When you picture a cowboy, who comes to mind? Maybe John Wayne. Maybe Clint Eastwood. Maybe a Marlboro Man riding into a golden sunset. But if your imagination doesn’t include a Black man in a Stetson hat, then you’ve been watching the wrong version of history.

At this year’s Oakland Black Cowboy Parade & Heritage Festival, crowds lined the streets to celebrate a truth that’s long been hiding in plain sight: that the West was built, in part, by Black hands and Black riders. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the parade—now in its 50th year—brought together generations of horsemen, ranchers, and cultural historians from across the country, determined to preserve and celebrate a legacy mainstream America tried to forget.

It’s more than a parade; it’s an act of reclamation.

Historians estimate that as many as one in four cowboys in the late 19th century were Black. Many were formerly enslaved men who found a form of freedom on horseback—working cattle drives, breaking wild horses, and shaping the frontier. Yet, their names were written out of the myth. Hollywood created a version of the cowboy that was rugged, righteous, and—most importantly—white.

The real West, however, looked more like Oakland. More like Houston’s Third Ward. More like Oklahoma’s all-Black towns.

Figures like Nat Love, often called “Deadwood Dick,” and Bose Ikard, a close companion of famed cattleman Charles Goodnight, were legends in their own right. But when their stories were adapted for the screen, their faces and names were replaced. The result was a cultural erasure so complete that generations grew up believing cowboys looked nothing like them.

Events like the Oakland Black Cowboy Parade aren’t just about nostalgia; they’re about restoring balance to American memory. They’re also about showing a new generation that Western culture belongs to us, too.

You could feel it at the festival: kids in cowboy boots learning to lasso; elders trading stories about rodeos and trail rides; riders representing groups like the Compton Cowboys, Black Rodeo USA, and the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club, each carrying a piece of history down the street.

In a country that has often tried to define Blackness within urban boundaries, these spaces expand the narrative. They remind us that we have always belonged everywhere — on plantations, on battlefields, on bandstands, and yes, on horseback.

The return of the Black cowboy into mainstream consciousness is also happening in pop culture. Lil Nas X flipped the cowboy archetype on its head with “Old Town Road.” Idris Elba and Caleb McLaughlin saddled up for Netflix’s Concrete Cowboy. And Beyoncé, in her Cowboy Carter era, pulled Black country and Western aesthetics into global conversation—reminding the world that what’s marketed as Americana has always had Black roots.

But the Oakland parade shows something deeper than fashion or trend—it shows lineage. The men and women there aren’t dressing up; they’re continuing tradition. They’re descendants of the people who built this culture and refused to let it die.

That’s what makes the parade so powerful: it collapses the distance between past and present. Watching hundreds of Black riders move through the streets, it’s impossible not to think about what was taken—and what we’re reclaiming.

These riders aren’t asking permission to be seen; they’re demanding to be remembered. They’re rewriting the Western myth in real time, one hoofbeat at a time.

In a time when cultural erasure is still being debated in classrooms and statehouses, Oakland’s Black Cowboy Parade is doing something radical: preserving joy as resistance. It says that we were here, we are here, and we’ll keep riding until our stories are written where they’ve always belonged—at the center of America’s narrative.

Because the truth is, the West was never whitewashed by accident. It took intention. And reclaiming it will take the same.

The next time you imagine a cowboy, picture us too — reins in hand, boots dusty, eyes steady toward the horizon. Because we’ve been riding all along.