I grew up In Saratoga Springs, NY, and we have a famous race track there, too. And it's also a very diverse community, including at the track, and those who work with the horses. But it's true that the jockeys, at least those I grew up being familiar with, are almost all Latino. I hadn't given it much thought before, and though I was a kid, I should have...

was ridden by an AA jockey, Oliver Lewis, and trained by an AA trainer, Ansel Williamson, a future Hall of Famer. The owner, Hal Price McGrath, although not AA, was born to poverty in Kentucky, headed west to prospect for gold in CA, and from that beginning was ultimately able to earn enough $$$ to return to KY to establish a stud farm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristides_(horse)

From the link - a description of how the first race was run:

Saving for after work.

I may have misspelled the author's last name, but I first learned about black jockeys by reading William C. Roden's book Million Dollar Slave. I highly recommend the book. It takes on the issue of whether or not current highly paid athletes are slaves. While doing this, Roden gives a history of black athletes.

Thanks!

From the Apostrophe! album, a song called Uncle Remus - this is the second verse:

"Just keep your nose to the grindstone they say
Will that redeem us, Uncle Reemus
I can't wait til my fro is full grown
I'll just throw away my du-rag at home
I'll take a drive to Beverly Hills just before dawn
And knock the little jockeys off the rich people's lawn
And before they get up I'll be gone, I'll be gone
Before they get up I'll be knocking the jockeys off the lawn
Down in the dew"

Huntington, Pasadena, Beverly Hills, Santa Anita - in the 60's and 70's you could drive through the very rich neighborhoods and all these damned palaces seemed to have statues of jockeys on their front lawns, jockeys that were usually black.

All the horse track folks knew that in the post Civil War era, many if not most of the jockeys were black. The rest of our country, not so much.