Cowboys Ride With Pride on Hilltop High
By: Vanessa Rozier
Posted: 10/19/07
Walking across the yard, Kendra Handy spotted unusual visitors to Howard’s campus. Unable to resist, she asked for a ride. Handy, a freshman print journalism major, climbed on top of one of the horses grazing in the grassy knoll next to the Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel, and made sure she got a picture.
Her brief run-in was with one of the 11 horses that graced Howard University Thursday afternoon. Riding these horses were 10 black cowboys and Miles J. Dean, an African-American horseman.
"I just wanted to shake the hand of a real cowboy," Betty Akins, director of the study abroad program at Howard, said to Dean as she extended her hand. "Excuse me, a horseman."
Dean shook her hand and then turned his attention back to one of two interviews he agreed to do at Howard, a place he fondly remembers. "I went to Howard University from 1968 until 1970," he said of his collegiate days in Washington, D.C. on a wrestling scholarship. "I was here with Stokely [Carmichael] and the Unifics. I was here when they took over the campus."
Now, almost 40 years later, Dean was here to pay back a debt to the ancestors who could not do half of what he has done and will do in his lifetime.
By day, Dean is a language arts and history educator in the only school system he is willing to teach in - the New Jersey public schools. But until Black History Month in February, he will be taking a break from the classroom and riding from coast to coast on an A.M.A.A.P. Journey, which stands for a Modern African American Pioneer.
As passersby looked on with curiosity, Dean explained his passion. "Our history needs desperately to be told because we’re in desperate times," he said. "One of the reasons why we are in the situations that we are in as black people is because of our lack of being grounded. We need a better sense of who we are. We need to believe in ourselves more."
He said that his mission is to connect people with the information about themselves. "They’re written in book after book after book. The problem is that they don’t get the attention they deserve," he said.
Starting at the African Burial Ground in New York City, Dean is making pitstops at as many Historically Black Colleges and Universities along the way until he reaches the West Coast with his travel partner, his horse, Sankofa.
"I have an ancestral connection to the horse, and so do you," Dean said. He recalled the 1972 film, Buck and the Preacher, which sparked his interest in horses. Knowing that Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte do not act without a righteous purpose he investigated. "There’s something to this," he remembered asking himself. "I began a quest. It was over then. I was validated."
Dean is making this trip on his own but, while in the area, the East Coast Rough Riders are taking care of him and showing him around. "It’s just a black riding club," the president said. Mr. Morris is the name he goes by - it is printed just like that on his business card.
Unlike Dean, Morris said that he is a full-fledged cowboy. "We like to support them as much as we can," he said of his organization’s attitude toward other black horsemen. "We try to get our kids involved in it to give them more options than football and basketball."
Morris, who now owns 12 horses in Brandywine, MD, said that he knew being a cowboy was his calling. Although unable to make it himself, the Rough Riders will be participating in tomorrow’s Howard University Homecoming parade like they do every year.
In the midst of preparation for what is arguably the largest homecoming in the country, Dean and Sankofa trotted down Georgia Avenue on their way to the next phase of his journey.
©Copyright 2007 The Hilltop
