By Joe Drape
In Black Maestro, Joe Drape meticulously brings to existence the drama, adventures, romances, and heartbreaks of an not likely player within the maximum historic occasions of the 20th century. it's a breathtaking narrative that takes you from pastoral Kentucky to Mob–controlled Chicago, from the pony nation of Poland to the chaos of purple sq., and from freewheeling Paris to the hard–luck American South of the melancholy. it's also a narrative that returns Jimmy Winkfield to his rightful position as an unique American hero.
In 1919, on the age of thirty–seven, as Bolshevik cannon fireplace thundered above, the already epic lifetime of Jimmy Winkfield became an odyssey. With a ragtag band of Russian the Aristocracy and varnish squaddies, the son of a black sharecropper from Chilesburg, Kentucky, was once entrusted with saving greater than 250 of the main royal yet fragile thoroughbreds left in crumbling Csarist Russia. They trekked 1,100 miles from Odessa to Warsaw for almost 3 months amid the bloodiest a part of the Russian Revolution, surviving gunfire and starvation....
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Extra info for Black Maestro: The Epic Life of an American Legend
Example text
One state legislature after another pushed for measures to keep blacks and whites from sharing everything from buses and trains to schoolhouses and hospitals. Plessy v. Ferguson affirmed a law passed in 1890 by the Louisiana state legislature that as long as trains offered “separate but equal” accommodations for black and white passengers, there was no reason they needed to sit together. In fact, if they did, it was against the law. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, a thirty-year-old shoemaker who was seven-eighths white, boarded the “Whites Only” car of the East Louisiana Railway in New Orleans for a trip to Covington.
When he refused to leave, he was arrested and jailed. With the backing of a black newspaper and early Civil Rights groups, Plessy turned to the courts to answer how a recently freed people could so quickly lose their rights. S. Supreme Court, which, on May 18, 1896, ruled in favor of Judge Ferguson and the state. Now, “separate but equal” was the law of the land. Not that Jimmy ever really knew true freedom or equal rights—in Latonia he knew well enough not to stray too far from Isaac Overton’s all-colored boardinghouse.
FOUR A Rookie Amid the Stars W hen you are sixteen years old, a yearlong ban from race riding seems like an eternity, especially when you have engaged in your grand passion only once, but Jimmy had no intention of giving it up. Two weeks later, back in northern Kentucky, he was aboard Jockey Joe for a second-place finish at the Queen City Race Track in Newport, Kentucky. The racetrack was four miles away from Latonia, or a short ferry ride over the Licking River. It was an outlaw track, which meant the American Turf Congress, the body that held sway over most of the tracks west of New York, did not recognize it.