Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Remembrance Race takes place tonight.

by Debbie Little

For the eighth straight year, The Meadowlands will play host to a race in honor of civil rights pioneer Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The race was on The Big M condition sheet for Friday (Jan. 17), but even with a plethora of horses in the box, it did not fill.

To their credit, The Meadowlands put the race back on the sheet for tonight (Jan. 24), and 10 horses dropped in, including one trained by reigning Dan Patch Amateur Driver of the Year, Yogi Sheridan.

“I didn’t even check the condition sheet,” Sheridan said. “I just said ‘Just drop [Lindy The Brave] into a [$10,000 claimer].’ After last week, I didn’t know they were still going with it. I didn’t drop him in there for that reason, I just dropped him into a [$10,000 claimer].

“I put Tyler Miller up on him, and when [the entries] came out, it came out MLK with me on him. So, I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ So, I’m just hoping that he goes okay, because it seems like every time I’m in those races, I just never have luck.”

Sheridan is one of five African-American drivers, along with Brandon Cruse, William Carter, Deshawn Sample, and Jim King Solomon, competing in tonight’s fifth race, the Martin Luther King Remembrance Race. As The Meadowlands has done in previous years, the mile dash is a friendship race that also includes five Meadowlands regulars, Braxten Boyd, Bradley Chisholm, Justin Huckabone, Justin Irvine, and Tyler Miller.

In his celebrated “I Have A Dream” speech, Dr. King spoke of people not being judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, and how he dreamed that one day children of different races would join hands as brothers and sisters. It is that sense of unity that The Meadowlands celebrates with this friendship race in Dr. King’s name.

“It’s a good thing all the way around for the track, for us, for the principle of what Dr. King stood for, you know, everybody getting along,” Sheridan said. “You know, everybody coming together. I like the whole scene of it.”

Sheridan competes weekly in the Meadowlands Amateur Driving Club and finished 14^th in the 2024 Meadowlands year-end driver leaders, so he understands the importance of getting to compete at “The Mecca” of harness racing.

“When I’m down in Virginia driving, everybody speaks of The Meadowlands,” Sheridan said. “They always ask me, they say, ‘Yo, how does it feel winning a race at The Meadowlands?’ just in a conversation. They say, ‘That long stretch, and all the people and this and that.’ And I look and I say, ‘Yeah, you know, it’s alright.’ And they say, ‘Man, I just want to win one there.’ So, that goes to show what that place means to racing.”

Prior to the MLK Remembrance Race not filling last weekend, Sheridan got calls from some trainers asking him if he would choose their horse if they dropped it in.

“I said, ‘Dude, you just gotta put the horse in, and whoever you get, you get, because I may not get your horse anyway,’” Sheridan said, adding with a laugh, “I said ‘You’re worried about me driving your horse? Guess what? There were nine other black drivers that beat the hell out of me for the last five years; beat the pants right off me. So, you’re going to get some good guys, I promise you.’”

Since many of the drivers that have competed in previous editions of the Martin Luther King Race do not call The Meadowlands home and have traveled in from Delaware, Indiana, Ohio or Kentucky, Sheridan said it might help get horses if the field of drivers was finalized earlier.

“I mean, I know everybody’s got a lot of stuff to do, but if you get on the horn early and get the [drivers] who would like to participate in it, then you can advertise that these are the drivers for the Martin Luther King race,” Sheridan said. “So, then [trainers] see the 10 guys that are going to be there and they can look them up. Then when they look them up, they’ll say, ‘Oh, well, we don’t have problems putting horses in.’”

Whatever the makeup of the race might be, Sheridan said the most important thing to him is that there is a race that honors Dr. King.

“It means a lot just because without him, we wouldn’t be where we are,” Sheridan said. “So, it means a lot to even have it every year. When I thought that we couldn’t have it this year, I was like, ‘Oh, man.’

“So, I mean, I’m happy that [Meadowlands president/chief executive officer] Mr. Gural and [chief operating officer/general manager] Jason [Settlemoir], let it go on for so long and let us compete.”