Monica Jackson, host of Mornings with Monica in Las Vegas, was in the middle of a live interview about the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo when the veteran TV personality became emotionally choked up.
“Growing up, I never heard about Black cowboys and cowgirls,” she said. “Now I’m the mother of a 15-year-old black child. It’s so important there’s representation that matters. Now my son can tell a story I wasn’t able to tell as a child.”
Valeria Howard Cunningham, who oversees the BPIR, is usually the one who gets emotional when speaking about the impact of the nation’s only touring all-Black rodeo.
Once, when she was promoting a “Rodeo for Kids’ Sake” event in Memphis, Tenn., bringing in more than 4,000 youth to learn about Black cowboys and cowgirls, a seven-year old boy walked into the arena and stopped dead in his tracks.
“His eyes got big as saucers,” she remembered. “He put his hands on his hips and exclaimed, ‘I can’t believe this! There are black cowboys and cowgirls!’ My eyes filled with tears right then.”
That’s because the boy’s realization validated Howard-Cunningham’s decision to take the reigns of the 37-year old rodeo when her husband Lu Vason passed five years ago.
And now, she has found new resources in forming a new partnership in which PBR (Professional Bull Riders) will co-produce BPIR events, piggy-back them with its events, and provide TV coverage.
The partnership, announced during in February, has already come to life spectacularly. Earlier this month, the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo was paired with PBR’s premier series in MGM Grand Garden Arena, and broadcast on CBS Television Network on June 19 – the holiday known as Juneteenth. It’s the first time an all-Black rodeo has been carried on broadcast television.
The Bill Pickett rodeo is more than a great competition that gives Black rodeo athletes opportunities to compete while serving as launch pad for western sports stardom. It awakens us to a hidden past absent from history books that have omitted the fact that one quarter of all cowboys and cowgirls who settled the American West were African-American. The Bill Pickett rodeo – named from the son of a former slave who invented what is now known as the sport of steer wrestling – inspires everyone to learn more about what Hollywood and the history books have left out.
The all-Black rodeo was born of observation and necessity when Howard-Cunningham’s late husband, who was a creative, well-connected entertainment impresario and entrepreneur, attended the iconic Cheyenne Frontier Days in the early 1980s and noticed an absence of Black athletes competing.
To give these athletes a platform, Vason created a rodeo just for them.
Under Valeria-Cunningham’s stewardship, the rodeo, which has now visited more than 30 cities across the U.S., has thrived.
