PEOPLE : Ride ‘Em, Cowboys

As the dusty vans and horse trailers pulled out of the L.A. Equestrian Center, the beat of rap competed with the twang of country. Sedgwick Haynes was heading home to Hempstead, Tex., and his job making valves for oil rigs. He’d won $775 in prize money.

He is a weekend cowboy. As he travels the West, people honk and give him the high sign. His horse trailer proclaims him “1991 Champion Black Cowboy.”

He took the honor by winning $18,000 in the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, America’s only touring rodeo for African-American cowboys and cowgirls.

A 25-year rodeo veteran at age 37, he used to think that “best black cowboy” was a title he could live without.

But he found that winning “meant more to me than anything.” Through the Bill Pickett rodeo--named for a black cowboy--”we’re letting America know black cowboys exist.”

Hollywood and history books have tended to forget. Outside Texas and Oklahoma, Haynes says, “black cowboys are an endangered species.”

Earning about $1,400, Donald Goodman of Beaumont, Tex., also left a winner. He believes in black rodeo. Where it’s white versus black, he says, some judges “see what they see.” Here, “we’re saying we’re just as tough as you are.”