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
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
Lucile Berkeley Buchanan
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…