Springs blacks settled city's southeast

PART 13 OF A 24-PART SERIES introducing the rich heritage of our region. Find stories and additional materials online at www.gazette.com/wellsprings.

The men who planned Colorado Springs had intended for the south end of town to be the choice residential area. But during the 1880s, the wealthiest residents built their homes in the north end.

The area south and east of downtown instead became the center of railroad operations, lumber yards and other related industries, and the neighborhoods that grew up around them were home to the town's working people and most of its black population.

Historians aren't sure why this happened, but some say Colorado College attracted wealthy white residents toward that end of town. Others think it was because some of the wells in the south end went dry.

For whatever reason, the city's black families settled mainly in housing scattered through the area south of Pikes Peak Avenue between Nevada and Wahsatch avenues, at that time the city limits.

Colorado Springs' founder, Gen. William Jackson Palmer, tried to set a tone of nondiscrimination in early Colorado Springs. Palmer had fought for the north in the Civil War because he vehemently opposed slavery.

His right-hand man from the Civil War days was George Motley, who escaped from slavery in North Carolina and joined Palmer's regiment as an orderly. When Palmer came west to survey a route for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, Motley was by his side, and he served as the general's cook, valet and assistant until the late 1890s.

Palmer also employed Jesse Bass as a horse trainer and later as his assistant coachman. Bass' daughter, Dorothy Bass Spann, named after one of the general's daughters, was a founding member of the Colorado Springs Unity Council, a civil rights organization, and the author of "Black Pioneers: A History of A Pioneer Family In Colorado Springs." (She recently died at age 96.)

The Colorado Springs Company founded by Palmer donated the land for Payne Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first black church in the city. Isaiah, John, Thomas and Oliphant Carter and their families organized the congregation in 1872 and named it for a prominent AME bishop.

In 1875, a wooden church was built at 128 Pueblo Ave.; a stone building replaced it in 1897. The church moved to 3625 Marion Drive in 1986, where the congregation celebrated its 129th anniversary this year. But for many years, the stone structure served as a center of the black community and still stands as a downtown landmark.

Though Palmer believed in equal rights for blacks, the racial climate in early Colorado Springs was tolerant at best. If you looked closely, the signs of discrimination were evident: Blacks were not served in many restaurants or welcomed in the finest hotels. They were segregated at theater performances and mostly excluded from extracurricular activities in the schools. Separate churches and social organizations were the rule. And in employment, few blacks could aspire to professional positions.

Nevertheless, some members of the black community flourished in a variety of endeavors. In 1879, three of the four barbers in town were black. Harvey Groves of Manitou Springs guided tourists on horseback trips up Pikes Peak and later traveled as a show cowboy in Wild West shows. Skilled laborers such as Alex McGaugh, a plasterer, were in demand, as were hotel employees.

Palmer replaced the dining-room staff of the Antlers hotel with an all-black force in 1884. Frank Loper, a waiter at the Antlers and later headwaiter at the Alamo Hotel, was born into slavery on Jefferson Davis' Mississippi plantation and arrived in Colorado Springs in 1886. Along with other waiters at the Antlers, he started the Colorado Springs Sun, a weekly newspaper that serv-ed the black community. It was published until 1905. (Three other black-owned papers were published between 1892 and 1913.)

When George Hackley was elected constable in 1897, he became the first black person to win a public office in El Paso County. Hackley, who operated three downtown barber shops, served as executive officer of the court for one of the county's two jus-tices of the peace until 1901.

The black community lost a friend when Palmer died in 1909. After that, blacks had to fight harder to overcome discrimination.

Author John S. Holley relates one incident that took place in 1916. In that year, H. Allen Nye, principal of Colorado Springs High School, informed the school's black students that they could not eat in the school's new cafeteria.

When Eliza Albright Duncan, who had been W.S. Stratton's chief housekeeper, heard about that, she organized a protest. The delegation's voices must have been loud and clear; the restriction was removed.

A branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was organized Aug. 13, 1918, in a meeting at Payne Chapel. It soon would be sorely needed as a counterforce to the Ku Klux Klan, which was growing in strength in the state and the nation.

On July 4, 1923, the Klan burned a 30-foot cross atop Pikes Peak, heralding the formation of a local klavern. In 1924, Klan member Clarence Morley was elected governor of Colorado and Rice Means was elected to the U.S. Senate. The Klan also captured the Denver mayor's office, but Colorado Springs voters rejected three Klan candidates for Colorado Springs City Council in 1925.

According to Holley, racial tensions reached a high point in April 1934, when a couple of Colorado College students were beaten and robbed near Prospect Lake by two men they described as blacks. One of the assailants attempted to rape the woman.

After word of the attack spread, some students and others led a demonstration downtown. An effigy of a black man was dragged along East Costilla Street and hung from a tree. Rumors of race riots flew in both black and white communities.

The tensions were quelled only by an announcement that two young black men had confessed. Police said members of the black community had assisted in the investigation that led to their arrests. George Williams and William Drew were convicted and sentenced to prison for the attack.

In 1947, members of the black community began to challenge discrimination in the city's restaurants. First, the NAACP, headed by Charles Banks, organized a series of sit-ins. Then lawsuits were filed against businesses where the participants had been refused service.

Most of these cases never went to court. Some were settled; of those that did go to trial, some were won and some lost. But they were a step in ending discrimination in public places in the 1950s and led to significant civil rights gains in the 1960s.

Colorado Springs remains a predominantly white city.

In the 2000 Census, 33,670 people in El Paso County identified themselves as black (and no other racial category.)

THROUGH THE YEARS

1870 Census shows one black resident in El Paso County: Jerry Crump, a ranch hand.

1885 First black student, Eliza Rollins, graduates from Colorado Springs High School.

1887 Horace Shelby becomes Colorado Springs' first black policeman.

1931 Dolphus Stroud is the first black student to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Colorado College.

1946 Colorado Springs Unity Council organized to promote opportunities for minorities.

1947 Juanita C. Hairston is awarded $600 in damages in a suit against the Ute Theatre. She was forced to leave after sitting in a nonsegregated section.

1949 The Brown Bombers, black semipro baseball players, win the city championship; they repeat in 1950.

1954 Nina Stroud Pellerin becomes the first black teacher hired in Colorado Springs.

1957 Fannie Mae Duncan's Cotton Club debuts on Colorado Avenue; entertainers such as Duke Ellington perform for interracial crowds.

1969 Floyd Pettie Jr. is the first black person elected to the Colorado Springs City Council. In 1972 he becomes El Paso County's first black state representative.

1973 James L. Woods is the city's first black personnel director.

1987 Kenneth Burnley is appointed to head School District 11, becoming the state's first black school superintendent.

PREVIOUS WEEKS' WELLSPRINGS

MAY 8: The First People: The Utes

MAY 15: Pathfinders and Pioneers

MAY 22: The Fifty-Niners

MAY 29: Colorado Springs: Built on sunshine and gold

JUNE 5: Spa in the Rockies

JUNE 12: Old Westside

JUNE 19: The Broadmoor

JUNE 26: A Mountain Forged

JULY 3: The Northwest - "Chasing the Cure"

JULY 10: Springs' economy

JULY 17: The North End

JULY 24: Roads and rails

SOURCES

Deborah Edge Abele, "Downtown Historic and Architectural Intensive Survey, 1985," prepared by Community Development Department Planning Division, Historic Resources Advisory Board

John S. Holley, "The Invisible People of the Pikes Peak Region" (Colorado Springs: The Friends of the Pikes Peak Library and The Friends of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, 1990)

"A Golden Legacy: Winfield Scott Stratton and the Myron Stratton Home, 1848-1998" (The Myron Stratton Home, 1998)

Memorial Park Master Plan, prepared by William Wenk Associates, Denver, May 1983

"A Living Legacy: The Story of Parks and Recreation in Colorado Springs" (Colorado Springs Park and Recreation Department, no date)

Denise R.W. Oldach, ed., "Here Lies Colorado Springs" (Colorado Springs: City of Colorado Springs, 1995)

John McMillin, "The Legend of Stratton," at www.mines.edu/ academic/lais/faq/stratton.html

Jean Messinger and Mary Jane Massey Rust, "Where Thy Glory Dwells: A Guide to Historical Churches of Colorado Springs" (Manitou Springs: TextPros, 1998)

"The Shooks Run Inventory of Historic Sites" (Colorado Springs, 1978)

BLACKS IN EL PASO COUNTY

Year Black Population Total Population 1880 159 7,949 1890 571 21,239 1900 1,033 31,602 1920 1,088 44,027 1940 1,122 54,025 1960 5,069 143,742 1980 19,0583 309,424

Sources: http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census; John S. Holley, "The Invisible People of the Pikes Peak Region"

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