Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an international civil and human rights movement organized in 2013 by three Black women: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Formed after the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, the movement began as a social…

Charles Burrell (1920–) is a classical and jazz musician who first joined the Denver Symphony in 1949 and played bass with the group for decades before his retirement in 1999. Sometimes called the “Jackie Robinson of classical music,” he was not actually…

Cantonese immigrant Chin Lin Sou (1836–94) defied racial barriers to establish himself as an esteemed business and civic leader in Colorado. Not only do historians recognize Chin and his wife as the first Chinese American family in Colorado, but Chin and…

Chipeta (1843–1924) was a Ute woman known for her intelligence, judgment, empathy, bravery, and quiet strength, all of which made her the only woman of her time allowed on the Ute council. She was also the wife of Ouray, whom the United States recognized…

Clara Brown (c. 1803–85) was an ex-slave who became a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and humanitarian in Denver and Central City. She is said to be the first African American woman to have traveled West during the Colorado Gold Rush. While in Central City…

For economic reasons, as well as to protect themselves from an Anglo-American culture that mostly viewed them with contempt, Denver’s Chinese residents established an ethnic enclave in the city around 1870. The neighborhood endured decades of racially…

Since the city was founded in 1858, Denver has included residents from a plethora of ethnic backgrounds drawn in by the promises of wealth and freedom often associated with the American West. As the city developed, immigrants from various parts of the…

Elijah McClain (1996–2019) was a massage therapist in Aurora who was walking down the street when approached and killed by Aurora Police and Aurora Fire Rescue officers on August 24, 2019. The death of McClain, a young Black man whom his family described…

Elizabeth Piper Ensley (1847–1919) was a political activist and reformer who worked throughout her life for gender and racial equality. The daughter and wife of formerly enslaved people, she came to Colorado in 1887 and soon helped lead the first…

Ellison Onizuka (1946–86) was an astronaut for the US Space Shuttle program who earned degrees at the University of Colorado in Boulder before perishing in the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster. Onizuka was Colorado’s highest-profile astronaut and is…

Elvin R. Caldwell Sr. (1919–2004) was one of the most significant African American policymakers in Colorado history. An accountant and businessman, Caldwell joined many community organizations before beginning his political career in 1950 in the Colorado…

Bordered roughly by the South Platte River to the northwest, Thirty-Eighth Street to the north, Downing Street to the east, Park Avenue and East Twentieth Avenue to the south, and Twentieth Street to the southwest, Five Points is a historic neighborhood…

Marcus M. Garvey (1887–1940) was president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL), an organization that offered hope to millions of African people in the United States and worldwide. In the early…

The federal government built the Granada War Relocation Center, also known as Camp Amache, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II. Fearing that Japanese Americans might sympathize with Japan and work against…

Beginning in the 1920s, immigration to Denver underwent several significant changes owing to war, economic depression, and evolving civil rights legislation and related social tensions. Movements of people due to World War II, Japanese internment,…

Jack Bradley (1919–2000) was a violinist who became one of the first Black members of a major professional orchestra in the United States as well as the first Black member of the Denver Symphony Orchestra when he played with the group from 1946 to 1949…

In 1882 a group of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settled at the Cotopaxi Colony. The colony was the result of persistent efforts by several prominent American Jews and Jewish organizations to offer a better life for those fleeing the Pale of…

Justina L. Ford (1871–1952) was a medical pioneer and Denver’s first licensed African American female doctor. Ford is best known for her obstetrics and pediatric work in Denver’s Five Points community. Patients knew Dr. Ford as “the Baby Doctor,” and it…

Lucile Berkeley Buchanan (1884–1989) was a gifted teacher and the first African American to graduate from the State Normal School of Colorado (today, the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley) in 1905. Following graduation, she occasionally worked…

Three of the Shitara sisters, known in the contemporary press as “the Nisei Sisters,” were prisoners at the Amache concentration camp who helped two Germans escape from a nearby prisoner-of-war camp. During their trial, the third treason trial of World…

Oliver Toussaint “O. T.” Jackson (1862–1948) was an entrepreneur and prominent member of black communities in Denver and Boulder during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1910 he founded Dearfield, an-all black agricultural settlement…

On November 16, 1900, a white mob in Limon chained Preston Porter, Jr., a fifteen-year-old Black railroad worker, to a vertical steel rail, slung a rope around his neck, and burned him alive. Porter was accused of raping and murdering a local white girl;…

Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales (1928–2005) was a prominent figure in the Chicano Movement in Denver in the 1960s and 1970s. He also had ties to the greater Civil Rights Movement. In addition to his activist work, Gonzales had multifaceted careers in boxing,…

Saul Halyve was a Hopi distance-running champion raised near Grand Junction who exploded onto the athletic scene in the early 1900s. Although Halyve would never compete in an Olympics due to a multitude of factors, his accomplishments match and possibly…

There is no shortage of labels used to identify members of the population that share a Spanish language heritage and/or whose ancestry is from one or more Spanish-speaking or Latin American countries. These many labels include but are not limited to …

The Denver Woman’s Press Club is an organization for women newspaper writers and authors founded in 1898. At the time of its founding, the club demonstrated the new social and political power of women through its involvement in a range of causes,…