The Man Who Brought Harlem a Rodeo
After a landmark Black rodeo in New York, Cleo Hearn realized winning buckles wasn’t enough. Cowboys of Color became his answer
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Under the bright lights of Fair Park Coliseum in Dallas, the dust hangs in the air like a curtain. A chestnut horse pivots in a tight circle, nostrils flaring, as a calf bolts from the chute and darts across the arena. The rope sings once, twice, then whistles forward. In less than ten seconds it’s over: the loop settles cleanly, the calf hits the dirt, the cowboy dismounts and ties three legs with the muscle memory of a thousand practice runs.
Over the loudspeaker, before the crowd has even finished cheering, a familiar baritone cuts through the noise.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer says, “let’s talk about who really built the West.”
At the edge of the arena, leaning on the rail in a starched shirt and black hat, Cleo Hearn watches the crowd more than the clock. For decades, this has been the rhythm of his rodeos—action followed by history lessons, eight-second rides punctuated by quiet corrections to the myth of the white, lone cowboy. At Cowboys of Color events, the show has always been only half the point.
“Our job,” he liked to say, “is to rope calves and rewrite history, all in the same night.”
A boy in Seminole, chasing a different kind of dream
Cleo Lavorde Hearn was born in 1939 in Seminole, Oklahoma, to an African American mother and a father from the Seminole Nation. This was oilfield country and Jim Crow country, where the line between town and pasture was thin. His family assumed he would follow his father into baseball; that was the sport they knew.
But sometime around age nine, the story goes, he saw something that rearranged his future: a Black cowboy named Marvel Rogers riding into an Oklahoma arena. Suddenly the cowboy world didn’t look so far away—or quite so white.
By sixteen, Hearn was entering local rodeos as a roper—calf, team and steer—and learning fast that the arena dirt was not neutral ground. In the 1950s, many producers simply refused to let Black cowboys compete, or they relegated them to separate rodeos tucked away from the main circuit. When they did get in, the judging often tilted against them.
Hearn would later explain why he gravitated toward tie-down calf roping: the clock didn’t care what color you were. In an era when style points and subjective scoring could be weaponized, timed events felt like a small zone of fairness.
Still, even the clock couldn’t get him into every rodeo. In his early years on the professional circuit, he would arrive ready to compete and be told he wasn’t welcome—until the other cowboys and the crowd pushed back.
“When Cleo started in the rodeo business as a Black man he was not allowed to compete in the regular rodeos because of discrimination,” the Cowboys of Color organization now writes in its official history. “He persevered until the audience and the other cowboys forced the rodeo producers to let him compete because his calf roping times were better than the rest of the competitors.”
In 1959, he joined what’s now the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA), one of just a few Black cowboys on the national stage.
The first Black rodeo scholarship—and a detour to the White House
Talent could pry open doors that racism tried to keep shut. In the late 1950s, Hearn made history as the first African American to attend college on a rodeo scholarship, enrolling first at Oklahoma State University to compete on the rodeo team. When the school canceled its rodeo program, he transferred, eventually earning a business degree from historically Black Langston University.
The route there was complicated. In 1961, the U.S. Army drafted him. Hearn ended up in one of the most visible uniforms in America: he was selected as one of the first eight Black soldiers to serve in the Presidential Honor Guard under President John F. Kennedy.
Even in Washington, he kept riding. Off-duty, he’d pile fellow soldiers into a bus they’d hired and head for a New Jersey rodeo known as Cowtown. The days were for standing guard near the White House; the nights were for chasing calves under cheap arena lights.
That double life—a formal, integrated America by day, a segregated cowboy world by night—sharpened his understanding of where barriers were shifting and where they were stubbornly holding.
After his two years in the Army, Hearn returned to Oklahoma to finish his business degree. He kept competing, honing the skills that would eventually make him one of the best tie-down ropers in the country.
“Roping and moonlighting”
The moment that cements his place in the record books comes in 1970, at Denver’s National Western Stock Show & Rodeo—one of the crown jewels of the circuit. In tie-down roping, Hearn posts the fastest time, becoming the first Black cowboy to win a calf-roping title at a major rodeo.
By then, rodeo had already given him a second career.
His success in the arena helped land him in a television commercial for Ford tractors. Executives soon discovered that the man in the hat also held a business degree. Not long afterward, they hired him. Hearn would spend more than thirty years with Ford, rising to Southwestern zone manager and working with dealerships across Texas and beyond.
He jokingly described his schedule as “roping and moonlighting.” In practice, it was the opposite: he did Ford business by day, visiting dealerships, troubleshooting sales, representing the company; then he hit the rodeo road on nights and weekends, often hauling his four sons along as they grew old enough to compete.
It wasn’t just a matter of money—though rodeo checks helped. Corporate life provided him with something else: fluency in sponsorships, marketing, and logistics. Those would become crucial tools when he decided that competing wasn’t enough.
Harlem, 1971: when the mission changed
The pivot point in Hearn’s life doesn’t happen in Oklahoma or Texas. It happens in Harlem.
In September 1971, semi-trucks and horse trailers crowded the streets near Randall’s Island in New York City. Pickup trucks with Oklahoma and Texas plates rolled in, cowboys and cowgirls climbing down in boots and wide-brimmed hats. The event was called simply Black Rodeo.
The rodeo drew thousands of children from Harlem and the surrounding neighborhoods—many of whom had never seen a cowboy in person, much less a Black cowboy. Accounts from the time describe cowboys letting kids sit on their horses in the streets, the parade spilling over into the sidewalks.
Hearn was one of the key organizers and competitors. For days afterward, he couldn’t shake the look on those kids’ faces.
He later said that seeing Black children stare up at Black cowboys—eyes wide, mouths open—changed his ambitions. He still wanted to win, but he also wanted to show a generation of young people that the cowboy story included them.
That same year, he produced what Texas cowboy historians now describe as his first big Black rodeo, a show organized specifically to reach 10,000 children in Harlem with a lineup of 100 Black cowboys from Texas and Oklahoma. If a major rodeo wouldn’t tell the story he knew to be true, he would build one that did.
A few years earlier, in 1969, he had helped co-found the American Black Cowboy Association, embracing an emerging movement to document and elevate Black contributions to the Western story. Now he was going further, creating a full-scale touring production.
Building the Texas Black Rodeo—and then Cowboys of Color
In 1971, Hearn began producing the Texas Black Rodeo, a new kind of event on the circuit—part competition, part cultural correction. It would eventually evolve into a mainstay in Dallas and other cities: a summer rodeo tied closely to the African American Museum in Dallas, raising both funds and visibility.
By the mid-1990s, he recognized that the audiences and the contestants who found their way to his events were broader than the name suggested. Historians estimate that as many as one in four working cowboys in the late nineteenth century were Black, while countless others were Mexican vaqueros or Native horsemen pushed westward by violence and land theft. Hearn saw that complexity in his own arenas: Black, Hispanic, and Native riders shared the chutes and back pens.
In 1995, he formally renamed the Texas Black Rodeo as Cowboys of Color Rodeo to underline that multicultural reality. The new name wasn’t cosmetic; it announced his mission.
“He wanted rodeos that were open to all athletes,” one retrospective from the National Cowboy Museum notes, “and used breaks between events to educate attendees about the long history of Black, Hispanic and indigenous cowboys and cowgirls.”
At a Cowboys of Color show, the script diverged from a typical PRCA rodeo in key ways. There were the standard events—bareback riding, steer wrestling, barrel racing, tie-down roping—but also Pony Express relays and grand entries that foregrounded multicultural riders. Between events, a narrator would step in to explain who Bass Reeves was, or how Mexican vaqueros shaped roping techniques, or why Native horsemen were often erased from frontier lore.
And then there was the simple fact of the lineup: 200 or so cowboys and cowgirls of every shade, competing for prize money and pride.
“Before I got into it,” Hearn told a reporter years later, “they didn’t let Black cowboys in professional rodeos, so Black cowboys started their own.” Cowboys of Color was both a continuation of that self-determined tradition and a bridge back to mainstream arenas.
Inside the tour: rodeo as classroom
To sit in the stands at a Cowboys of Color event in Fort Worth or Mesquite or Denver is to feel the cadence Hearn perfected.
A bull explodes from the chute, trying to sling its rider into the rafters. Eight seconds later, the buzzer sounds, the crowd roars and the rider stumbles free. As the pickup men clear the arena, the jumbotron flashes an image of a Black cowboy from the 1880s, or a Latina rancher from south Texas. The announcer starts talking—not about the last ride, but about the way Hollywood shrunk the West into a white fable.
“We mix entertainment with education,” Hearn liked to say. “You come for the show, you leave with some history.”
For many in the stands, the history was as startling as the bucking stock. School groups, church youth ministries, and families could see Black men and women, Latino riders, and Native competitors in roles they’d rarely seen depicted.
The tour grew into what the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame now calls “the largest multicultural rodeo in the world.” It traveled across the country, but its heart remained in North Texas. The Texas Black Invitational Rodeo at Dallas’s Fair Park emerged as a signature event and a major fundraiser for the African American Museum, Dallas—proof, year after year, that cultural institutions and cowboy arenas could share a mission.
The show’s success rested not just on Hearn’s charisma but on his insistence that every stop on the tour be accessible. He kept ticket prices relatively low, pushed for group sales to schools, and framed the rodeo as a family outing. Sponsors—some cultivated through his Ford connections—helped subsidize the costs.
Behind the scenes, he was doing something equally radical: treating up-and-coming riders the way no one had treated him.
Mentoring the next generation
If you talk to calf ropers in Texas long enough, Hearn’s name surfaces with a particular kind of gratitude.
The Washington Post’s obituary of Hearn recounts how he routinely paid entry fees for young riders who couldn’t afford them, and how his four sons remember kids just “showing up” at their house or practice pen because they’d somehow gotten word that Mr. Hearn would help. He watched how they handled a rope, but also how they handled a conversation.
His son Harlan recalled that his father never turned anyone away, never hoarded knowledge. If a kid was paying attention, Cleo would sit on a tailgate and talk them through the mechanics of roping—or the obstacles that still lingered in the sport.
Those informal lessons built out the network that Cowboys of Color needed. The tour relied on riders who could compete at a high level and understood that the job was not only to chase checks, but to embody possibility for whoever happened to be sitting in the cheap seats.
The effect rippled forward. All four of Hearn’s sons—Harlan, Eldon, Robby and Wendell—became calf ropers themselves and attended college on rodeo scholarships, part of a second generation that no longer had to break down as many doors just to enter an arena.
“Because of Dad,” Harlan has said, “I was never turned away from a rodeo. I was never told I could not compete.”
A cowboy in two worlds
For a long time, Hearn moved between corporate boardrooms and dusty arenas with the practiced ease of someone swinging a leg over a saddle. During the day, he was Mr. Hearn, a Ford manager explaining quarterly targets to dealers. On weekends, he was the man whose name made the dust hang still when he rode into the arena.
His dual careers shaped how he framed Cowboys of Color. He saw the rodeo not just as a cultural intervention but as a business that had to survive in a volatile entertainment landscape. That meant courting sponsors, negotiating arena rentals, and building a brand that could intrigue people who had never set foot in a barn.
At the same time, his Ford career underscored the persistence of the same dynamics he fought in rodeo. Corporate America in the 1960s and 1970s was only beginning to integrate; a Black zone manager in Texas was as much an anomaly as a Black calf-roping champion in Denver.
In both spaces, he negotiated the same question: Who gets to be seen as the face of the American story—on a truck commercial, in a stadium, in a history book?
Honors, hall of fame plaques, and a trail that bears his name
By the time he retired from competition in 2017, Hearn’s résumé read like a catalog of Western accolades. He was inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame and later the National Rodeo Hall of Fame; he received the National Finals Rodeo’s Lane Frost Award, joined the Texas Black Sports Hall of Fame, and saw his name etched into the Texas Trail of Fame in the Fort Worth Stockyards.
The city of Lancaster, the Dallas-area suburb he called home for most of his adult life, designated an equestrian trail in his honor and later proclaimed an annual “Cleo Hearn Day.” The official tributes echoed what Cowboys of Color crowds had known for years: that a man who once was barred from rodeos had become one of the sport’s essential ambassadors.
He kept working behind the scenes for the Cowboys of Color tour until about 2020, by which point his sons were increasingly running the operation. Still, he remained a fixture at events, strolling the concourse, stopping for photos, leaning over the rail to give a quick word of advice to a nervous teenager in the chutes.
“I think the day that I lay down and can’t breathe anymore,” he once told a documentary crew, “I’ll still be looking for a rodeo.”
On November 9, 2025, Hearn died at age 86 in Lancaster. Tributes poured in from across the Western world: from the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo, from the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame, from Black cowboy associations that had grown in the slipstream of his work. The Cowboys of Color organization called the tour “the living dream of Cleo” and promised to keep telling his stories.
The Washington Post eulogized him as a man who “mixed rodeo entertainment with education to preserve and promote the Western lifestyle,” while the Wall Street Journal remembered that he often said, “God sent me here to be a cowboy.”
What Cowboys of Color made possible
To measure Hearn’s impact, it helps to think in images.
Before Cowboys of Color, the most common image of the American cowboy—on screen, in textbooks, in marketing—was overwhelmingly white. Historians and community archives had long known that reality was far more complicated. But those stories rarely made it into the mainstream.
Hearn didn’t just argue with the myth; he staged a counter-myth in real time. He mobilized his professional credibility, his rodeo skills, and his corporate experience to build a tour where tens of thousands of people could see a different West unfolding in front of them: a Black barrel racer thundering around a pattern, a Mexican roper throwing a loop honed in vaquero country, a Native cowboy leading the grand entry with his tribal flag.
In that sense, Cowboys of Color wasn’t just an entertainment product. It was a living archive, a moving museum exhibit in denim and dust. It gave kids—especially Black, Latino and Native kids—a rare chance to see themselves not as extras in someone else’s story, but as protagonists in a story that stretched back generations.
It also forced the broader rodeo industry to reckon, however slowly, with its own erasures. Hearn’s success undercut the old argument that diverse lineups wouldn’t sell tickets. His events filled arenas in Dallas, Fort Worth and beyond, proving that audiences were hungry for a truer picture of the West.
That doesn’t mean his rodeos ended discrimination—racism in Western sports remains real and persistent—but they did change the frame. They made it harder to claim, with a straight face, that cowboys of color were a historical curiosity or a niche sideshow.
And they offered a blueprint for other cultural interventions: take the tools of a beloved tradition, and quietly, insistently, re-wire its narrative from the inside.
The dust that stood still
There’s a line that friends and colleagues began repeating after Hearn’s death, one that Cowboys of Color itself used in a social-media tribute: When Cleo Hearn rode into the arena, the dust itself stood still to watch.
It’s a bit of rodeo poetry, sure, but it captures something real about his presence. Here was a man who had gone from being barred at the arena gate to having his name on the banner above it; from sneaking into rodeos as one of only a handful of Black competitors to building a tour where being a cowboy of color was, finally, the norm rather than the exception.
In the end, the arenas where he spent his life remain what they’ve always been: noisy, dusty, full of risk. The calves still sprint out of the chute. The rope still sings. Somewhere in the stands, a child who has never seen a Black cowboy before sits forward, watching.
That, more than any plaque or trail name, might be the legacy Cleo Hearn cared about most: that for at least one kid in every crowd, the story of the West suddenly widened enough to let them in.