From rodeo clowns to voting rights, understanding race and history

Have the folks who jeered the President Obama stand-in at that Missouri rodeo ever heard of Bill Pickett?

Pickett was an African American cowboy, inventor of the gutsy bulldogging technique, grabbing cattle by the horns and wrestling them to the ground. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,

Pickett starred in rodeos and movies, traveled the West and in the 1970s was inducted into the National Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame. He’s depicted as a legend of the West on a U.S. stamp. Pickett was a founder of the same rodeo tradition that allowed the Missouri state fair crowd to whoop and holler, encouraging a bull to run down the “president” while an accomplice jiggled the broad lips on the mask of the clown dressed as Obama and an announcer teased violence that recalled the worst of the ways this country has treated its black citizens.