The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America

＂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... The Long Ride Home celebrates the heritage and the enduring resilience of these Black cowboys...＂ Elizabeth Cheng Krist, Senior Photo Editor, National Geographic Magazine

The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America is among the first books to tell the story of the Black cowboy experience in contemporary America. Although Black cowboys have been a fixture on the American landscape since the nineteenth century, few people are aware of their enduring contributions to the history of the West and how their unique culture continues to thrive in urban as well as rural areas all over the country.

The bookfeatures Ron Tarver’s beautiful, compelling, and often surprising contemporary images of African-American cowboys that not only convey the Black cowboy’s way of life and its rich heritage, but also affirm a thriving culture of Black-owned ranches and rodeo operations, parades, inner-city cowboys, retired cowhands, and Black cowgirls of all ages, too. Tarver, who comes from a family of Black cowboys in Oklahoma, uses his artistry to question, if not upend, long-held notions of what it means to be a cowboy and, with that, what it means to be an American.

The Long Ride Home couldn’t be more timely, coming on the heels of Beyonce’s hit album, Cowboy Carter (2024), and films such as Lil Nas X’s hit time-travel Western, Old Town Road (2019), andIdris Elba’s Concrete Cowboy (2021). The latter was based on Greg Neri’s book, Ghetto Cowboy (2013), about Philadelphia’s contemporary African-American cowboy culture. Many of Tarver’s images were made in some of the same Philadelphia neighborhoods.

In addition to Tarver’s photographs, The Long Ride Home includes an essay by Art T. Burton, an expert on the history of Black cowboys. This book is both a tribute to and a celebration of the Black cowboy in America, providing an invaluable and unique perspective on American history and culture as well as the Black experience in America.