In shaping Peter of Chasing Freedom into a character who loves animals and finds his place as a stable boy, I dug deeply into the history of horse racing in the late 1700s and early 1800s. That research led me to an extraordinary source: The Great Black Jockeys by Edward Hotaling.
On its cover is a reference to a CBS Sunday Morning segment Charles Osgood once reported on — a piece about the remarkable Black jockeys who dominated early American racing. These men were the finest riders in the country, yet they were eventually pushed out of the sport solely because of their skin color. As Osgood said, they were “driven out of the sport and out of history.”
Their story was a surprise to me. The first black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby was a black man. It also felt like exactly the kind of truth my fiction should help bring back into the light. Including characters inspired by these forgotten athletes allowed me to honor their legacy — and to give readers a glimpse of a history too often left untold.