Nine decades before the election of President Barack Obama, a mixed-race person who identifies as African American, Charles  Curtis, a mixed-race man who identified as Native American, was elected as Herbert Hoover’s Vice President.

A child of a French, Kaw, Osage and Potawatomi mom and an English, Scotch and Welsh father, Curtis was born in the Kansas Territory and raised on a Kaw reservation. He was known as “Indian Charlie” as a boy and was a spectacular rider of horses and an accomplished prairie jockey. His mother died when he was three, and Curtis was cared for at various times by both sets of grandparents, taking an education in Topeka. A career in law led to one in politics, the biggest horse race of them all, which he also mastered. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle profiled Curtis in early 1929, soon after he he was sworn into executive office.