The Compton Cowboys

Drive south on Caldwell Street on any Sunday afternoon and you will, eventually, end up behind a horse. This is not a trick of the imagination. It's the Compton Cowboys taking a slow ride home, and they have been doing some version of this ride for more than three decades. The story most outsiders know goes like this: a group of young Black riders from Richland Farms — Compton's last surviving agricultural neighborhood — formed a club, got photographed by national magazines, signed a deal with a clothing brand, and put Compton on the map as a place with a Black equestrian tradition. All of that is true. None of it is the whole story. The whole story starts with Mayisha Akbar, the matriarch of the Compton Junior Equestrians, who started teaching neighborhood kids to ride in 1988 because she did not want to lose any more cousins to the streets. She pulled together donated horses, a half-acre yard, and a saddle she had owned since she was 16. She charged the kids' families nothing. The first generation she trained — kids who are now in their forties, raising children of their own — didn't see the riding as a brand. They saw it as a Sunday. They saw it as a reason to keep going. What the second generation did, in the late 2010s, was tell the world about it. The original Compton Cowboys collective — Randy Hook, Anthony Harris, Keenan Abercrombia, Charles Harris, and a small list of cousins — turned a culture they'd already been living into a movement that could fund itself. The book deals and brand deals were the visible part. The part the cameras missed was the same part Mayisha had been doing all along: trail rides on Sundays, free riding lessons for kids whose parents couldn't pay, a roster of horses sleeping on land their grandparents had fought to keep zoned for animals. The third generation — kids who are 8 and 12 now, who barely remember a Compton without horses on the news — is the generation this exhibit is for. The wall here pulls together photographs from the 1990s archive, a saddle donated by Mayisha herself, and a 7-minute oral history reel cut from interviews with three of the original Cowboys. They are still riding. They have never not been riding. The reason they look like a national story is that the rest of the country finally caught up.