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Barney Ford

Born into slavery in 1822, Barney Ford escaped to freedom and moved to Colorado in 1860. He soon became a successful businessman and an influential civic leader who pushed for Colorado statehood with suffrage for all. Ford died in Denver in 1902 and has…

Buffalo Soldiers

The so-called Buffalo Soldiers were several African American cavalry and infantry regiments that operated in the American West during the late nineteenth century. While there is no evidence that the black troops themselves adopted it, the nickname…

Charles Burrell

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…

Clara Brown

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…

Elijah McClain

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 Ensley

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…

Elvin R. Caldwell

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…

Garveyism in Colorado

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…

Jack Bradley

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…

Jeff Campbell

Jeff Campbell (1970–) is a Denver rapper, playwright, performance artist, and activist. Born in Alabama and raised along the Front Range, Campbell worked for a hip-hop label in California before returning to the Mile High City in the early 1990s and…

Julia Greeley

Julia Greeley (c. 1840–1918) was born into slavery in Missouri. Around 1880 she moved to Denver and became a Catholic. Despite being poor herself, Greeley spent the rest of her life doing good deeds for the impoverished. In 2016 the Catholic Church…

Justina Ford

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

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…

Michael Hancock

Michael Hancock (1969– ) is the forty-fifth mayor of Denver, elected in 2011. Currently in his third term, Hancock succeeded fellow Democrat John Hickenlooper and interim mayor Guillermo Vidal. Widely seen as a pro-growth mayor, Hancock is credited with…

Oliver Toussaint Jackson

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…

Preston Porter, Jr.

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;…

United Mine Workers of America

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) formed in 1890 to fight for better pay and working conditions for the nation’s coal miners. In Colorado the union was most active in the early twentieth century, with thousands of members joining strikes in the…