When you think of Compton, California, a few things may spring to mind:
- Gang violence between the Crips and the Bloods overtook the populace in the 1970’s with death and crime rates remaining high until after the Rodney King Riots in the early 1990s.
- The rap group N.W.A. took the nation by storm and put Compton on the map in 1988.
- A laundry list of ground-breaking musicians including Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar, Eazy-E, Suge Knight, and Coolio
- But did you know about the cowboys?
For more than 20
years, her ceaseless struggle to secure funding and prestige for the program worked.
She retired recently, turning control of the ranch over to her nephew, Randall Hook. He and several other former CJP
members renamed it the Compton Junior Equestrians and took full control of the
organization on January 1, 2019. The job
of running such an organization is a particularly tough one and the struggle is
ongoing but these passionate young men and women who call themselves the
Compton Cowboys, one of only two riding clubs left, have never met a fight they weren’t willing to have.
Enter New York Times writer Walter Thompson-Hernández, a
native of Compton who has fond memories of the black cowboys in Compton parades
of his youth. Thompson-Hernández began his career with the New York Times in
2018 and writes for Surfacing, the NYT’s multimedia reporting team covering
subcultures and marginalized and offbeat communities around the world. He's
written about an albinism community in Ghana hunted for their body parts by
witch doctors and rural villages, the lowrider community in Tokyo and Nagoya in
Japan, women rappers in Oaxaca, Mexico speaking out against violence on women
in the region, and more.
His new book, The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of
Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland, teams with life. Thompson-Hernández lives
and works with the Compton Cowboys for over a year to give readers an in-depth
look at daily life in a community and a culture that in many ways still struggles
to survive. He does not stray away from
the harsh details of daily life and behavior, including mental illness and struggles with
drug and alcohol addiction, but allows the dreams and ambitions of these modern
pioneers to shine through those struggles.
This is definitely a story that deserves to be told.
For more of Walter Thompson-Hernández’s reporting, click here.
Find the Compton Cowboys online:
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew
Desmond
Pulitzer Prize winner, General Nonfiction, 2017
National Book Critics Circle Award winner, General
Nonfiction, 2016
From Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond, a landmark work of
scholarship and reportage that will forever change the way we look at poverty
in America.
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
2018 Audible Audiobook of the Year
Winner of the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in
Nonfiction
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and Kirkus Prize
Finalist
Named a Best Book of 2018 by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed, The
Undefeated, Library Journal, The Washington
Post, Southern Living, Entertainment
Weekly, and The New York Times Critics
In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending
essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of
secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation
teetering on the brink of moral collapse.
World cultures:
Outcasts United: The Story of a Refugee Soccer Team that Changed a Town by Warren St. John
The extraordinary tale of a refugee youth soccer team and
the transformation of a small American town. Clarkston, Georgia, was a typical
Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement center in the 1990s,
becoming the first American home for scores of families in flight from the
world's war zones, from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
Isolated by Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful
Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest
or injury. In a riveting narrative, award-winning journalist and often-injured
runner Christopher McDougall sets out to discover their secrets.
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