” in the state at the turn of the 20th century. Klan member Clarence Morley served as a Republican governor from 1925 to 1927.
“Local banks and the Federal Housing Administration drew red lines around Black neighborhoods, rating them D-Level areas, thus making them ineligible for government-backed mortgage loans,” author Alvin Hall wrote in his book, “Driving The Green Book.” “Once you dig into the history, you find that there was that fight for civil rights” in the Centennial State, she said. “There was that fight for integration. There was that fight for equal treatment.”
Pitts went on to build several family homes in Cherry Creek North and a cabin in Lincoln Hills, “the country’s only Black-owned resort community west of the Mississippi” from 1922 to 1965, Jackson said. Jackson’s mother, 98-year-old Nancelia Jackson, has resided in the same Denver home for 97 years. She told him about their family’s travels back to Missouri to visit relatives from 1926 until the late 1950s and the precautions they would take to keep themselves safe.
Black commuters would’ve been wary of Colorado Springs, Limon and Longmont among other towns, Nelson said. The American public largely learned about The Green Book with the release of the 2018 film by the same name, winning three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Visitors with the Horseless Carriage Club of Colorado drive up to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo., on July 7, 1952. has recorded several instances in which the town and “much of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains remained unwelcoming to Black Americans throughout the first half of the 20th century.”
While Machalek hasn’t found much in the local papers yet about other accounts of discrimination, “that’s an important part of our history, and something we haven’t really known much about.” But he recognizes the possibility of the community’s awareness that “this may have been an issue.” Museum Director Derek Fortini described his team as in the “very early stages of exploring” accounts of prejudice within the town’s history. He has yet to find any laws that contributed to bias, but he’s digitizing the museum’s photo collection to look for evidence like unwelcoming signs in downtown shop windows and scanning old newspapers for related information.