Compared to the history of the Denver Broncos, Denver International Airport, or iconic citizens like Margaret “The Unsinkable Molly” Brown, Denver’s African-American history is a poorly understood thing.
Turns out that’s true across the Rocky Mountain West. For all of the strides made toward inclusion over the decades — from the 1971 opening of Denver’s Black American West Museum to last week’s announcement of Rev. Kimberly Lucas becoming the first African-American female bishop in Colorado Episcopal Church history — there’s still a dearth of appreciation for the role of African-Americans as pioneers.
And not just homesteaders, miners, soldiers and cowboys, but also doctors, business leaders and educators, many of whom continue building atop the civic achievements left by ancestors like Barney Ford, an escaped slave who moved to Colorado in 1860 and became one of the state’s most prominent businessmen.
“We’re really trying to answer the question, ‘How are we out there?’ ” said Doretha Williams, who works at the National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC), part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
“Being a Kansas girl, I always had to answer the question, ‘Are there black people in Kansas?’ And I had my response: ‘Yes, the Exodusters.’ ” (African-Americans who made their way to Kansas in the late 19th century along the Mississippi River, following the Civil War.)
As the Smith Fund program manager for the NMAAHC, Williams’ title has a special bearing on Denver.
Robert F. Smith, who graced the cover of Forbes earlier this year as America’s richest black man, with a et worth of $4.4 billion, hails from Denver. So when the museum decided to travel the country for a collection project on black American history, they could hardly ignore the hometown of the man who supports their organization.
Nov. 1-11, the NMAAHC will set up shop in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood and elsewhere with the goal of collecting and digitizing as much of the local African-American population’s photos, documents and videos as possible — part of a nationwide push that began last fall in Baltimore.
“We learned a lot from that,” said Williams, who has visited Denver three times over the past year in preparation for the Community Curation project. “We don’t just want to collect and preserve these private memories, we want to give people space to talk about the changes in their community. In Baltimore, one of those discussions was about gentrification, and the last time I was in Five Points there were more cranes and construction projects than I’ve ever seen.”
A free, opening reception for the project will take place 6-10 p.m. Nov. 2 at the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library (2401 Welton St.) in Five Points. That institution and the Black American West Museum, also in Five Points, are collaborating with the Smithsonian on the initiative.
The main goal is to preserve history, and the free USB drives that people walk away with containing their digitized videos, photos and family documents are theirs and theirs alone. However, if they elect to share them with the D.C. museum, thereby submitting them to the public domain, all the better.
“We had a woman who brought in her late husband’s material — he was an artist in Baltimore and did some fabulous paintings — and I’m not sure how people outside that community ever would have heard of it otherwise, since some of the buildings he created these murals on are now no longer in existence,” Williams said. “Another woman had a deteriorated photo of her grandfather and hadn’t seen a picture of him since she was a little girl. Our team was able to give her and her family a clearer picture of him for the first time in decades.”
Certain materials are common: wedding photos, family reunion videos and albums, snippets of holidays and birthdays, certificates proving this or that. Gathering these in a single place, and bridging the “digital generational divide,” often leads to unexpected connections, Williams said, with people overhearing long-forgotten names and reuniting at random.
The Community Curation project also includes several free, open-the-public programs Nov. 3, 4, 5 and 10 at the Blair-Caldwell Library. They cover religious objects, genealogy, oral history, musical culture and more, with an eye toward empowerment, since the D.C.-based museum wants to teach people how to research their own family’s roots and branches, and conduct their own oral and written research.
To register for those programs or the collection project — and to see a full list of the free, public programs — visit maahc.si.edu.
“I will never forget that my path was paved by my parents, grandparents and generations of African-Americans whose names I will never know,” Denver-reared billionaire Smith wrote, shortly after he became the first black American to sign the Giving Pledge (committing to contribute half of his net worth to philanthropic causes during his lifetime), according to his Forbes profile.
“Things develop and move,” Williams said. “So now we’re also looking to do more research and have more conversations about African-American history and culture in the West, as well as looking at black migration patterns in late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a product of African-American migration to the central Plains, Denver is close to my heart, and our hearts.”