Antoine Fuqua, the director of the remake of The Magnificent Seven, says he insisted on Denzel Washington playing the lead character in an attempt to present a more diverse and accurate view of America's cowboy past.
Oscar-winner Washington, 61, is one of Hollywood's most successful black actors and in the remake of the classic western he plays Sam Chisolm, a bounty hunter, and the leader of the Seven. Fuqua, 50, who directed Washington in Training Day, is in post-production for the hotly-anticipated film, which will be released in September.
Fuqua told AFP: "I said it needs to be an event and it needs to be something we haven't seen – and more diverse. I said Denzel should play the lead role."
Fuqua's film is a re-imagining of the 1960 western starring Steve McQueen and James Coburn – which in turn was a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Japanese-language epic Seven Samurai. The new version stars Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke, along with South Korea's Lee Byung-hun as Billy Rocks, one of the seven gunslingers who defend a community against murderous bandits.
The director believes that the true racial makeup of America's Wild West – a melting pot of Europeans, Chinese, Mexicans, Native American and blacks – remains one that has not always been accurately represented. He added: "Now it's just not the white cowboy, the white soldier, but it's all of us together. It's white, black, Asian, Indians. It doesn't matter anymore... We all have to come together to fight tyranny."
Black cowboys were working on ranches throughout Texas by the early 19th century, and many more were employed after the civil war to break horses and herd cattle across the rivers. Jim Austin, president of the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, told AFP: "What we found is that if you talk to some (modern) cowboys they'll say 80 per cent of the cowboys were actually people of colour."
Austin also points to the TV and film versions of The Lone Ranger, a character who battles outlaws along with his Native American sidekick Tonto, as an example of Hollywood compounding ignorance over race in the Old West.
The Lone Ranger is widely believed to have been inspired by Bass Reeves, a real-life black lawman who, legend has it, went through his entire career without being shot, despite bagging 3,000 outlaws. "Hollywood took Bass's story and they flipped it, from an African-American man – six feet two inches, black hat, black horse, sidekick a Native American, always got his man – and turned it into The Lone Ranger," Austin said.
The Oakland Black Cowboy Association stages an annual parade to raise awareness of the role of non-whites in settling the Old West.