“NEXT UP TO SPEAK TONIGHT is Randy Hook, a member of the Compton Cowboys,” the council member said through a microphone. “You have three minutes to speak, sir.” The city council chamber was filled with a variety of Compton residents. Some were there to speak, others to listen to the council’s plans for the community.
In recent years the city of Compton had been under investigation for a series of corruption scandals, which broke the trust of the community. Now local officials were fighting hard to regain it. As a child, Randy had watched Mayisha speak at council hearings on countless occasions. She had always been an advocate for more resources for the Richland Farms, and her confidence boomed throughout the room, making him proud to be her nephew.
As he approached the podium for the first time, he thought about the big shoes that Mayisha had left for him to fill. He was the youngest speaker that night and had a vision for his community that was centered on developing more horse programs for Compton’s youth. At one point in his life, Randy had a dream of entering politics—the reason why he chose to major in sociology in college. He stroked his beard and then adjusted his black Stetson hat in front of the mostly middle-aged African-American and Latino residents. All eyes were on the lone cowboy in the room.
“Good evening, everyone,” he said. “My name is Randy Hook and I am a member of the Compton Cowboys. We’re a group of horse riders from the Richland Farms and I’m here to speak about the need to put more resources into the farms. Horses are a big part of the community and we think they could really help with the image of the city. As residents of the Richland Farms, we’ve been asking for more horse-riding lanes on the streets, and we need to have cleaner trails by the canals.”
Members of the council leaned forward in their seats and listened. Randy’s cowboy hat, gold earrings, and nose ring raised some eyebrows. Council members adjusted their glasses and took down detailed notes as he spoke. Randy’s speech captivated them, but he secretly thought entering the room while mounted on his horse would have created more of a splash.
He spoke about the power that horses continued to have on youth on the farms and the changes he had seen in them. But without the help of the city, the impact of their program would be minimal. Many of Compton’s own residents weren’t aware that the farms existed, and he wanted to change that. He wanted a designated trail throughout the city and signage that detailed the farms’ geographic boundaries. There was also a need to clean up and clear areas that had been neglected for too long, where debris and overgrowth prevented horse riding.
When his three-minute session ended, the council vowed to allocate more resources to the farms and to schedule a cleanup effort over the next few weeks.
“Thank you for listening,” Randy said.
For many of the council members, it was their first time interacting with the new generation of black cowboys from the farms. The idea of young black men on horses was tough for some of them to fathom. Most young black men at Randy’s age were either in prison or involved with gangs.
The meeting established Randy as the voice of the Compton Cowboys and their neighborhood, a part of the city that sometimes wasn’t recognized even by its own. His decision to begin attending council meetings had been spurred by recent conversations that he had begun with other members of the cowboys. “We have to put the same energy on the community-building side of things as we do with the riding and entertainment side of things,” he had said to them in a group chat text. “What good does it do if we don’t help our community?”
Finding ways to give back was an ongoing issue for the group. Randy understood that the ranch had been established as a way to give back to the farms’ community. As Mayisha’s nephew, he understood that her dream had been a program that would put children’s needs at the very center. Everything else was secondary.
At the same time, he also understood the challenges that came with that model. Mayisha had had wealthy financial donors throughout the years, while the Compton Cowboys had none. Perhaps it was the move to get back to their roots of western riding that alarmed wealthy white donors. Riding western directly invoked the forgotten history of black cowboys in the West. It was as much a political choice as it was a cultural choice. Riding western came with less outside funding and resources than the more elitist English style. Now they were on their own and would have to fend for themselves to inspire more interest in the Compton Cowboys. For many of the cowboys, it felt like their own community didn’t believe in their ability to successfully run the ranch. At times it felt like they were being set up for failure. Still, Randy hoped that moving back to the more popular western riding would bring in more kids from the streets.
Most of Randy’s time these days was spent trying to reestablish the ranch’s presence in the community. New riders needed to be recruited, and every day was a struggle to secure meetings with potential sponsors and donors. The Los Angeles Chargers, the Professional Bull Riders, Dr. Dre—they were all on his list. If the ranch could have a chance to survive, the cowboys would have to secure immediate funds to help jump-start the new five-pillar program that he developed: Education, Business, Athletics, Guidance, and Therapy. He was even learning the most basic steps—filing taxes, incorporating a company. Running a business and philanthropic group wasn’t something he’d learned growing up. He was doing the best he could with the little he had.
SINCE MOVING BACK to the farms last year, Randy had struggled to find balance both in himself and in the community. He had left Compton to go to college and then moved to the San Fernando Valley to live with the mother of his child.
But being back home came with a rude awakening. He began to feel the pressures of the streets in ways that he didn’t understand as a teenager. That also reaffirmed for him the effect the ranch could have to heal an entire community. He believed the ranch had the power to save everyone. Even with the group acting like a dysfunctional family and the community having its own challenges, there was real love there, and they needed the ranch to nourish it.
Being at the helm of the ranch also meant that Randy had to confront personal challenges and find ways to rise above them. Mental illness had plagued his family for generations; one of his aunts had committed suicide as a result of symptoms related to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He considered his own family dysfunctional, like many of the black families he knew in Compton, and the mental health problems only made things harder. His aunt’s suicide was the most extreme example, but he recognized a form of the illness in everyone in his family. They all had the same kind of emotional instability and anger problems, and yet none of them knew where the hell it stemmed from.
As an adult Randy had attempted to address his condition by seeking therapy, but at this point in his life—with the responsibility of keeping the ranch afloat—his own healing was put on the back burner.
When things began to pick up with the cowboys, Randy found it hard to sleep at night. Insomnia had been a frequent visitor throughout his life, but at twenty-eight and with the pressures of keeping the ranch alive, it had kicked into high gear.
As Randy drove through the city following the council meeting, the sounds of Kendrick Lamar’s album Good Kid, M.A.A.D City played loudly. His full beard, gold earrings, and nose ring moved together in unison while he bopped his head to the rhythm.
He drove through the city to find peace of mind and often found it in Kendrick’s lyrics. He was brought to tears the first time he heard Kendrick’s music in the driver’s seat of his father’s Toyota Camry. Keenan sat in the passenger seat and closed his eyes and took in the Compton rapper’s words in the same way. After listening to the song on repeat, they both sang:
When the lights shine off and it’s my turn to settle down,
my main concern, promise that you will sing about me,
promise that you will sing about me,
promise that you’ll sing about me.
Both Randy and Keenan had grown up listening to rap groups like N.W.A but had never had someone speak to them the way Kendrick’s music did. His music provided a soundtrack for their lives in ways that no other musician had done before. Kendrick understood what it was like growing up in the ’hood, and many of the traumas and everyday struggles he experienced were Randy’s and Keenan’s too. Also, like Kendrick, they had grown up eating at Louis Burgers on Rosecrans, and both navigated through the same situations with girls that Kendrick often rapped about. They both also considered themselves good kids in a mad city.
Kendrick’s music spoke to them in a way that the older generation of Compton rappers like Eazy-E and Dr. Dre could not. They were all dodging the same bullshit that came from growing up in the ’hood, and they were the same age and from the same generation. Kendrick inspired Randy to consider what kind of influence the ranch could have outside of Compton. He hoped to create bridges between other black cowboys around the United States by adopting similar youth ranch programs in other urban cities. It could be the start of a movement. If horses could work in Compton, they might work in other neglected urban communities as well. There were black cowboys in Philly, black cowboys in Chicago, and new groups popping up in just about every American city. It was making such an impact here, he thought, why not spread it elsewhere? It could be the prototype for all other ’hoods in America.
The dream of uniting the Compton Cowboys with other black riding communities was both palpable and a challenge. Social media had allowed the cowboys to connect with other riders, and as each day passed, more and more black cowboys from around the country began to contact him about the need to create more programs for black youth riders. The incentive to create more riding programs felt especially urgent as the killings of unarmed black men by police officers continued to occur throughout the United States. Randy believed that the ranch could serve as a model to help decrease the violence. Black Lives Matter was about camaraderie and caring for other black people. It was the social justice movement in this political moment, and these horses, Randy felt, could help save black lives too.