Black Lives Matter

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 media hashtag and galvanized antiracist activity around the globe. BLM’s mission is to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.”

There are more than forty chapters of BLM around the world. In 2015 activists Amy E. Brown, Rev. Dr. Dawn Riley Duval, and Dr. Bianca Williams formed Black Lives Matter 5280, a chapter serving Denver. One year later, activist Jon Williams and others founded Black Lives Matter Grand Junction, the main chapter on Colorado’s Western Slope.

In addition to organizing street protests against police brutality, BLM 5280 also provides educational initiatives; a Displacement Defense Fund for those who lost housing during the COVID-19 pandemic; and other spiritual, medical, and financial assistance to Black communities. BLM Grand Junction, meanwhile, offers a directory of Black-owned businesses on the Western Slope and provides forums for discussions about inequality and privilege.

After several years of antiracist activity that drew intense backlash from local whites, BLM Grand Junction halted most of its work in June 2020. However, the chapter inspired other local groups, such as Right & Wrong (RAW), to continue antiracist work in the community.

Origins

Anti-Black racism has a long history that is tied to the rise of race-based New World slavery, which became a significant social and economic institution in the United States. After the Thirteenth Amendment officially ended slavery, anti-Black racism continued to drive policy and actions that oppressed Black people, including sharecropping; Jim Crow segregation; lynching; terrorism; poll taxes and literacy tests; police brutality; and discrimination in housing, jobs, school funding, and banking. These actions and policies caused intergenerational trauma among Black people and prevented Black families from gathering wealth to pass on to their children, creating the foundation for today’s dramatic gaps in wealth and well-being between Black and white America.

Although slavery was never legal in Colorado, anti-Black racism was nonetheless part of the state’s history from the beginning. During the Colorado Gold Rush, white prospectors ran a group of Black men off a claim in Summit County, calling the place “Nigger Hill” thereafter. In 1900 Preston Porter, Jr., a young Black man, was burned alive in front of a cheering crowd in Limon (he was accused of murdering a young white girl). In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was effectively in charge of the state and Denver’s government; members burned a cross in the yard of the Denver NAACP president. Throughout the twentieth century, racist housing covenants and residential redlining excluded Denver’s Black families from the city’s middle- and upper-class communities, and police disproportionately targeted and abused Black people.

The Denver Police Department’s renewed focus on street gangs in the 1990s targeted Black and Latino neighborhoods, leading to the routine harassment of residents. In the early 2010s, ongoing police killings of Black people and other minorities became a major catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement, which is modeled in part on the nationwide Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1960s. By 2016, a year after Black Lives Matter 5280 was founded, Black Coloradans made up around 4 percent of the total population but 18 percent of the jail or prison population. They were more than three times as likely to be arrested than whites.

In Colorado today, 20 percent of Black residents have income below the federal poverty line, compared to 8.9 percent of white residents; the average white household has 16 times the wealth of the average Black household. In Denver, Black people are 2.7 times as likely to be killed by police as white people; nationwide, they are three times as likely. In the context of historical and present-day inequality, and with a nation more aware of racist activities via ubiquitous cameras and social media, Black Lives Matter found plenty of traction in the Centennial State.

Notable Activity

In April 2015, Freddie Gray, a young Black man in Baltimore, died while in police custody, sparking national debates over policing. On May 21, 2015, BLM 5280 held a community dinner at the Boys and Girls Club in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood to officially launch the organization. More than fifty residents attended, creating poster collages of their visions for an equal city and society. Later that year, the group’s first real push for change came when they rallied to have the city’s Stapleton neighborhood renamed; it was originally named for Denver Mayor Benjamin Stapleton, a Ku Klux Klan member. The neighborhood was eventually renamed “Central Park” in 2020.

Over the next few years, BLM 5280 worked to get charges dropped against a local Black high schooler who was dragged out of a bathroom for violating dress code (2016), sent a delegation to the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by Indigenous people (2016), and raised thousands of dollars to bail Black Coloradans out of jail (2018). They also held vigils for Black people killed by police in other places and worked alongside Denver Homeless Out Loud to highlight the role of capitalism in Black oppression.

In July 2018, BLM 5280’s Education Squad (composed of local K–12 teachers) launched the Freedom School. This program centers on Black knowledge, people, and principles and is named after the Freedom Schools that Black activists set up throughout the South during the Civil Rights Movement. In June 2020, BLM’s Education Squad successfully campaigned for the Denver School Board to remove police officers from schools.

In late May 2020, after footage began circulating online of a Minneapolis police officer brutally killing George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, BLM 5280 joined other civil rights groups in massive demonstrations in Denver. As they did elsewhere, the protests drew thousands to the heart of the city for multiple days, and solidarity protests cropped up all over the state, from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, Steamboat Springs, and Alamosa. Although the Denver demonstrations were mostly peaceful, police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, and some altercations between protesters and police occurred. Dozens of police officers and hundreds of protesters were injured, and the city’s independent monitor later found that the Denver Police Department used excessive force against protesters. On June 25, 2020, BLM 5280, along with nine individual plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit against the city and county of Denver over the police department’s actions. The case was still ongoing in late 2021.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, as Black people and other minorities suffered disproportionately from the disease and its economic effects, BLM 5280 organized a Displacement Defense Fund to help keep minority families in their homes. Families excluded from federal relief payments could apply for funds up to $2,500 to help get them through the pandemic.