The Texas Black Invitational Rodeo honored the pioneering cowboy who created opportunities for Black competitors and worked to restore their place in western history.
By Michael Cuviello
Dallas Morning News
https://www.dallasnews.com/
A DJ played R&B and hip-hop as horses raced across the dirt, cowboys wrestled steers and a sold-out crowd cheered inside Fair Park Coliseum.
During intermission, the competition paused to honor the man who helped make the scene possible.
Cleo Hearn, the pioneering cowboy who helped establish the Texas Black Invitational Rodeo, died in November at 86. With members of Hearn’s family present Saturday, African American Museum, Dallas, President and CEO Lisa Brown Ross spoke to the crowd about his impact on rodeo and his work preserving the history of Black cowboys.
“This is the first one we’ve done without him,” said Harlan Hearn, Hearn’s oldest son and president of Hearn Rodeo Productions and Cowboys of Color Rodeo. “It’s kind of bittersweet, but we have to move on. We have to keep going.”
The 37th Texas Black Invitational Rodeo was built around that idea: remembering the people pushed to the margins of western history while creating opportunities for those carrying the tradition forward.
Black cowboys helped shape the American West but were often absent from the movies, television programs and history lessons that shaped popular ideas about cowboy culture. Within the sport, segregation once kept Black competitors out of some rodeos or relegated them to competition after most spectators had left.
Cleo Hearn and museum founder Harry Robinson Jr. created the Dallas event to confront that exclusion while giving Black cowboys and cowgirls a prominent arena in which to compete.
“There’s more to the West than they know, than they’ve been told,” Harlan Hearn said. “It’s not that it doesn’t exist. It’s just never been represented.”
Saturday’s rodeo featured about 150 competitors from across the country, according to Ross. Events included bull riding, barrel racing, steer wrestling, tie-down roping and the Pony Express relay race.
Cleo Hearn began competing at 16 after being inspired as a child by Black cowboy Marvel Rogers at a rodeo in Boley, Oklahoma. In 1970, Hearn became the first Black cowboy to win tie-down roping at a major rodeo when he captured the event at the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo in Denver according to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.
He later founded Cowboys of Color Rodeo and spent decades combining competition with lessons about the Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people whose roles in shaping the West were often missing from popular culture. He was inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame in 2022.
Barriers inside the arena
Veteran cowboy David “Rookie” Brooks remembers the barriers Hearn worked to dismantle.
Brooks, 65, of Mansfield, said he began riding bulls at 7, became a rodeo clown at 10 and has worked fighting bulls at Hearn-produced rodeos for about 25 years.
When Brooks started competing, he said, some rodeos would not allow Black cowboys to ride during the main performance. Organizers sometimes held his bull until the slack, competition conducted outside the advertised show.
“They would run my bull during the slack, after all the rodeo was over,” Brooks said. “But people would stay just to see a Black guy ride a bull.”
Brooks competed in one of Hearn’s early Black rodeos in Oklahoma City when he was about 16. After he won the bull-riding event, Hearn approached him.
“He said, ‘You’re a true cowboy. Follow me,’” Brooks recalled.
Decades later, Brooks said he can still feel Hearn’s presence behind the bucking chutes.
“I still feel like he’s here,” Brooks said. “When I’m behind the bucking chutes, I feel like he’s still here with me.”
The story of one generation helping the next continued Saturday with Jeremy Burkhalter, a 47-year-old Houston-area history teacher and coach who won the steer-wrestling event.
Burkhalter began competing in rodeo at 36 after playing basketball. Both sports require athleticism, preparation and a willingness to work without any guarantee of winning, he said.
“You’re not guaranteed to win, but you’re guaranteed to lose if you don’t work hard,” Burkhalter said.
He credited Brooks with helping him after he broke down in Stephenville when he was relatively new to rodeo. Brooks, who did not know him at the time, gave him a place to stay, put him to work and allowed him to practice with his horses and cattle.
“He’s a winner, not only in the arena but in life,” Burkhalter said. “He made me realize that I can do this at a high level if I put the work into it and treat people right.”
For Burkhalter, Hearn and Brooks demonstrated that rodeo can offer more than competition. It can provide discipline, pride and community.
“They paved the way,” he said. “They know what it takes to win.”
Women carry western traditions forward
Brittany Amos of Anderson said she has ridden horses for as long as she can remember and has competed for more than 40 years. Barrel racing, she said, depends on trust between a rider and her horse.
“When you have your horse, your horse is your partner,” Amos said.
Her presence in the arena also challenged assumptions about women in rodeo.
“It’s to show people that we’re not just pretty faces,” Amos said. “We can also get out there and get dirty.”
The rodeo’s account of the West extended beyond Black cowboy history. It also featured escaramuza charra, a traditional Mexican equestrian sport in which teams of eight women perform synchronized, intersecting patterns at high speed while riding sidesaddle.
Martha Alcala, 25, said she has participated in escaramuza charra since she was 13. Rules govern the riding technique and competitors’ handcrafted clothing, preserving a tradition passed down through generations.
“We’re trying to show people what our culture is and how we ride,” Alcala said. “We don’t want to differ from what the rules were.”
Ross said the rodeo’s history belongs to the country as a whole, not only to the Black community.
“It’s not just African American history, but it’s American history,” Ross said. “We were participants in the culture of the cowboy and the essence of what it means to be a cowboy.”
For Cleo Hearn, creating that recognition was more important than building a personal legacy, his son said. He wanted to make room for the cowboys of his generation and those who would come after them.
“He didn’t do this for legacy,” Harlan Hearn said. “It turned out to be legacy.”
For Hearn and his brothers, keeping the rodeo going is less about assuming a new responsibility than continuing something that has always belonged to their family.
“I was born into it,” Hearn said. “It’s been a part of my life. It’s been a part of my brothers’ lives. For us to continue this, it’s really just a natural progression.”
Breaking News Reporter
Michael Cuviello is a breaking news reporter for The Dallas Morning News. He previously reported for the Amarillo Globe-News, where he led on-the-ground coverage of the Smokehouse Creek fire, the largest wildfire in Texas history. A graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso, he served as the sports editor for the student publication, The Prospector. Cuviello is a combat veteran who served more than a decade in the military.
