Randy Hook is living proof that horses can transform lives.
“My homies and I are all here today because we had horses,” Hook, 32, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue, which celebratesBlack History Month. “But so many of our friends and family didn’t have that. They fell victim to the streets or ended up in jail, strung out on drugs or dead. Now we’re using horses to reach the next generation, to keep kids off the streets and make them into decent human beings.”
“We’re changing kids' lives and making it dope to be involved in your community and be civically engaged,” says Hook, a father of two young sons.
It was Hook’s aunt, Mayisha Akbar — a 69-year-old realtor and horse lover who moved to Compton during the height of the city’s gang violence in the late 1980s — who set all this into motion. She purchased a three-acre property in Richland Farms, a 10-square-block rural enclave in Compton that is the largest urban agricultural area in the sprawling metropolis of L.A.
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From left: KasenRoss, 10, Chloe Corley, 15, and Joshua Gonzalez, 12 (with Cowboy Tre Hosley, rear).Jamie Vance
In 1988, after Akbar’s son was injured in a gang-related shooting, she refused to flee the community and decided to create a horse-centered after-school program on her property that became known as the Compton Junior Posse.
Over nearly three decades, hundreds of local kids — including Hook and his pals — spent much of their waking hours on Akbar’s urban ranch, learning how to muck stalls, clean tack and take care of her horses while competing in rodeos and riding in parades.
Randy Hook with the Compton Cowboys.Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times via Getty
After Akbar suffered a stroke in 2018, Hook agreed to take over the reins of the program on one condition: “I wanted to do it my way and bring a ‘lights, camera, action’ attitude to the ranch and create a movement around it,” Hook says of the nonprofit — now known as theCompton Junior Equestrians— which offers low-cost classes in riding, urban farming and animal care.
Randy Hook with son Luxe.Kirstie Marie Photography
He came up with hisCompton Cowboyidea to hopefully attract attention to the youth program. Before long, the group — who have since appeared in ads for Guinness Beer, Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger and the equestrian clothing brand Ariat — was providing much of the funding to help keep the ranch running.
“We’ve built a movement out of it,” says Hook, who led a 2020 March in Compton in the wake ofGeorge Floyd’s killing that former Compton Mayor Aja Brown called “one of the most powerful and peaceful expressions of love in our community.”
Hook has also harnessed the group’s social media presence (they haveover 160,000 Instagram followers) to introduce a new generation to the long-forgotten heritage of the Black cowboy.
“We were the ranch hands on the plantations and post-slavery, and when the west was being pioneered, one in four cowboys were Black,” says Hook. “We’re shedding light on how important horses once were to Black culture to show that horses aren’t just for rich white people.”
source: people.com
