By: Keith Kappes
Columnist
Carter County Times
The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby will be this Saturday at historic Churchill Downs in Louisville, an event heralded each year as the greatest two minutes in sports.
More than 100,000 racing fans will see it in person and millions of people around the world will watch it on television. The “Run for the Roses” is an all-Kentucky show for the world to enjoy.
But protests have already started about the tradition of having those hordes of spectators stand and sing our state song, “My Old Kentucky Home”, before the Derby starts. A columnist in the Louisville Courier-Journal Wednesday called for a new state song to be adopted so the “racist” song by Stephen Foster could be retired “to the archives of historical shame”.
For the record, the song has been sung at every Kentucky Derby since 1930 and it always invokes teary eyes and sentimentality for those who sing it in person at the track or at a Derby Party at someone’s home or anywhere.
I’ve been to five runnings of the big race, one of them in a National Guard uniform and carrying a weapon along with a hundred other soldiers present to keep demonstrators from interfering with the race.
I’m proud to admit that I’ve never been able to sing that great song anywhere without getting misty-eyed because of my pride in being a native Kentuckian. As for those who want the song to disappear because it reminds them of the evils of slavery, my response is that trying to rewrite history is a slippery slope.
Dropping that song from the Derby won’t change what happened 150 years ago when a black jockey named Oliver Lewis rode a horse named Aristides to victory in the first Kentucky Derby.
Yes, the enslavement of human beings is a shameful practice, but no one associated today with thoroughbred racing or with Churchill Downs had anything to do with it. In fact, it ended 11 years before the first Kentucky Derby was called to the post.(Contact Keith at keithkappes@gmail.com).
