A 1940 silent home movie from the Mississippi Delta shows a young white boy in a red satin shirt and cap riding a pony from under a canopy of trees. Blowing a horn as he rides, the herald announces the opening of the 1940 Rosedale Mule Races at the Walter Sillers Memorial Park. The movie camera moves smoothly from the mounted messenger to a grandstand covered by a brown, pavilion-style tent flying red, white, and blue pennants from its peaks, reminiscent of descriptions of Medieval jousting matches. The grandstand overflows with white onlookers in light-colored summer clothing and hats. They mill about in groups along a walkway between the grandstand and a white rope fence girding the improvised race track. Continuing its sweeping panoramic shot, the camera glances upon a handful of African Americans clustered under an isolated grove of trees, and finally rests on a parking lot filled with automobiles.
Though New Englanders raised mules for export prior to the Revolutionary War, George Washington's breeding activities with imported stock from Spain and Malta after the war aggressively introduced the animal to American agriculture. Washington's breeding work produced a line of riding mules as well as draft animals.
By 1850 mules comprised ten percent of the draft animals in the South, and by 1860 twenty percent of the draft animals on the plantations of the Lower South, primarily in the lower Mississippi Delta, the Alabama Black Prairie, the Upper Coastal Plains, and the lower Piedmont of Georgia. By the end of the 1870s, with the revival of the plantation system, and the expansion of cotton planting into Oklahoma and Texas, mules made up one-third of the draft animal population. Their numbers reached 2,468,000 by 1900 and peaked at 4,465,000 in 1925 when the effect of tractors began to be felt in the Southern economy.1
In most of the South the mule dealer was "the biggest man in town," according to Robert Byron Lamb, "and his mule barn was the center of trading activity."2 Ray Lum's mule and horse barn was a key trading institution in Vicksburg, Mississippi, from the early 1900s through the 1950s when he switched to selling cattle. Ray Lum recalled:
The Delta was a booming place for mules in the 'thirties. If you didn't have mules, you wasn't in the farming business. Those farmers bought them by the hundreds. Some good farmers had a barn that would hold fifteen hundred mules, and they'd ring a big farm bell every morning to call the men to work.3Amateur movie maker Emma Knowlton Lytle captured the tolling of the plantation bell on her documentary film and used it to regulate the flow of the work day in a movie on cotton production shot in 1940-1941. One of the first scenes in the film shows African American farm hands slipping into the mule corral before dawn to identify and bridle their mules in preparation for the day's labor.
From the Depression until World War II the overall mule population declined along with the reduction and concentration of cotton acreage. Throughout the 1930s, with payments from federal programs such as the Agricultural Adjustment Agency, cotton planters bought tractors. Pete Daniel describes the transition from mules to mechanical power:
Mechanization in the Cotton Belt actually started in the western growing areas and spread east. Oklahoma, Texas, and the Mississippi River Delta mechanized first. The change from mules to tractors proceeded gradually. Large farmers bought tractors to replace old mules, and tractors and mules coexisted. In the late 1930s James Hand, an implement dealer in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, took trades of mules for credit on tractors.4Daniel adds that the plantation South "lagged behind other areas in tractor purchases; in 1930 only 3.9 percent of southern farmers owned tractors, compared with 13.5 percent for the country at large." According to livestock trader Ray Lum, "California was the first place to put in tractors. I began to buy mules in California 'cause tractors was taking their place ... as the tractors would come in, the mules would go out... But they were still using mules in Texas and Mississippi, and that's where I went with mine."5
Clarksdale area, Summer 1940, Library of Congress, (LC-USF34-55049E.
Wherever men worked mules they found time to race them. The earliest citation is the 1835 Maury County fair in Tennessee. On the last day of fairs planters often organized a mule race using their slaves as jockeys. Part of the ritual required spectators to do everything they could to "retard the progress of the steeds and make them fly the track."6
In the 1840s, the annual Huckleberry Frolic held in Long Island, New York, on the nation's first official race course, the New Market track, listed mule races on its "bill of performance." In antebellum Natchez, freedman William Johnson, an avid turfman, noted in his diary in October 1843: "Shooting match and Riffle [sic] shooting and mule Racing out at the tract this Evening So I am told."7
Racing provided the entertainment at many get-togethers in the South from agricultural fairs during the antebellum period to informal barbecues at the turn of the twentieth century. Mules frequently shared the racing program at these events along with ponies, harness horses and native running horses. County fair premium lists from Kentucky featured mule races among the regularly scheduled events as well as competitions for the best mule stock. The 1880 Exhibition of the South Kentucky Fair Association held near Glascow, Kentucky, listed prizes of ten dollars for five categories of mule stock from colts to aged, as well as two mule races. On the first day of the fair, authorities awarded a ten dollar prize for the hindmost mule to run one mile. On the second day, the fair awarded ten dollars for the fastest mule to run a mile.8 The 1885 program of the twentieth exhibition of the Nelson County Agricultural Association of Bardstown, Kentucky, mentioned two mule races. The last race on the final day of the fair offered a ten dollar prize: "Fastest mule, any age, to run around the outside track three times, five or more to enter, all to start at the tap of the drum."9 People attended races at county fairs until the Depression of 1929 when harness racing and running horses became too expensive to maintain and racing programs ended at the fairs.
Additionally, plantations held mule races as part of larger racing programs put together to provide local entertainment. Tom Wilburn, a native of east central Mississippi, remembers attending them as early as 1928:
It'd be little social gatherings around here. And they'd have these impromptus, just on a straight away, mule race. And then different plantations would bring in their mules and some of the black riders, and its competitive; local competition among local places. ...Always betting on the side... And at the same time, usually the white owners would be riding their horses and there'd be impromptu straight away races.10Wilburn stresses that the races were competitions between plantations; that planters, the largest white landowners, regularly matched their stock in performance against each other. In fact, the mule races occurred frequently enough that some planters kept mules that did nothing but compete on the track. Wilburn explains:
...runnin mules, they were not very big, they were more streamlined and medium sized. And ... they were kept by different places strictly to run. They were never worked... Keep in mind, a mule that size is kind of like a goat. It doesn't cost anything to keep it.11Performing well on the track was a matter of honor and helped determine the planter's status among his peers.
Throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, white farmers and their sons raced mules at agricultural exhibitions and county fairs all over the country. In the plantation regions of Mississippi, how-ever, the racial caste system orchestrating the social interaction and public behavior of the black and white communities, prohibited white planters from riding mules in public. Tom Wilburn remembers racing with his African American and white playmates, on his family's plantation in Lowndes County, Mississippi:
I never did ride a mule in a race but we rode them out here, you know, among, we'd race each other out here... So if you had a horse out there, well immediately, if a gang of us got together, immediately we would say, "let's race." We would go out in the pasture and race. And then we'd say, "all right let's get some mules." And we'd race mules. And then ponies, we'd race ponies ... but even as kids we thought it was a little bit inferior to be mounted on a mule... But now, we always had black kids with us, our friends, our playmates. Now they would be mounted on mules.12When promoted as draft animals after the Revolutionary War, mules were scarce, highly esteemed, and costly animals. As they became a more common sight toiling in the fields, swamps, and forests of the Southern landscape, their status changed, taking on cultural values. In the Delta, the mule came to symbolize the endless drudgery and manual labor of farming. With the development and expansion of slavery in the antebellum period, blacks increasingly worked the animals. As the lives of mules and slaves intertwined in the plantation South, one came to symbolize the other, and people of wealth strived to distance themselves from the working animal just as they physically separated themselves from the black laboring population.
Mule racing continued this long association extending it into the social life of the Delta. During the long, hot, humid cotton-growing months mule races, baseball games, and traveling minstrel shows entertained the populations of these Deep South agricultural communities.
Though the mule population in the South peaked in 1925, its decline was irregular throughout the region. In Mississippi, the mule population actually contradicted regional patterns by increasing twelve percent from 1925 to 1930. Between 1930 and 1935 when the first annual Delta mule race, the Pryor Derby, began in Washington County, Mississippi, the mule population had dropped a barely noticeable four percent.
The Pryor Derby, a gala event held at Larry Pryor's Silver Lake Plantation, took place on the first Saturday after the Fourth of July. Robert Allen Carpenter attributed organized mule racing to Larry Pryor in a Delta Review article. "Pryor first became noted for his parties in the depression years of the 1930's," Carpenter wrote. "He decided, bad times or not, something unusual should be done to commemorate the Fourth of July ... he decided on a mule race."13 In 1938, inspired by the popularity of the annual Pryor Derby, Bolivar County planters, with the help of Larry Pryor and Harold Council of Greenville, started the mule races at the first Plantation Festival in Rosedale. Three years later, Larry Pryor and Harold Council assisted the Greenwood Junior Auxiliary stage the first Greenwood Mule Race.
Innovative fundraising events organized by planters and middle class whites, the mule races parodied thoroughbred horse racing using black farm workers in place of jockeys and plow mules in place of pedigreed steeds. The organizers scheduled the first races during layby, a pause in the labor intensive production of cotton between chopping and picking, when the plant is left to grow. Abundant pre-race publicity, pari-mutuel betting, novelty events, and wild mule breaking attracted large crowds of whites and African Americans. According to Florence Sillers of Rosedale, "over a thousand spectators annually from all parts of the Delta," attended the races.14
The Greenwood and Rosedale Mule Races were social occasions as well as community events. Local newspapers covered the races on the front page as well as in the society columns. "The center of interest today for social and military circles of Greenwood and the Mississippi Delta is the Junior Auxiliary's third annual Mule Races...," noted the Greenwood Commonwealth August 5, 1943. Society columns in the Greenwood Commonwealth, and the Bolivar County Democrat named out-of-town visitors, where they came from, and who was entertaining whom at the numerous "Open House" and cocktail parties celebrating the races. Money raised through entrance fees, box seats, and gambling filled the coffers of the Greenwood Junior Auxiliary and paid for the up-keep of the Walter Sillers Memorial Park, also known as the Rosedale country club.
People enjoyed reminiscing about the mule races. Whites remember them warmly as community events where everyone had "good fun." Stories told by white people generally focused on the unpredictable nature of the mule. Conversely, African Americans remember the men who performed and the excitement of watching their friends and acquaintances ride competitively.
Jimmy Love from Rosedale described the thrill of the races in the African American population as "a great big event and we all look forward to it all the time. And we be at home wondering who's going to ride and who's going to win."15 People remember going to the races with their families, arriving on foot and by wagon. Joe Pope worked on the Dattle place and went to the Rosedale races: "Yeah, I went to the race because I had never seen a mule race. And so me and my parents, all went out there, come out to the golf course to see the mule race."16 Though the people who attended often lived and worked on the plantations that entered mules, they were not necessarily related to the riders. Frank Duncan, a former chauffeur from Duncan, Mississippi, traveled to Rosedale to see the races:
Bunch of them go. When there was a mule race, just head out to the road and you'll find company and when you get there you got too much company.17Lilly Wade went to the American Legion Ball Park in Greenwood to see her son, Johnny, ride: "[The mule race was] for the whole black community. Anybody could come what wanted to. They had the bleachers up there."18 Wade refers to the segregated bleachers as proof that blacks as well as whites attended the events.
The African American community stressed the skill of the riders as the attraction of the races. Like the lure of the rodeo for those familiar with horses and cattle, black farmers went to watch the best hostlers perform.
Members of the white community attended expecting to see a spectacle of mules running every which way around the track. Frank McCormick, a Greenwood photographer, noted that riding bareback increased the probabilities of mishaps: "part of the thing is, its harder to stay on without a saddle."19 Eleanor Fiore of Greenwood described the attraction of the races for the white audience:
Oh, it was a delight, I never had so much fun...You never [knew] whether they were gonna sit down, those mules would just sit down all of a sudden, they get so confused.... And they might could run backwards, run in the opposite direction. They do everything. Head out across the middle of a field. You never knew what they were gonna do, or just start buckin all of a sudden. Those mules weren't trained for anything but plowin.20Mary Hamilton, a member of the Junior Auxiliary, also believed the unpredictability of the mule was the main attraction of the races:
They were mules, you never know what they're going to do...they'd have them all lined up, and they'd start out and maybe one of them, all of a sudden, changes his mind, turn around and go back, jump the fence and go out. So nobody knew what they were going to do. And I think that was one thing that made it so much fun.21
Clarksdale area, Summer 1940, Library of Congress, (LC-USF34-54756D.
Most written mule race information comes from the Greenwood Commonwealth. The day after every Greenwood race the newspaper reported the first, second, and third place winners, naming the animal, rider, and owner. Sometimes the paper listed all of the entries in each race. The newspaper record combined with home movie footage and personal interviews, indicates that between six and eight mules ran in a race. Mule owners entered one animal per race and the number of races depended upon the number of mules entered.
Pre-race articles in the Bolivar County Democrat and the Greenwood Commonwealth encouraged large landowners to enter mules by listing the names of planters who had already done so, in the process creating the impression that only white planters entered mules in the races. However, the Greenwood Commonwealth also actively countered that impression by clearly stating on the day of the races that African Americans and whites could enter mules in the events. The following article appeared July 23, 1942, the day of the second Greenwood Mule Race:
A hundred mules, fresh from the cotton rows, race here today for charity and the owners, whether sharecroppers or plantation proprietors, compete on equal terms.Some of the owners, including negroes from the city's Catfish Alley and planters from mansions built by cotton fortunes, will ride their steeds to the races, what with the tire rationing and the like.
Clyde Aycock, a white man who worked at the pari-mutuel booth during the Rosedale races, confirmed that African Americans and whites could enter animals: "There wasn't any, any excluding anybody if they wanted to..."22 Freddie Anderson rode for John Gourlay, his employer, as well as for Howard Walker, one of three African American men known as "big renters" in the Bolivar County African American community. Anderson recounted that Howard Walker, Munch Love, and Kid Piggy entered mules in the Rosedale Mule Races though their names are not listed in the existing copies of the Bolivar County Democrat.
African American farm hands and hostlers rode the mules bareback, usually for their employers. Men wanted to ride in the races. On some plantations competitions were held to determine the best riders. Prior to the races, men often trained their mules by running them in the turn rows of the cotton fields. Besides the thrill of performing at a large community event, the races provided an opportunity to earn cash, an important feature for people earning as little as $1.50 a day. At the Rosedale Mule Races, men received $2.50 to $5.00 for each race they entered. Additionally, they had an opportunity to win prize money. In 1941, riders at the Rosedale Mule Races collected $10 for first place and $5 for second, while the winner of the Sweepstakes won $25.00. Tips from spectators also filled the pockets of the riders. Hostler Freddie Anderson rode frequently and described the pre-race promenade:
Just before race time you walk your mule or ride your mule up and down that line and then people would be betting on your mule, but now you don't know who's betting on you because you steady riding. Only thing you know if somebody comes up and tells you, "are you going to win this race? [I'd] say, I'm going to try. What they tell you, [they'd] say, "if you win this race you got 50 or 45 or 30" or whatever...Now this isn't what you was paid, this was the tip they gave you for winning the race. "If they gave you 50 or 45 dollars, what do you think they won?"23The riders made money. The bettors made money. The organizers made money. Thousands of dollars were raised in Rosedale to support the Walter Sillers Memorial Park.24 Though figures for the Greenwood Mule Races cannot be found, the Junior Auxiliary used racing proceeds to finance the building of a community center among other projects.
Rosedale
In 1938, members of the new, WPA-built Walter Sillers Memorial Park organized the first Plantation Festival and mule races in Rosedale. The races drew crowds of people, generating so much money through the pari-mutuel betting system that the following year the town continued the races without the Plantation Festival. Rosedale resident Will Gourlay, son of planter John Gourlay, remembers being told, "the law says that pari-mutuel horse racing was against the law in Mississippi, didn't say a damn thing about mules."25 All of the money raised contributed to the maintenance of the Walter Sillers Memorial Park. The mule races followed an afternoon baseball game in a long, festive day full of political speeches, games, music, food, and dancing at Walter Sillers Memorial Park.
Home movie footage from 1940 shows seven politicians, including Governor Hugh Lawson White, delivering speeches to a white audience before the races from a platform elaborately decorated with patriotic bunting. Dressed in white shirts, ties, trousers, and hats, men lounge on the grass in groups while women wearing floral dresses and hats sit on chairs under tall shade trees listening and fanning themselves.
According to the October 10, 1940 issue of the Bolivar County Democrat, the third annual races, portrayed in the 1940 home movie footage, were scheduled at two in the afternoon on October 15th. Tickets could be bought in advance and at the gate. The paper also listed some of the people who had entered animals, including home movie film maker Dixon Dossett. The article noted that the Delta State Teachers' College band would play at the races; concession stands would offer cake, candy, and cold drinks; a barbecue supper would be available after the races; and the evening would close with a dance at the club house.
The following description is based on footage of the 1940 Rosedale Mule Races found in the home movie collections of Lawrence Wilson and Dixon Dossett. Both men filmed the 1940 Rosedale Mule Races concentrating their cameras primarily on the activity of the track, rather than the audience.
Dossett recorded a close-up at the starting post revealing six African American riders wearing regular clothing, billed caps, and large numbers on the backs of their shirts. The official starter, a white man standing to the front and side of the mules, drops his arm, and the animals take off. Immediately, a very fair-skinned rider takes the lead. The mules wear bridles and some have blankets made from feed sacks on their backs. Both cameras record a gray mule as it approaches the finish line ahead of the others. The rider, wearing a red cap, hugs the outside of the track. A white spectator wearing a white boater appears to check a pocket watch, clocking the gray mule as it passes him. The runner-up passes the camera and crosses the finish line as the third place mule abruptly veers from the inside of the track directly across the course at an extreme angle. The rider just manages to check his mount before it goes through the fence, but gets turned around in the process and ends up facing the wrong direction, losing his third-place position.
Out of the 10 minutes and 16 seconds of collected mule race footage that was the only near-accident recorded. While racing mules was potentially dangerous and the riders took falls, no one remembered any instances of serious injury. This reflected the skill of the riders, the training of the animals, and just plain luck. Talented riders who won frequently, like hostler Freddy Anderson from Bolivar County, exercised some control over the choice of animals they rode in competition: When Rodie got to running, she'd stop all at once and make you...come over her head see. So, I didn't want to be out there and some of the other mules running and run over you and hurt you and kill you. So I rode her one time and hung her up.26
Wilson filmed white spectators lining both sides of the track, though only men appear to be on the infield. Race officials ride their horses onto the track, around the infield, and through the crowd. Everyone else is on foot except the mule riders. A large scoreboard along side the grandstand announces the number of the race and the names of the animals and their owners. A photographer runs into the frame to snap pictures as the riders come around the curve of the track. In between races small planes fly over the grounds of the Walter Sillers Memorial Park. A mule crosses the finish line and people turn away from the track.
Riders generally wore trousers and light colored shirts with large numbers fixed to their backs. Some white informants recalled riders wearing satin shirts in the colors of the plantation they represented. In fact, one rider in the 1940 home movie footage of the Rosedale Mule Races wore a red and white satin shirt, but the rest of the men dressed in plain clothing.
Dossett filmed the start and finish of the third and final horse race. Six men, two black and four white, compete. Three men carrying curved handle canes help the riders get their mounts into position at the starting post. It is a sunny, hot day and the back of one man's shirt is soaked with sweat. The crowd presses against the white rope fence separating them from the track. A white rider wins.
Greenwood Mule Races, Greenwood MS, circa 1943.Photograph by Frank McCormick
Both home movies from the 1940 Rosedale events show horse races alternating with mule races. Unlike the mule races, white and black men rode against each other in the horse races. Interrupted by World War II, the Rosedale Mule Races resumed in 1946 without horse racing.
Dossett filmed the last recorded mule race, a sweepstakes with six competitors including the fair-skinned man and the man wearing the red cap. The camera caught the winning gray mule as it galloped down the track and over the finish line carrying the man in the red cap to victory. The victor appears in the next shot riding his mule, with a wreath of cotton bolls and flowers around its neck. He heads to the stands for the inspection and acclaim of the crowd. The camera records the winner's smile as young white boys and a small enthusiastic black boy in a white tee shirt run toward him and his mule. The winning rider continues to smile as he rides out of the frame.
The excited African American child running toward the winner is one of two images of the black audience documented on the 1940 home movie film. Dossett and Wilson's footage reflects their interest in the competition on the track and their lack of interest in the spectators. At the 1946 Rosedale Mule Races, Emma Knowlton Lytle concentrated on filming the crowd rather than the track. Intent on recording her friends and relatives, Lytle's camera moved fluidly, at eye level, through the crowd, giving the viewer an intimate, first person sense of the event. She engaged friends in conversation, and filmed them in close-up while they spoke, recording everyone else in wide shots.
Lytle's film showed white people clustered around the betting booth and zooms in to a close-up of a woman's hands tearing a perforated ticket from a booklet. A man smiles at the filmmaker and fans out his tickets like a hand of cards as the camera catches him leaving the counter of the pari-mutuel betting booth. Lytle follows two white men as they stroll through the white crowd and into the black section of the track. Two African Americans wearing numbers on their backs, one leading a mule, walk in front of the white men. Abruptly, three riders enter the scene from the left, ride across the frame, through the black spectators' section, and onto the track. The camera follows their movement to the right, panning over the backs of the African American enthusiasts facing the track.
Lytle's roving camera recorded the segregated crowd and located the animal holding area behind the black section of the track. Most likely that is where the three mounted riders were coming from when they cut across the film frame to enter the track.
The 1946 footage hints at the size of the crowd and the array of activity. People are everywhere. Older men line the benches in front of a band stand. A heavy set man chats with the bench sitters from astride a light-colored horse. Young men in white shirts and ties carry plates of food into the club house. Young women in large hats carrying white gloves smile and talk to the film maker. A quick shot of the score board reads "RACE NO. 5." The camera documents riders as they form a group at the starting line of two or three abreast. About six men take off as two white men in hats back away from them. A rider wearing a soft, white, snap-brim cap backwards, canters a white mule easily across the finish line. An excited winner jumps up and down in the judges' booth.
The black and white home movie footage conveys the small town ambiance of the crowd. Many people know each other and the filmmaker. Lytle's subjects appear pleased to see her and amused by her camera.
Between races on the Rosedale track, skilled African American hostlers broke wild mules that bucked and reared like broncos at a rodeo. Jimmy Love of Rosedale described the appeal: "Some people would tick for that. Man says this mule aint never been rode, some of them want that, want to ride him, just cause he aint been rode."27 After the races, black horsemen gave performances on the track and sometimes riders arranged match races among themselves. The Rosedale Mule Races ended in 1950.
Greenwood
The Greenwood Mule Races, organized by the women's Junior Auxiliary, ran from 1941 through 1948, straight through the war. Proceeds funded the charity work of the organization. Junior Auxiliary members, mostly wives of planters and other prominent men in town, worked to alleviate the health care problems of poor white children.
The number of displaced white sharecroppers in Leflore County grew throughout the Depression as white planters replaced them with black sharecroppers and day laborers.28 The planters' labor practices provided their wives with a steady supply of destitute children to care for. Indicative of the times, the women observed the color line, assisting only poor white children though the population of Leflore County in 1934 was 76 percent black.29
The Greenwood mule races differed from the Rosedale races in several ways. The races stood alone, unsandwiched by political speeches, baseball games or dances. They were held in the evening rather than the afternoon and at the American Legion Ball Park rather than the Greenwood Country Club. Beginning in 1943, military men from the Greenwood Army Air Field and Camp McCain participated in the races, competing against each other on borrowed mules. In 1948, African American delivery boys from local drugstores rode against each other on bicycles. An undated Mule Race poster hanging on the wall of the Cottonlandia Museum in Greenwood lists the following admission fees: Adults .75, Enlisted men, Children, Colored 25.
Promotion in the local white newspapers began at least a month in advance. During the week of the event the Greenwood Commonwealth and the Greenwood Morning Star featured the races with front-page headlines and articles. Inside the papers, the names of out-of-town visitors and lists of mule race parties filled the society columns. Memphis, Clarksdale, and Greenville papers ran stories and photographs sent them by the 1948 Junior Auxiliary Mule Race Publicity Committee. The high powered Publicity Committee blanketed Mississippi with 175 radio advertisements promoting the races, including spots on the "Breakfast Club Program," a national radio show on NBC. Cafes, grocery stores, dry goods stores, drugstores, beauty parlors, filling stations, and taverns in Greenwood and nearby towns displayed mule race posters.
Universal Newsreel heard about the first Greenwood Mule Race after the fact, called the Junior Auxiliary and asked the organization if they could run them again for the camera. The women's group discussed the possibility with the Chamber of Commerce before declining. Universal Newsreel did film the second annual Greenwood Mule Races in 1942. Time magazine covered the races in the August 12, 1944 issue and noted that five thousand people attended the event. The Junior Auxiliary stopped holding mule races in 1948, however, the Greenwood Jaycees resumed the sport in the 1950s and ran them until the early 1960s.
Home movie footage preserved the actuality of the mule races for over fifty years, surviving the races and the mules. Today the film is an historical resource offering a richer, deeper understanding of life, ritual, and celebration in the plantation region of the Mississippi Delta.
Notes1. Robert Byron Lamb, The Mule in Southern Agriculture (Berkeley University of California Press, 1963) 31-45.
2. Lamb 19.
3. William Ferris, You Live and Learn. Then You Die and Forget It All (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1992) 73.
4. Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice cultures since 1880 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985) 175.
5. Ferris 167-169.
6. John Trotwood Moore, Songs and Stories from Tennessee (Freeport: Books For Libraries Press, 1902) 98.
7. William Ranson Hogan and Edwin Adams Davis, eds. William Johnson's Natchez: The Ante-Bellum Diary of a Free Negro (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993) 455.
8. Italics added.
9. Nelson County Agricultural Association, September 1, 2, 3 & 4, 1885.
10. Tom Wilburn, personal interview, Artesia, MS, October 7, 1994.
11. Wilburn, personal interview.
12. Wilburn, personal interview.
13. Robert Allen Carpenter, "Dum Vivamus Biberimus et Edimus," Delta Review Summer 1964.
14. Florence Warfield Sillers, comp. History of Bolivar County, Ed. Wirt A. Williams, Delta State Teachers College, 1948.
15. Jimmy Love, personal interview, Rosedale, MS, October 29, 1993.
16. Joe Pope, personal interview, Rosedale, MS, October 16, 1993.
17. Frank Duncan, personal interview, Duncan, MS, October 29, 1993.
18. Lilly Wade, personal interview, Greenwood, MS, April, 8, 1994.
19. Frank McCormick, personal interview, Greenwood, MS, October 15, 1993.
20. Eleanor Fiore, phone interview, Greenwood, MS, March 8, 1994.
21. Mary Hamilton, personal interview, Greenwood, MS, February 25, 1994.
22. Clyde Aycock, phone interview, Rosedale, MS, November 29, 1993.
23. Freddie Anderson, phone interview, Chicago, IL, November 14, 1993.
24. Sillers, History of Bolivar County.
25. Will Gourlay, personal interview, Rosedale, MS, October 16, 1993.
26. Anderson, November 14, 1993.
27. Love, October 29, 1993.
28. Daniel 87.
29. Daniel 87.
NewspapersMule Races to Be Held October 15. Bolivar County Democrat October 10, 1940.
Sporting Blood Rushes to Heads of Delta People. Greenwood Commonwealth August 6, 1941.
Mule Races Off to Fine Start. Greenwood Commonwealth July 23, 1942.
