In the city of fallen angels
where the wild and the crazy hang.
Full of hustlers and dope pushers, whoa we’re sleepless in L.A.
My name is Ghuan Featherstone. I’m the executive director here at Urban Saddles.
Our mission is building hope and opportunity for youth and community
through the equine experience and the Cowboy Code of the West.
What we do is provide families with a safe place. Youth and adults.
I started riding over 20 years ago when I got out of the military.
Well, actually, when I got back from Europe.
I was introduced to The Hill from an ex-girlfriend of mine.
And it had been there for about 75 years prior to me getting there.
And sure enough, it was a whole bunch of Black folks on horses
and I had never seen anything like that.
I couldn’t believe it. They let me start cleaning up after the horses,
petting the horses, grooming the horses.
One day, one of the guys was like, you can ride this horse named Ashanti.
I learned how to ride, and I was just on the horse ever since.
It just gave me this sense of peace. This overwhelming calm.
The way we get to our community in a holistic way
is just riding through the community.
We ride through the city.
We let people see us in the streets and then they stop
and you’ll see the kids – they’ll want to pull over
and have their mothers come over and take a picture,
and, “Where’d you Black people get these horses?”
And, “Whose are they?”
“We live right over there, and we stable right over there,
and we’re just like you and your community.”
And then that gets them to come out.
You see adults turn into kids. You see gangbangers humble themselves.
You see the police, you know, when they normally probably see
a gang of Black folks riding around on some motorcycles or something,
they wanna stop you and, you know, harass you.
But when they see us, the police are like, “Hey!” You know, “Hey, cowboys!”
You know, it gives people a sense of – I think,
a sense of like hope that the community could be
a different place when they see us ride through.
Just, having no care, riding these big animals
and controlling these animals through the streets.
It’s like, “Oh wow.”
So, it works. That’s what I want them to get out of here.
A sense of family, sense of community,
and a sense of a whole bunch of people
getting together trying to make things right.
In the 1800s, nearly 25 percent of all cowboys were Black.
But you never saw that in the movies.
They couldn’t show a Black cowboy in the movies.
It was rarely depicted in the movies.
Urban Saddles came to be – at first,
we used to be an organization called Saddle Up.
And in 2012 there was a fire.
And they tore the place down.
That’s when the desire to create this came up.
Because we had a lot of youth that used to frequent The Hill,
we saw go back into the street life, get into gangs,
and go to jail, get killed.
And we were like, we gotta do something. So we started Urban Saddles.
And uh, we found this place out here in South Gate.
And then this barn was just sitting here for like 10 years.
The guy wasn’t doing anything with it. And then I asked him,
I said, “Can we rent that?” And started doing the program over there.
He gave us the go-ahead. So we fixed it up and started our organization
So it’s beautiful. It’s just an organic type of get-together type movement,
and it grew into this.
The Cowboy Code of the West is just ethics, in which we live by. You know.
Just different things that we actually try to instill in the kids through action,
And I see that they get it. They get it that way.
The world around these kids when they come out their house,
they have to worry about getting shot sometimes.
They have to worry about wearing the wrong baseball cap
‘cause it got the wrong team letters on it
and some gang done associated theyself with the team
and now they got the right to kill you, ‘cause you got these letters on your head.
Or you got your wrong shoes on. I mean, it’s just so many factors
that these kids have to face on the daily. That when they come up to an environment like this,
where it’s free from all those type of insecurities that they have out in the world.
They just get to just be kids.
‘Cause they get a sense of responsibility.
Because they have to take care of these horses.
And they get to learn how to deal with people.
Because with horses, you have to communicate with your senses.
And it allows kids to look at people that way.
And just see people as people, and notice that you’re agitating somebody.
Or maybe you’re offending somebody with your actions and your movements.
The way you stand up on a horse is, building trust with that horse.
Getting your balance together, and working with the horse.
The horse has to trust you.
To have a visual right there. A person that looks like them.
That lives like them. Talks like them.
Inside the same community,
that shows a whole different ethic of how to live.
It gives them hope and opportunity that, “Okay, I’m here,
but I don’t have to be of here.”
“Anything that I think I can do, I can do.”
And even if they don’t get into horses.
“I wanna take up skiing. I wanna take up surfing.”
You know, we just give them that, “Man, I can really do whatever I wanna do.”
I know some kids now that are into scuba diving.
I’m like, “Scuba diving?” But they’re like, “You into horses!”
[Laughs]