Ju’Niyah Palmer:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Life Breonna Taylor Lived, in the Words of her Mother”
Caitlin Gibson, “I Was her Shadow: As Millions Cry for Justice, Breonna Taylor’s Sister Faces her Own Private Grief”