Reckoning with Colorado’s racist roots for a more equitable future

The Welcome to Golden sign on Washington Avenue in downtown on September 19, 2023 in Golden, Colorado. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)

We are experiencing a systematic attack on the truthful telling of history. This should concern us all.

At a time when dedicated national efforts attempt to prevent or reframe the teaching of Black history and the history of other oppressed groups, it is more important than ever that we work to fully understand and reckon with our past.

Racial justice studies are an important tool that governments use to acknowledge history, clarify how history informs social and economic realities in the present, and make informed decisions about how to write a stronger tomorrow, both for historically oppressed groups and for us all.

Recent in-depth coverage from The Denver Post highlighted Colorado’s own tragic legacy of segregation, redlining, violence, and government-backed systematic racism faced by Black Coloradans. This dark part of our state’s history is something that many children won’t learn about in school. As a result, many Colorado natives remain uninformed and unaware of the way that racism was built into our state’s very foundations.

It’s true that Colorado wasn’t a slave state – although slavery wasn’t abolished from the state constitution until 2018 – but it’s also true that our state adopted and emulated many of the racist policies and practices that we typically associate with the American South.

As The Post article details, “sundown” towns dotted the state, where Black individuals and families were turned away at restaurants and faced the threat of violence. Prominent cities utilized redlining to deny Black Coloradans access to housing and to keep schools segregated. The Klu Klux Klan had a powerful and expensive presence in our state at all levels of government, from the state legislature to judgeships to town councils in major Colorado cities like Denver, Pueblo, and Grand Junction.

As Coloradans, it is important that we know our history for two simple reasons: so that we can understand the ways in which it continues to impact us, and so that we can do something about it.

We know disparities exist for Black Coloradans in everything from health care to housing to criminal justice to educational outcomes and economic mobility.

In 2020, 73% of White Coloradans owned their own home, compared with 42% of Black Coloradans, a disparity that has grown every decade since the 1970s. In 2021, almost twice as many Black Coloradans reported skipping health care due to fear of unfair treatment compared to White Coloradans, and Black mothers were three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women.

Only 25% of adult Black Coloradans have attained a higher education degree, certificate, or credentials, and Black citizens are five times more likely to report being unjustly stopped by law enforcement than White people. All of this has led to a reality where 50% of Black families in Colorado qualify as low income and just 37% are considered middle class.

These statistics provide a snapshot of challenges faced by the Black community in Colorado today. However, without comprehensive historical documentation of anti-Black laws and practices in our state, we still do not fully understand how we arrived at these realities or how to progress out of them. How have legalized and condoned forms of exclusion, bigotry, and violence contributed to Black Coloradans’ persistent barriers? How did prejudice become woven into financial institutions, the media, law enforcement, and government? Once we know this history, how might we rewrite it?

Racial justice studies are practical tools that allow our citizens and lawmakers to more comprehensively understand systematic racism, quantify racism’s impacts on impacted communities and us all, and make smarter policy decisions that lead to greater equity. Throughout history, and more recently, they have been used to provide opportunities for healing and repair.

We can see examples of racial justice studies outside of Colorado. Evanston, Illinois recently completed a racial justice study report, and, as a result of this study, lawmakers have made free financial literacy classes available and created a Restorative Housing Program to help qualifying Black residents secure funds for homeownership.