Brown Bullet—The Legend of Rajo Jack

The powers-that-be in 1920s auto racing, namely the American Automobile Association’s Contest Board, barred anyone who wasn’t a white male from the sport. But Dewey Gatson, a black man who went by the name “Rajo Jack”, drove into the center of “outlaw” auto racing in California, refusing to let the pervasive racism of his day stop him from competing against entire fields of white drivers. In the new book “The Brown Bullet”, journalist Bill Poehler uncovers the life of a long-forgotten trailblazer and the great lengths he took to even get on the track, showing ultimately how Rajo Jack proved to a generation that a black man could compete with some of the greatest white drivers of his era, winning some of the biggest races of the day. What follows is an excerpt highlighting a major turning point in the struggle of African-American drivers for equality on the track.