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Harold Miller is a nine-time world champion bareback bronc rider and a member of the Black Cowboy Museum Hall of Fame. Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter.
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At 68, Miller admits to thinking about going back to riding—“Those bucking horses, they just draw you to them,” he says. Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter.
Harold Miller
Age: 68.
Hometown: Seneca.
Claim to fame: A nine-time world champion bareback bronc rider and three-time qualifier for the International Finals Rodeo (that sport’s Super Bowl), he was inducted into the Black Cowboy Museum Hall of Fame in March 2023.
Horse sense: While Miller shoes horses for a living—three or four a day—he also trains and breaks colts. In his free time, he draws horses and welds figurines out of horseshoes.
Co-op connection: A member of Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative.
With his signature black hat and a toothpick lodged in the corner of his mouth, Harold Miller has straddled bulls and broncs and most anything considered “crazy, unbroke or having bad habits” on the professional rodeo circuit for 50 years.
It was only a torn-up shoulder and a chance of paralysis that finally forced him to retire in March 2024. Even now, Miller admits to thinking about going back.
“It’s a bad addiction,” he says of the eight-second shot of adrenaline on the back of a twister of hide and hooves. “Those bucking horses, they just draw you to them.”
He can count six broken bones, and there was that Saturday night in Blacksburg when Miller was upside down, hanging beneath an ill-tempered bronc named Ironside.
“I thought, ‘This was it.’ But it was like Jesus put a shield around me. It was just bruises and a sore shoulder. It was amazing I could get on one the next day, but I did. You going to be a rodeo rider, you’re going to have to take some pain.”
He’s known on the circuit as “Cowboy”—a name he earned as a kid breaking ponies down around West Union.
“I told them I wanted to be a cowboy, they’d laugh,” he says. “There weren’t many Black cowboys, especially in the Southeast, back then.”
In those early years, rodeos were segregated. He’d take home a sportsmanship award, while a white rider would be named champion. For Miller, it wasn’t about race. It was about the horses and being a cowboy.
His wife, Mary Beth, thinks it relates to how her husband and horses have been misunderstood.
“A horse has been told it’s this and it’s that and can’t nobody do anything with it. And you got Harold, who grew up with all the racial stuff, and he’s been told he couldn’t do things and he’s this and that. It’s like they’re on the same level. He can feel what they’re feeling.”
Miller remembers a gray bucking horse he once owned. Nobody gave Flying Gray much of a chance. But Miller rode him, and they won first prize. He’d like the horse to be included on his headstone.
“I was wanting to be a cowboy, and he was wanting to be a bucking horse. We just kind of got along.”