Cowboys of Color

Picture the Old West. You may see John Wayne… Roy Rogers… Clint Eastwood. But as Ben Calhoun found… some of the stories West are still being written. In search of an Asian Cowboy on America’s professional rodeo circuit… he found a family doing just that. Ben caught up with Cleo Hearn… champion calf roper… and the founder of an organization called Cowboys of Color.

Hearn and his four sons… all African American cowboys… have dedicated themselves to rodeo… and the tradition of non-white cowboys of the American West. Together they’re carrying on that tradition near Dallas, TX. Cleo Hearn will be the first person to tell you the world of rodeo hasn’t always welcomed him with open arms. But that’s never stopped him.

Track 1
Cleo Hearn
Tape Tr. 3
OK where I was born, when I was fifteen I tried to enter the rodeo there. They wouldn’t let me enter because I was black. It was heartbreaking. Ome of these guys that were riding were my white friends, and I think it hurt them more than it hurt me. There were people who wanted to see me ride.

When I meet Cleo Hearn… the first thing I notice is his size. His six-foot-plus frame… towers over his cowboy boots. With his jeans tucked into the top of those boots… and a cleanly starched collared shirt there’s no doubt you’re talking to a cowboy. A grandfather… he seems nimble enough to rope any calf that might come his way. His ranch home on the outskirts of Dallas is filled with rodeo. Posters of rodeos… pictures of bucking broncos. Still, it’s easy to underestimate hearn’s love for what he calls the Western way of life.

Track 2
Cleo Hearn
Tape 22:30
When you start talking about where did you come from… I believe god put me on this earth to do this. {I’m sixty three years old.} There wasn’t a day in my life when I didn’t want to be a cowboy.
[Edit]
Cleo Hearn
Tape 42:50
{I think… I mean, }I know I could have been a baseball player, I was good enough… good enough that I could have probably played pro if I had as much interest in that as I did in rodeo. All I can tell you, is every time I tried something else I’d always come back to roping… like I said I haven’t woken up a day in my life when I didn’t want to be a cowboy… calf roper especially. [So when you go back and you look over 63 years and you see this, you quit fighting it.]

As we stand in his living room… we watch homemovies of him and his sons competeing at rodeos.
[Bed sound of Cleo and I watching the video]
As we watch an educational video… Hearn begins to talk history. He talks at a hundred-miles an hour… sometimes echoing the lines of the narrator

[Sound comes into the clear]
Track 3
What he’s saying is it wasn’t exactly like that… of the 40-thousand cowboys that rode the range in the early days, one third of them were black, Hispanic, and Indian. {One of the themes of the Cowboys of Color rodeo is let us educate you while we entertain you. Let us tell you about the things that black, Hispanics and Native Americans did for the settling of the west that the history books left out.} This is what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to make history, we’re just trying to show you… yes we were back there.
[Bed sound again]

Hearn sees himself as a caretaker of that history. His family is somewhat of a dynasty in that way. All of his sons are professional rodeo cowboys. At 40… Harlan Hearn is the oldest. While he doesn’t compete anymore… he says he was born into rodeo.

[Bed sound of Harlan]
Track 4
Harlan Hearn
Tape 3:53
That decision was made as a child… with a stick horse, a pickin’ string, and pretending. We played rodeo as kids the way some kids play baseball, football… it was our sandlot version. We created our own areas, and in our play rodeo we competed against the top cowboys of that time. It was never really one particular moment it just evolved, just from being around it all the time.
4:34 {I would describe it to a person who had maybe been around baseball, or loved baseball.} It’s just… as they say, it’s in your blood. You wake up in the morning, and you just sort of eat, sleep rodeo, just like any other person with any other type of passion. Whatever that passion may be, it possesses you, it stays on you mind all the time, and you go in a direction to fulfill your dreams.

Someone who is not familiar with the rodeo might not understand the combination of art and science that is that passion. At a Fort Worth Rodeo… I watch Harlin’s brother Wendell compete. For the first time I get a glimpse through Cleo’s eyes.

Track 6
Cleo Hearn
SOUNDS OF HIS SON FROM FRIDAY’S RODEO UNDERNEATH. 30-45 SECONDS AFTER EDITING.

Listening to Hearn… it’s easy for his joy to mask the discrimination he’s faced. Cleo Hearn can tell you countless stories of being turned away. Rodeo organizers who forced him to compete after the crowds had all gone home… even when he was one of the best on the circuit. He talks about the looks he would get when he would compete. He tells me about one Louisiana rodeo where he and another black cowboy went to compete. But now… Harlin says things are better. He says the looks have changed.

Track 6
Harlan Hearn
Tape 7:30
{Most of it was really truly curiosity… and still today} if you have not seen an African-American cowboy, you watch television, and if you haven’t seen it in real life, and you haven’t seen it on television, you haven’t been exposed to it… and it’s just curious looks, it’s just… they watch and they watch you perform, and afterwards I’ve actually had people come up and say “You know, I had not idea there were black cowboys.” That’s really what it is, it’s the curiosity that they have. I don’t want to call it amazement, but to a certain extent it is. It just kind of takes them back a step. They just go “Wow… I didn’t know,” it leads back to the purpose of what we do. It is that exposure that we’re looking for.

The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association says it doesn’t keep track of the number of cowboys of color. BUT Harlan estimates there are 153 black “professional” cowboys. He says that’s a sign of progress.

Track 8
Harlan Hearn
Tape 13.56
There are always new generations coming in. The looks we get today, and I guess from a certain standpoint, a lot of looks we get today, because of the rodeos we do are from young African American children, and they’re parents and their grandparents. I think those looks we will continue to get… hopefully those looks will get reduced just through education, and the rodeos we produce. It’s actually a good thing to see those looks from the children because to me we are showing them an option outside of baseball, basketball, and football. You know, those are the big money sports, and that’s where the glory is… this is a sport too… and education and exposure is really the only way to do away with the looks.

Cleo Hearn says he plans to do rodeo as long as he can.

HEARN CUT TALKING ABOUT HISTORY SHORT

This fall, Cowboys of Color wraps up a six rodeo tour across the southwest. Before I leave the Hearn home… I walk out to the family’s barn that sits about a 1-hundred yards behind the house. There are two practice pens for calf roping on the left. Up ahead there are horses. For the Beat… I’m Ben Calhoun.