Alonzo Clayton

A day at the races in black and white: how an 1898 horse race led to a whipping, a lawsuit, and a 1901 arrest
John A. Drobnicki

Introduction
On 22 April 1901, as African-American jockey Alonzo ‘Lonnie’ Clayton was preparing to ride The Golden Prince in the fifth race at New York City’s Aqueduct racetrack, he was arrested by Deputy Sheriff Warren Ashmead and locked up in the Queens County Jail. With Clayton unable to ride, John Bullman, who was considered by the bettors to be a more successful (and therefore more popular) jockey, was given the mount on the Prince, whose odds immediately fell. The crowd smelled a rat – the New York Times called it ‘a turf coup’ – but the arrest of Clayton had nothing to do with gambling, even though some biographical sources on Clayton have continued to assert that the 1901 incident was a wrongful arrest for race fixing. What, then, led to the arrest of Lonnie Clayton, a jockey who had won the Kentucky Derby a decade earlier? The story involves a bad ride, the lashing of a track spectator, a civil trial and court proceedings in three New York counties, a judgment, and then, finally, that 1901 arrest, all of which took place while the career of a once celebrated jockey – who had ridden the winning horse in the 1892 Kentucky Derby – was fading, even though he was not yet thirty years old.

African-Americans and horse racing in America
While many Americans grew up thinking that Jackie Robinson integrated professional sports in America in 1947, horse racing had already been integrated
for two centuries prior to Robinson, with black and white jockeys competing against each other, even in the South during the days of slavery. During the decades prior to the Civil War, many of the best jockeys were black (both slaves and free), and the sport’s popularity continued to grow as it became America’s first national pastime, with the big-time races attracting huge crowds (and lots of gambling). Many African-Americans moved North during and after the Reconstruction period, and black jockeys began winning at newly opened tracks in the Northeast. Up to that point, as one racing historian has observed, ‘the only race that mattered was the one around the tracks, the only colours that counted were the ones on their backs, if only for those minutes on horses’. Indeed, black jockeys were so successful that they would win fifteen of the first twenty-eight Kentucky Derbies, before disappearing. One of those winning jockeys was Alonzo Clayton.

Alonzo Clayton’s early life and career
Both early and modern profiles give conflicting information about Alonzo Clayton’s place of birth, including Louisiana; Kansas City, Kansas; and Kansas City, Missouri. Clayton’s 1917 death certificate gives his date of birth as 4 January 1876, and his birthplace as ‘Miss’. Mississippi did not begin keeping official birth records until 1912, so there is no official record of his birth. However, Mississippi is most likely where Clayton was born– his parents, Robert and Evaline (sometimes spelled Eveline) Clayton, were living in Moss Point in Jackson County, Mississippi at the time of the 1870 United States Census. The Clayton family was still living in Mississippi in 1878, two years after Lonnie’s birth, as four older siblings are listed as being of school age in Mississippi’s 1878 Enumeration of Educable Children. At the time of the 1880 Census, the Claytons had moved to Wyandotte, Kansas with their nine children, and the place of birth for all of the children listed on that enumeration (including Alonzo) was given as Mississippi. The Clayton family moved to Arkansas around 1886, and young Alonzo ran away from home two years later, at age twelve, to try to become a jockey in Chicago like his older brother, Albertus (Albert). After beginning as a stable hand and exercise rider, he began working as a jockey in 1889 for owner Dan Honig, and won his first race in 1890 in Clifton, New Jersey. One of the first things he did after winning some races was to buy a farm for his parents in Brushy Island, Arkansas, in December 1890. Clayton’s career took off when was given the mount on Azra – together they won the Champagne Stakes (1891), the Kentucky Derby (1892), the Clark Handicap (1892), and the Travers Stakes (1892).18 Although Clayton is officially credited as having won the Kentucky Derby at the age of fifteen, which was the youngest at the time and only equalled once since, it is likely that he was already sixteen at the time of the victory, if the birth date given on his death certificate is accurate. Clayton’s success continued in 1893, when he came in second at the Kentucky Derby aboard Plutus II, and won the Churchill Downs crown – of his thirty mounts at that track during that season, he finished in the money twenty-four times (eleven wins, five place, and eight show).19 Clayton also had success riding Henry of Navarre, and the pair had an ongoing rivalry with the thoroughbreds Domino and Clifford, leading the New York Jockey Club to put up a $5,000 purse for a match race with the three horses at Morris Park in Bronx, New York, which Clayton won aboard Henry (1894). In 2020 dollars, that $5,000 purse would be worth $149,539.53.21 Riding Laureate in 1895, Clayton came in third at the Kentucky Derby, won the Kentucky Oaks at Churchill Downs aboard Valadora, and was signed to a contract to ride for the Brookdale Stable at the salary of $10,000 a year – $306,200 in 2020 dollars. The 1895 season was by far Clayton’s busiest, with a total of 688 mounts – and he finished in the money 398 times (58% of his mounts). Although he never had that many mounts again, he finished in the money 61% of the time in 1897.

Although many contemporary writers looked at Clayton through prejudiced eyes and dwelled on his appearance – labelling him variously as ‘mulatto,’ ‘coffee coloured,’ ‘copper coloured,’ and even ‘saddle coloured,’ as well as being a natty dresser – they also referred to him repeatedly as ‘clever’ and ‘exceptionally bright,’ noted that he came from a religious family, and praised the fact that he did not squander his winnings, having bought property and built a house in North Little Rock, Arkansas. (The writer Edward Hotaling has offered mock praise ‘to the obsessed white writers for their thesaural contributions’ undertaken as part of the ‘white reporters’ obsession with shades of black’.) Clayton purchased two lots of land in the North Argenta Addition section of North Little Rock in December 1893, and then spent $6,000 ($183,720 in 2020 dollars) to build a Queen Anne-style house on the property in 1895, which later became known as the Engelberger House, which was described as ‘the finest on that side of the river’. He also purchased a commercial property, in his father’s name, in North Little Rock in February 1896, where his brother-in-law, William F. Stewart, operated the Stewart & Smith Grocery on the first floor, while the second level was a hotel.

Riding Ornament, Clayton won the Flatbush Stakes (1896), the Latonia Derby, the St. Louis Derby, and the Oakley Derby, all in 1897, and came in second at that year’s Kentucky Derby. Other important stakes races won by Clayton in the 1890s include the Jerome Handicap on Picknicker (1891), the Latonia Derby on Newtown (1892), the Latonia Oaks on Lake Breeze (1892) and Sardonic (1898), the Great Western Handicap on Sabin (1894), the Flash Stakes on Onaretto (1895), the Lawrence Realization and the Swift Stakes on Requital (both 1896), and the Suburban Handicap on Tillo (1898). Undoubtedly, many of those who followed thoroughbred racing would have agreed with the sentiment, expressed in one newspaper profile, that Clayton was ‘the premier jockey of the West’.

Despite his successes, though, Clayton was not immune from criticism. In an article about a race at Saratoga – with the subtitle ‘Clayton Made Onaretto
Lose’ – a racing columnist wrote that, Clayton is riding, and there was a time when Clayton might have been called a jockey, but Clayton now rides as if the Saratoga water had gone to his head and changed the gray matter there to sawdust. Indeed, his performances are so remarkably bad that one wonders if it is not a changeling Clayton who is riding…No living bad jockey, not even Fenn [sic.] at his worst, could have equaled Clayton on Wallace’s Onaretto in the Bankers’ Stake to-day. He not only took advantage of every opportunity to go wrong that was offered him, but with extraordinary ingenuity he wrought out opportunities for himself.

Writers who covered horse racing at that time could not only be highly critical, they would often use inflammatory racial imagery when Clayton lost, especially when the writer felt that the horse he was piloting should have won. When he came in second riding Clifford in the Brooklyn Handicap (1896), the New-York Tribune’s racing columnist called Clayton a ‘little sooty imp,’ said that a ‘jockey who did so much mischief and damage to high-class sport as Clayton did ought never to have a chance to do any more harm upon any reputable American racetrack,’ and remarked that: Hundreds of colored men have been lynched in the South for offences less irritating and exasperating than that which this jockey Clayton committed in destroying all the chances of Clifford, the popular choice, in the Brooklyn Handicap.… it was lucky for Clayton that it was in the presence of a Northern assembly of law-abiding, order-loving, self-restrained and peaceful people that he rode Clifford, instead of before a conventicle of southerners at Texarkana or Paris, Tex.

The racial views of the day even came through when Clayton was being complimented, as when a newspaper columnist noted that:

Clayton has a more scientific seat than most of the colored boys, whose appearance is generally a careless, slovenly one. Clayton’s distinguishing feature is his
ability to place his mount well at the moment for the final rush, but this leads him to temptation of ‘riding a grandstand finish,’ drawing it so fine that the crowd will yell their approval at him; in this way Clifford was defeated for the Brooklyn Handicap by Sir Walter. Clayton waits too long on many critical occasions.

Henry Bolomey, ‘an inoffensive ice dealer of Brooklyn’
The other person who played a major part in the events that led to Alonzo Clayton’s 1901 arrest was Henry Bolomey, a European-American ice dealer from Brooklyn, New York. His 1917 death certificate gives his date and place of birth as 16 June 1863 in Belgium, and his name appears in New York real estate records for the first time in 1894, obtaining a $32 mortgage to buy a wagon ($957.05 in 2020 dollars). ‘H’y Bolomey’ is listed in the Brooklyn City Directory for the first time in 1896, so his earlier years are not well documented. Census, municipal records, and genealogical sources show that Henry and his wife Catherine (McKenna) Bolomey had four sons born between 1896 and 1903, although the first child (also named Henry) died at one day old. On each child’s birth certificate, the place of birth given for their father alternates between Switzerland and Belgium, which could mean that Henry was being deliberately evasive, since the two countries do not share a border – and on his son Charles’ birth certificate, the name of the father is listed as Harry Bolomy [sic.] instead of Henry, so it seems likely that he went by both Henry and Harry. The 1901 Brooklyn City Directory lists him as ‘Harry Bolmey,’ at the same address previously listed for Henry. The 1900 U.S. Census gives Bolomey’s place of birth as Belgium, while the 1905 New York State Census and the 1910 U.S. Census give his place of birth as Switzerland.

Since Bolomey seems to have used both Henry and Harry, it is interesting to note that in March 1894, a ‘truckman’ named Harry Bolomey was arrested and accused of stealing a diamond ring worth $75 ($2,243.09 in 2020 dollars) from a lady whose furniture he was engaged in moving. Although the outcome does not appear in the contemporary newspapers, official records show that the case was dismissed on 2 April 1894. One is left to speculate that perhaps the missing ring eventually turned up – or was returned.

When Henry met Lonnie: the 1898 incident at Morris Park
The lives of Lonnie Clayton and Henry Bolomey intersected on 14 October 1898, at the Morris Park racetrack in Bronx, New York.43 In the third race, Clayton had the mount on Warrenton, who by all accounts ran terribly, swerving all over the track and losing the race to Sailor King. As the jockeys came back to weigh out, something provoked Clayton to strike spectator Bolomey across the face with the butt end of his whip. The track stewards fined Clayton $200 for disorderly conduct – $6,297.78 in 2020 dollars – and the incident was covered (in various lengths) by newspapers all around the United States, from Anaconda (Montana) to Washington, DC, with the victim’s name listed variously as Bolomey, Bolomay, and Balamey. None of the articles specifically mentioned whether Clayton used a ‘loaded whip’ – jockeys often used whips that contained lead for balance, which made them potent weapons.

As one might expect, much of the press coverage was highly critical of Clayton. In the New York Journal, one columnist, who described Bolomey as ‘an inoffensive ice dealer of Brooklyn,’ managed to insult another ethnic group by wondering if the jockey had ‘a streak of “redskin” blood somewhere in his make-up,’ since ‘he took revenge on a spectator who, he imagined, had insulted him…[like] any raid of Indians on a frontier settlement’. Another columnist, writing in the Morning Telegraph, deemed Clayton’s action as ‘unpardonable,’ criticised his riding of Warrenton, and then gave one of the more detailed accounts of what transpired after the race: As the field finished a German [sic.], by the name of H. Bolomay [sic.], who gave his address as 632 DeKalb avenue, Brooklyn, was standing with a friend near the rail alongside the stewards’ stand. According to his story, he remarked to his friend that Warrenton would have won if the boy could have kept him straight. At that instant Clayton came by with Warrenton, and, swerving into the rail, he heard the remark and immediately slashed Bolomay across the face with his whip. The blow landed just above the temple and across the ear.

Bolomay went up to the gate leading to the stewards’ stand to make complaint, but the policeman there stopped him. A big crowd, however, collected about the stand, and the incident created so much excitement that eventually the stewards felt impelled to take some action. They held a meeting, questioned both Bolomay and Clayton, and evidently found much comfort in the statement made by Clayton that Bolomay had applied a vile epithet to him. They fined Clayton $200.47

The subtitle of the article in the New York Press described it as ‘a Ruffianly Assault,’ whose unnamed track columnist argued that Clayton should have been banned from Morris Park for life, as well as receiving a dozen lashes on his bare back. The writer also noted that the blow ‘left a long ridge on the man’s face and raised a big lump on his ear,’ and said that the victim ‘protested that he did not make any remark to Clayton, but he refused to make a complaint against the jockey to the stewards’. The reporter summed up his coverage by adding that: When a colored jockey can assault a spectator in this ruffianly manner and escape with a $200 fine it is a temptation for spectators to take such cases into their own hands. H. Bolomay [sic.] of No. 632 DeKalb avenue, Brooklyn, was the man assaulted. If he had taken Clayton and pummelled him into such shape that even his best friend would not have recognized him, he would not have exceeded his rights. Spectators should beware of the whips of colored jockeys.

Even in an age when African-Americans were considered to be inferior to whites in many parts of the United States, and only two years after the Supreme Court had upheld racial segregation laws for public facilities (‘separate but equal’) in Plessy vs. Ferguson, not all of the press coverage was against Clayton. An unnamed writer in the Boston Herald defended Clayton, saying that the jockey ‘rode the colt to the best of his ability, and the criticism of the spectator was unwarranted’. The Daily Racing Form noted that the spectator ‘addressed an abusive remark to the jockey’ and in addition to fining Clayton, the stewards ‘should have gone farther and had the man who insulted an honest jockey put out of the grounds’.50 (One wonders that if it truly was highly insulting, even a ‘vile epithet,’ to say that a horse lost a race because the jockey didn’t keep him straight, then should numerous horse racing columnists also have been whipped, since they routinely said even more unflattering things about jockeys on a daily basis, as seen in some of the excerpts about Clayton cited above?) The Cincinnati Enquirer referred to the spectator who was whipped as ‘a race-track fiend,’ but it is not known if that was a moral judgment about those who frequented racetracks in general, or about Henry Bolomey in particular.

Lawsuit and trial
Notwithstanding the New York Press’ account that Bolomey initially ‘refused to make a complaint against the jockey to the stewards,’ he evidently had no qualms about going to a lawyer, because his attorney, Reginald R. Thomas, had the Supreme Court, Kings County (Brooklyn), issue a summons on 19 October 1898 for Clayton to answer the charges against him within twenty days. Whether it was served on Clayton or on his representative is not known, but on 2 November 1898, Clayton’s attorney, Louis Lowenstein, requested a copy of the complaint and all other papers pertaining to the action from Thomas. On 17 November, Henry Bolomey signed a complaint against Alonzo Clayton which stated: That on the 14th day of October 1898, at the Morris Park Race Track, in the Borough of Bronx, in the City and State of New York, while the plaintiff was peaceably and lawfully standing near the rail alongside the Steward’s stand, the defendant, Alonzo Clayton, violently, wrongfully, wantonly and willfully struck this plaintiff with the butt end of a horse whip, bruising and cutting plaintiff’s head and left ear and cutting, bruising and discoloring his left eye, and whereby this plaintiff was made sick and was seriously injured and the sight of his left eye impaired

He asked for court costs as well as $10,000.00 ($309,889.16 in 2020 dollars) for pain and suffering. Clayton, in response, denied ‘each and every allegation in
said complaint’ through his attorney, Louis Lowenstein. It took over a year for the case to finally be tried. After being listed in the court calendars of various newspapers for several days incorrectly as ‘Boloney vs. Clayton,’ Bolomey vs. Clayton was tried in Supreme Court, Kings County on 21 February 1900, before Justice Josiah T. Marean. According to coverage in the New-York Tribune, the plaintiff alleged that the assault was unprovoked and that the blow affected his eyesight. In his defense, according to that newspaper, Clayton seemed to claim that it was both an accident and that he was acting in self-defense:
On his way back from the judges’ stand after weighing out he heard some one [sic.] in the crowd call him an insulting name. Turning, he saw Bolony [sic.]
about to strike him. Raising his arms to ward off the expected blow, the whipwhich he carried in his right hand accidentally struck Bolony in the face.
The reporter went on to describe Bolomey’s account: In rebuttal the plaintiff said that he did not utter a word and had no occasion to do so, as he had bet on Sailor King, and that horse won. He thought some one in the crowd might have said something which Clayton overheard in passing, and which provoked him to strike with his whip.
The writer then concluded: It was the opinion of many who saw the races at Morris Park that day that Warrenton was badly ridden. No intelligent person believes that Clayton’s version of the matter was correct. The jury would not have given Bolony a verdict for $1,250 if they had thought Clayton told the truth. Clayton has ridden in races more than once which called out severe criticism.

The judgment awarded to Bolomey by the court was for $1,250 in damages plus the plaintiff’s costs of $201.98, for a total of $1,451.98.57 According to an
online inflation calculator, that amount would correspond to $44,459.63 in 2020 dollars. It was entered into the Judgment Roll by the Kings County Clerk on 26 February 1900, and was published in various newspapers beginning the following day.

Additional financial and legal troubles for Clayton
Even before being sued by Henry Bolomey, Clayton was complaining about all the expenses that he had to take care of. In a newspaper article about how
numerous jockeys die in poverty, Clayton was quoted as saying: Jockeys are at a terrible expense all the time, and few people think about this. When I am riding right along I have four men under salary, and it takes a lot to keep them a-going. You have to look out for them the year round, so when youare not working they cost you a great deal for board and clothes. Then when I was going from Chicago to Cincinnati and from Cincinnati to New York and back to St. Louis we all traveled first class, which was a big expense. There are an infinite number of small expenses which help eat up your salary. As historian Katherine C. Mooney described it, these successful jockeys were ‘the focal points of employment networks,’ which was ‘a constant worry for someone with largely seasonal work’.

On top of his own regular expenses, as well as the judgment for Bolomey against him, Clayton was also having some financial and legal problems back
home in Arkansas. A lien of $600 was placed on Clayton’s house in North Argenta on 30 November 1897, and additional liens of $900 and $500 were added on 4 February 1899, and 27 March 1899, respectively. And just after the civil case in Brooklyn was held and the judgment was awarded to Bolomey, Clayton was on the losing end of two more judgments in Arkansas. A ‘warning order’ was published in the press by the Pulaski Circuit Court, Second Division, giving notice to Alonzo L. Clayton (defendant) to appear within thirty days to answer the complaint from Charles Clayton (plaintiff), his older brother. A trial was held with Judge Joseph W. Martin presiding, and a judgment for $511.00 was awarded to Charles Clayton on 11 April 1900. That would correspond to $15,646.82 in 2020 dollars. Another judgment against Clayton, for $160.05 ($4,900.73 in 2020 dollars), was awarded to George M. Street, on 29 April 1900.64 Street was one of the people who sold the commercial property in North Little Rock to Clayton. In addition, four months later, Clayton was sued by ‘Jos. Leob’ for $75.00 ($2,296.50 in 2020 dollars) for services rendered.66 The 1899 Little Rock City Directory does not list anyone with that name – however, there were a few people named Joseph Loeb, one of whom was an attorney, so one can surmise that Loeb may have represented Alonzo in one of the cases against him, and then needed to bring action to get his legal fee.67 In addition, records show that Clayton also did not pay his real estate taxes on his North Argenta house/property in 1899.

The search for Clayton and his property
Although Henry Bolomey received a favourable ruling in civil court, he would then have to try to collect his judgment. After publication of the judgment,
there was a twenty-day stay, after which attorney Thomas began to actively search for Clayton’s property. On 19 March 1900, Thomas issued executions against the property of Alonzo Clayton to the Sheriffs of both Westchester and New York Counties, because Thomas had been told that the defendant owned some property in the former, and because Clayton had testified at trial that his place of residence was 492 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan (New York County). Both executions were returned unsatisfied, however – the former on 30 March 1900, and the latter on 10 April 1900. Attorney Thomas then undertook his own investigation to ascertain Clayton’s residence or whereabouts. According to an affidavit he filed with the court a year later (after Clayton’s 1901 arrest), he himself went to 492 Seventh Avenue, and also to 229 West 32nd Street, where he had been informed that Clayton had lived. He also went to 243 Sixth Avenue, where Thomas had been told that he might hear of Clayton. Thomas also made inquiries at the racetracks at Aqueduct, Morris Park, and Gravesend, but each time he was not successful. Around that time, the Chicago Daily Tribune noted the absence of black jockeys on the tracks and attributed it to prejudice, and also reported that: Lonnie Clayton has grown to be a man almost and cannot do weights that would bring him every-day usefulness. But he made a lot of money in his time, built for himself a gorgeous mansion at Little Rock, and now is in a position to get some return for his years of self-denial in the training barn.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that, unlike in the past, Clayton and several other big name jockeys had not been signed to riding contracts with any stables for spring 1900, and noted that Clayton ‘has grown heavy and will not be able to accept mounts except in heavy-weight handicaps and stake events’.

Clayton’s name was among those granted licenses by the Jockey Club for the 1900 season. On 22 May 1900, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that Clayton would be taking part in the Brooklyn Jockey Club meeting, after which it said that he was planning to go to England to ride. It was also reported elsewhere that Clayton had asked Edward Corrigan, a stable owner who was bringing his horses to England, to give him some mounts in that country. Hearing that Clayton might be at Brooklyn’s Gravesend track, attorney Thomas obtained an order on 31 May 1900 for Clayton’s examination in Supplementary Proceedings, and served the order personally to Clayton on the same day at a place on Village Road near Gravesend Avenue in Brooklyn.

On 2 June 1900, Clayton appeared for examination before Justice Frederick Smyth in Special Term Part II of the Supreme Court, New York County (Manhattan). The jockey testified that he was the owner of land with building thereon in North Little Rock, Arkansas, that it was mortgaged to the amount of $1,500 ($45,930 adjusted for inflation), and that there was also an attachment affecting the property amounting to $500 ($15,310 adjusted for inflation). The examination was adjourned until 7 June 1900. Clayton, however, did not return to court on 7 June for examination, and Thomas obtained several orders requiring him to show cause as to why he should not be punished for contempt in failing to appear. However, the orders were never served because, once again, Thomas could not locate Clayton. A body execution against Clayton was issued to the Sheriff of New York County on 25 June 1900, where Clayton testified (both at the civil trial and also at the Supplementary Proceedings) that he lived. The execution was held from 25 June to 24 August, but the Deputy Sheriff was not able to find Clayton. In an article about how white owners and jockeys had conspired to shut out black jockeys, the New York Times noted that ‘Clayton spent but a short time in New York in the Spring [of 1900], and, finding he could get no riding to do, ceased to appear at the racetracks’. This just happened to coincide with the fact that attorney Thomas was searching for him in New York and at its tracks. There is also no listing for Alonzo Clayton in the 1900 U.S. Census, so whether it was purposeful or not, Clayton seems to have been staying under the radar.

Having been forced to appear in court and give details about his North Little Rock property, was Clayton now concerned that he would (finally) be forced to pay Henry Bolomey the judgment against him, while also having liens on his house and two other judgments against him in Arkansas? Bolomey’s attorney, Reginald Thomas, was actively pursuing Clayton and trying to collect on behalf of his client. On 12 July 1900, just over a month after testifying at the Supplementary Proceedings, Clayton sold his house in North Little Rock to Robert A. Little for $3,000 ($91,860 in 2020 dollars). Within a week after the sale, Clayton paid off his back real estate taxes, as well as $1,400 in liens, and the judgments for George M. Street and Charles Clayton were satisfied.80 His parents also sold off part of their farm on 26 November 1900, for $275 ($8,420.50 in 2020 dollars).

Not having a contract to ride with any particular stable and not getting any mounts, whether because of his weight or prejudice, two newspapers reported that Clayton decided to quit riding altogether and open a restaurant in upstate Albany, New York. Was Clayton sincerely through with jockeying, or was he trying to throw Thomas off his trail and avoid being arrested or having to pay the judgment(s) against him? On 13 April 1901, just nine days before his eventual arrest, Clayton’s commercial building in North Little Rock was sold for $4,000 ($121,039.06 in 2020 dollars). Evidently Clayton was not committed to running a restaurant (if he indeed ran one), because the Jockey Club granted its licenses for the spring meeting on 20 March 1901, and Clayton was among those who received licenses.

Hearing that Clayton was living at Gravesend, Brooklyn, and preparing to ride in the coming races, attorney Thomas obtained a property execution (9 April 1901) and a body execution (12 April 1901) against Clayton, which were issued to the Sheriff of Kings County (Brooklyn). As in the previous instances, Clayton was not able to be located, and the executions were returned, the former on 12 April, and the latter on 27 April.

Clayton did finally reappear on the New York City racing scene on 15 April 1901, when it was reported in the press that he was in the saddle in the second race at Aqueduct, riding Osman Digna. Clayton, it turned out, was actually quite fortunate, because two days later, Osman Digna threw jockey George Wilkerson, fracturing the man’s skull.

With Clayton riding at Aqueduct, attorney Thomas obtained a body execution against Clayton, which was issued to Sheriff Joseph H. De Bragga of Queens County, where Aqueduct was located. Deputy Sheriff Warren B. Ashmead proceeded to Aqueduct and arrested Clayton as he was about to ride The Golden Prince in the fifth race – as one news report noted, ‘Ashmead refused to let Clayton pilot his horse, as he was fearful the jockey would ride off after the race was finished’. The jockey was then brought to the Queens County Jail in Long Island City. Thus, Clayton’s 1901 arrest was due to the fact that he had not paid the civil judgment against him and had nothing to do with alleged race-fixing.

Clayton’s arrest and incarceration
Although Clayton’s arrest did make the front page of his adopted home town newspaper, the story did not receive nearly as much coverage as the 1898 assault. As one might have expected, an African-American jockey whipping a white spectator was more newsworthy than the arrest of an African-American jockey, even though the latter resulted from the former.

Three weeks after his arrest, Clayton signed an affidavit on 17 May 1901, appealing for release, the legal argument being that the execution upon which he was arrested was issued more than ten days after the verdict, and more than three months after the entry of the judgment. Clayton also pointed out that he raced at the Brooklyn Jockey Club’s racetrack during the spring meeting of 1900, thereby implying that there had been other, earlier opportunities for Bolomey and Thomas to find him if they really wanted to. Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Samuel T. Maddox ruled that Clayton or his attorney should appear before him at a hearing on 22 May 1901.

Reginald Thomas, Bolomey’s attorney, made a motion on 21 May 1901, opposing Clayton’s release. He pointed out to the court that ‘Section 572 of the Code of Civil Procedure, under which this motion [by Clayton] evidently has been made, does not apply to an execution against the person, but does apply to an order of arrest,’ and that no order of arrest was issued in this action. Thomas also submitted an extremely detailed affidavit, chronicling all of the attempts he had made since the trial to collect the judgment, with numerous body and property executions having been issued to several Sheriffs, but ‘not one has been able to find any property belonging to the defendant or the defendant himself until the 22nd of April [1901] as above stated when the defendant was arrested’. Justice Maddox denied Clayton’s appeal on 23 May 1901, using Thomas’ legal argument as the basis for his decision, and Clayton remained in jail.

Clayton was incarcerated for at least two months, since it was noted in press reports in mid-June 1901 that he was the cellmate of rich playboy Theodore Burris, whose wealthy father had had him arrested for vagrancy. One can get a picture of conditions at the Queens jail, which seem to have been much better than other New York City prisons, from a later news description:
‘There are shower baths, marble wash basins and other up-to-date fixin’s [sic.] and the grimiest prisoners have appeared in court for trial, after a stay in the jail, looking like regular dudes’.96 Unfortunately, the whereabouts of the records of the former Queens County Jail are unknown and are likely no longer extant, so it is not possible to determine the exact date of Clayton’s release. Although Queens was incorporated into Greater New York City in 1898 and became one of the City’s five boroughs, the New York City Commissioner of Corrections did not take possession of the Queens County Jail from the Queens County Sheriff until 1912 – but the Sheriff retained oversight of civil prisoners even after that.

We know that Clayton was released sometime after mid-June, because it was reported in the press that the he was at Saratoga on 14 August 1901, that he had a jockey’s license, and that he planned to ride again. Again, we do not know with certainty why he was eventually released – did he use some of the proceeds from the sale of his North Little Rock properties to (finally) pay all or part of the civil judgment to Henry Bolomey? The Morning Telegraph reporter wrote, ‘It is said that his complainant has forgiven him and the case is ended’. There is nothing about Clayton’s release in the case file, and as the Deputy Kings County Clerk pointed out to the present author, when a payment for a civil judgment is made, it goes directly from one party to the other, without involving the court, so the County Clerk would have no record of the payment.

Clayton’s later years
Clayton’s career had already begun to decline before the 1898 assault at Morris Park – according to Goodwin’s, he had only 158 mounts in 1898, which was less than half of 1897s total (337), and then fell to only fifty-four mounts in 1899. After that season, Goodwin’s stopped including him in their annual ‘Jockey Mounts’ table, presumably no longer considering him one of the top jockeys.

With limited opportunities for him in the east, Alonzo Clayton moved further west to try to earn a living. In spring 1902, Clayton, still only twenty-six years old and previously one of the most successful jockeys in the country, was riding in Butte, Montana, and was the subject of a very flattering profile in a local paper that detailed his earlier successes riding Henry of Navarre, Ornament, and Tillo (which the paper misspelled as Fillo), but with no mention of the 1898 assault. Clayton and a fellow jockey came to blows after a race in Butte in 1902 when Clayton was accused of committing an intentional foul. In early 1904, he was riding in Memphis, Tennessee, where it was noted that he was…working hard to get in condition to race at the coming Hot Springs race meeting. Clayton has been living at the home of his father near Little Rock, and the farm represents all that the once wealthy jockey retained from enormous winnings and earnings. He is able to do 108 pounds at present, and thinks that he will hold his own with present-day jockeys. The earlier image of Clayton as someone who saved and wisely invested his money persisted, whether or not it was still accurate. In a 1905 Washington Post column about the decline of the number of black jockeys, the writer noted that, ‘Clayton bought some property in the West during his successful career as a jockey, and is now one of the coloured riders who have something to live off in their old age’.105 Clayton, of course, was neither in his ‘old age’ nor living off his savings, having already sold his house and commercial property. His parents sold the rest of their Arkansas farm on 23 August 1906, and moved to Los Angeles to live with their daughter and son-in-law. Robert Clayton was still living with his daughter, Bessie Westbrook, and son-inlaw at the time of the 1910 U.S. Census, but Alonzo is not listed in that Census.

Clayton’s name returned to the news and sports pages in 1913, when a man claiming to be former jockey Lonnie Clayton was arrested in New York City
for stealing expensive gowns from a local dressmaking shop where the man worked as a porter. The story was covered widely, and newspapers accepted the man’s claim and repeatedly (and mistakenly) identified the culprit as the former jockey. It was not until the man who claimed to be Clayton was found guilty and sentenced to jail that the newspapers realised he was an imposter – his real name was Howard Clifton, and he was sent to Sing Sing prison on 7 November 1913, under the name Howard Clayton. The press reported that the real Lonnie Clayton had been living in Vancouver, Canada, for twelve years.110 Although he is not listed in the 1911 Census of Canada, Lonnie Clayton, with ‘jockey’ as his profession, is listed in the 1913 edition of the Vancouver City Directory. The Cincinnati Enquirer ran side-by-side photos of Clayton from ‘17 Years Ago’ and ‘As He Is Today,’ the latter with suit jacket, tie, and vest, as well as a mustache, looking like a dapper businessman rather than a jockey, with the text stating that, ‘Clayton is in business in Vancouver, but recently received an offer to go abroad and ride and is considering it’. Of course, if Clayton was still either working as a jockey or a successful businessman in Vancouver and had opportunities to race abroad, why then did he move to California around 1914, where he worked as a hotel bellhop for the Union League? He died in Los Angeles of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis at age 41 on 17 March 1917, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery three days later – the present author could only find three newspapers that reported his passing. He was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame on 3 February 2012.

Bolomey’s later years
What happened to Henry Bolomey, the ‘inoffensive ice dealer of Brooklyn,’ after the 1898 assault? In early 1899, ‘Bolomey H (also called A F M Van Dyck)’ obtained a mortgage of $75 ($2,324.17 in 2020 dollars) for an ice and coal plant. Later that year, ‘Bolmey [sic.], H and F M Van Dyck’ obtained a mortgage of $165 ($5,113.17 adjusted for inflation) for wagons and furniture. In June 1900, ‘H. Bolomey’ obtained a mortgage of $150 ($4,593 in 2020 dollars) for horses.118 Henry Bolomey’s name (misspelled as usual) returned to the news briefly in 1908, when ‘Harry Bolomay, a driver for the American Ice Company, and Tommy Lawson, his assistant, were among the witnesses to the bomb throwing’ at the side entrance to the saloon owned by Carmello Manzello at 63 Sackett Street, near the Brooklyn waterfront, which police and news reports attributed to the Black Hand, an early name for organised crime. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described it, ‘by pulling up his horses Bolomay managed to escape injury to himself and companion,’ although the only description he could give was that the bomb thrower wore a gray coat.

Aside from his civil suit against Clayton, Bolomey also attempted to sue both the Long Island Rail Road Co. and the Brooklyn Heights Rail Road, the latter being a trolley car system. Unfortunately, the files for both of those cases, along with thousands of others, were destroyed in a 2015 Brooklyn warehouse fire. Another case, Bolomey vs. Nassau Electric Rail Road, appeared on the court calendars in various newspapers in 1916 and was heard in 1917 – a judgment of $108.90 was awarded to Edmund Bolomey, a minor, with his mother, Catherine Bolomey, listed as his guardian. That would correspond to $2,188.28 in 2020 dollars. Edmund Bolomey’s 1918 draft registration record notes that his right leg was paralyzed, which may have formed the basis of some, if not all, of the civil cases against the trolley/railroad companies.

Although Henry Bolomey is listed as the head of his household in the 1910 U.S. Census, he is not listed in the 1915 New York State Census, where his wife Katharine [sic.] is listed as the head of the household. Oral family tradition holds that at some point after 1910, Henry Bolomey left his family in Brooklyn, changed his name to Henry Van Dyke, and moved to New Jersey. He died at age 53 on 20 January 1917 of septicemia at Jersey City Hospital, and was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York – both his death certificate and burial record are under the name Henry Van Dyke. Bolomey/Van Dyke was buried in the same grave with his baby son Henry (Jr.), as well as his wife’s aunt and uncle (Elizabeth McKenna Noonan and Peter Noonan). When his wife, Catherine McKenna Bolomey, died in 1922, she was also buried at Holy Cross Cemetery – but, tellingly, not in the same grave with her estranged husband Henry, but rather with her mother’s relatives (the Murphy family). Linked together in both life and death, both Alonzo Clayton and Henry Bolomey died in 1917.

Conclusion
The assault of Henry Bolomey, the lawsuit, and the arrest did not ruin Alonzo Clayton’s career as a jockey. Other African-American jockeys had lost their tempers and used whips (and sometimes knives), too, and their careers survived, but their anger was usually directed at fellow jockeys rather than spectators, which made Clayton’s case unique, as did the persistence of the victim in pressing his claim. In 1878, the great Isaac Murphy was falsely accused of hitting another jockey with the butt of his whip during a race, and was hit with a twenty-five dollar fine and a one year suspension. However, Murphy was reinstated after a few months, when the true culprit admitted his guilt. In 1889, George ‘Spider’ Anderson struck a black coachman at Pimlico, but he was even permitted to ride in that day’s Preakness (which he won), and the victim decided not to press charges.127 In 1894, Bob Isom stabbed fellow jockey Robert Combs after a rough ride on the track in San Francisco, with Isom fined $250, and Combs (the victim) fined fifty dollars. In a race at Newport in 1899, jockey Coley Thompson tried to force the horse ridden by Jesse Mathews into the rail, so Mathews, who was white, retaliated with his whip, which led to a fight after the race – Thompson, who was black, was suspended for committing the foul during the race, while Mathews was exonerated for hitting him over the head during the race with his whip.

The career lifespan of jockeys is usually brief and depends more on nature: as their bodies grow, and as their weight increases, their usefulness as a jockey decreases. Several American jockeys went to Europe and Russia to prolong their careers, where the weight limits for jockeys were higher.The Brooklyn Daily Eagle already cited increased weight as the reason that Clayton was going to have stop racing, and that was back in 1900. Clayton had been a very successful jockey for much of the 1890s, and one of the two documented instances of him losing his temper and lashing out did not adversely affect his racing career, which was already starting to decline, although it definitely seems to have affected his personal life, as it coincided with him having to sell both his house and his commercial property. The assault also happened to coincide with a noticeable decline in the numbers of African-Americans working as jockeys and trainers. Although black jockeys were extremely successful and won many of horse racing’s biggest events, recent scholarship about African-American jockeys has pointed out that, even at their peak of success, blacks did not make up anything close to a majority of jockeys, accounting for only 22% of the jockey population in 1880 – but that percentage was almost twice their representation (13%) in the general population.

However, as mentioned above, columnists were already noting the sudden absence of black jockeys in 1900 – the New York Times attributed it to a secret ‘Anti-Colored Jockeys Union’ of white jockeys who were doing everything legal to prevent horses ridden by black jockeys from winning races. Historian Katherine C. Mooney described these concerted efforts by white jockeys to terrorise black jockeys: ‘In the midst of a pack of flying horses on the backstretch, they tried to unseat black competitors, box them in, injure or kill them or scare them so badly that they quit racing’. White jockeys made it obvious to owners that if they wanted their horses to not only have a fair chance of winning but also of finishing races safely, they should not hire black men to ride them. Although the racetrack had been integrated for two centuries in America, it ‘was an intolerable offense to the logic of Jim Crow, itself a response to deep-seated fears that black people might take advantage of the opportunities of freedom and the possibility of equality,’ and thus a threat to wealthy owners. Rather than dealing with the effects of prejudice, the stable owners and trainers ‘simply wanted to win purses… Instead of forcing the sport to give fair treatment to their African American jockeys, white stable owners simply quit hiring blacks’.

In addition to these overt and covert attempts to drive black jockeys out of the business, there were other sociological forces at work, too. As they left the south and migrated north to cities, young African-Americans no longer grew up around horses and did not see the racetrack as a viable career, as previous generations had. As Edward Hotaling put it: In one massive shift, African Americans had become city dwellers. This alone shrank the pool from which black jockeys might be drawn. Struggling in a big city, a young African American was not likely to find his way to a horse’s back, let alone a racecourse. In only a few generations, charity campaigns would be organized to take African American kids to the countryside to show them what a horse’s back looked like.
Hotaling went on to point out that: The great black riders had grown up on horse farms, or near them, but by 1910, most African Americans were living in cities, where thoroughbreds were a rare sight – unless you took a train to Coney Island or happened to see them being led into a horse sale at the old Madison Square Garden. Yet even that migration had much to do with escaping racism, with Hotaling pointing out that, ‘Racial prejudice and violence, lynchings and the terror of the Klan, contributed mightily to that migration, which in turn intensified racial prejudice and violence in the cities’.

Another factor in the decline in numbers of African-American jockeys, and, for a time, all jockeys, was that, by the early 1900s, horseracing was under persistent attack from progressive reformers who wanted to outlaw gambling, and legislation they enacted resulted in shortened race schedules, smaller crowds, and smaller purses. The number of racetracks in America fell from 314 to only twenty-five by 1908, and in New York, led by their progressive Governor Charles Evans Hughes, they ‘passed a draconian bill that did the trick for the puritans,’ making it ‘illegal for anybody to quote odds openly, solicit bets, or record bets in a fixed place. The next three seasons were a disaster for the New York tracks, and they shut down completely in 1911 and 1912’. Many stable owners exited the racing business and shipped their horses to Europe, and many jockeys (black and white) went overseas in the early 1900s as well, including Tod Sloan and Jimmy\ Winkfield. Kentucky, Maryland, and Canada were the only places in North America where horse racing still took place. A 1913 New York State Supreme Court decision in People ex rel. Shane v. Gittens …established the important precedent that individuals had the right to wager privately at a track as long as the betting was not a business and not carried on with paraphernalia… It provided a loophole that the laws did not ban racing or betting but prohibited pari-mutuel betting or bookmaking.

Although horse racing was resurrected in New York because of that court decision, none of the tracks in Brooklyn re-opened; and while some African-American jockeys did not return to the sport because they had moved on to other jobs, many others were simply no longer hired by rich white stable owners or trainers. The most popular sport in America had gone from one where blacks and whites had competed against each other for two centuries, to one that was virtually completely white, until later in the century when it eventually came to be dominated by jockeys from Latin America. Tragically, had Alonzo Clayton lived longer and had his career not already started to decline, he likely would have been out of a job anyway.

Alonzo “Lonnie” Clayton reached stardom in 1892 as the youngest jockey – at age 15 – to win the Kentucky Derby. An African American, Clayton went on to become one of the highest salaried riders on the East Coast circuit during the 1890s. He lived in North Little Rock where his earnings enabled him to build a Queen Anne-style home that the Arkansas Gazette described as the “finest house on the North Side” in early 1895. Surviving as the historic Engelberger House at 2105 Maple Street, the property (named for Swiss immigrant Joseph Engelberger, who bought it in 1912) was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.

Born in 1876 in Kansas City, Kansas, Clayton was 10 when he moved with his family to North Little Rock. Although he had to work as a hotel errand boy and a shoeshiner he attended school and was considered “exceptionally bright,” a correspondent for the Thoroughbred Record wrote in 1896. At age 12, Clayton ran away from home to join his brother, Albertus, a jockey who rode for Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin in Chicago. Lonnie Clayton started as an exercise rider and debuted as a jockey in Clifton, N.J. in 1890. Later that year he claimed the first of many victories.

The next year he won the prestigious Jerome Stakes and the Champaign Stakes at Morris Park in Westchester County, N.Y. Following his Kentucky Derby triumph in 1892, he added impressive victories in the Clark Stakes at Churchill Downs in Louisville and the Travers Stakes at Saratoga, N.Y. He competed in three more Kentucky Derbies, finishing second in 1893 and 1897 and third in 1895. During his peak in 1895, he posted 144 wins and finished in the money on 60 percent of his mounts at tracks across the country. In 1895, he won the Arkansas Derby at the Little Rock Jockey Club’s Clinton Park. To date, Clayton is still one of only three African American ever compete in the Preakness in Baltimore where he was third in 1896.

While spending most of his time on the road, Clayton, who never married, came back to North Little Rock regularly to visit family. He bought his parents a farm in 1894 in what is now Sherwood (Pulaski County) and had the Queen Anne-style house built in 1895. He also built a two-story commercial building on Main Street, North Little Rock, in 1897. His celebrity status spawned a legend that erroneously linked him to another Queen Anne, known today as the Baker House, a bed and breakfast at 109 West Fifth Street in North Little Rock. According to legend, Clayton, misidentified as Artemis E. Colburn, raced horses in England, came back to his hometown of Argenta to build a grand house but couldn’t live there because of racial prejudice.

Colburn, in fact, was a white jeweler and first resident of the future Baker House in 1897. Clayton and his family lived in the future Engelberger House from 1895 to 1899. Confirming this is Clayton’s nephew, Clayton Westbrook of Los Angeles, who retained a photo of his mother, Bessie (Lonnie Clayton’s youngest sister), and other family members in front of the house. Moreover, written in pencil in the attic are the names of Clayton and eight brothers and sisters, as well as “Mama and Papa Clayton” and “1899” and “Goodbye.” On a baseboard to the right is a drawing of what appears to be a jockey, under which is written “Ragtime Jimmie,” whose meaning is unknown. Newspapers, property records and city directories corroborate the family’s residence there.

The reason for the Claytons’ departure is not entirely clear, but debts and legal issues bedeviled him. In a larger context, racism did contribute to his declining career. In the early 1900s, bigotry drove black jockeys out of the sport they had dominated in America since the mid-1600s. Most stable owners stopped hiring them as sanctions and even physical threats against black jockeys increased. Some went overseas and Clayton may have done so. In his last big-time appearance, Clayton was arrested in April 1901, shortly before post time at the Aqueduct track in New York, for allegedly fixing a race. Despite dismissal of the charge, his career was effectively finished. He did attempt comebacks in 1902 in Montana and in 1904 in Memphis, but he never again won a major race. A wave of anti-gambling legislation in the 1900s also shut down many tracks and opportunities for jockeys. Clayton lived his last few years in California and died at age 41 on March 17, 1917, of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis. He was buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles.