African American business and political leaders in Denver successfully opposed Colorado statehood until lawmakers wrote a constitution that removed color as a barrier to suffrage. Their activism helped persuade Congress to grant voting rights to Black men living in Colorado and other western territories in 1867--three years before ratification of the 15th Amendment granted the same rights to Black males in the states.

It flared anew in the 1890s, when Five Points resident Joseph Stuart - the first African American elected to the state legislature - sponsored a bill designed to end housing discrimination and other forms of racial intolerance. The measure passed, but segregation continued - indeed worsened, despite the efforts of political organizations such as the Denver chapter of the NAACP (formed in 1915). In the 1920s, politicians allied with the Ku Klux Klan gained control of the state government - an indication of how deep Colorado's racial divisions ran.

Colorado Magazine article about William J Hardin, Vol. 52, no.1 (pp. 52-65); ill.,

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Article, William J Hardin Colorado Spokesman for Racial Justice.pdf

History Colorado

Article, William J Hardin: Colorado Spokesman for Racial Justice, 1863-1873

William Jefferson Hardin was born in Kentucky to a previously enslaved woman and a white father in 1831. In 1863 he came to the Colorado Territory, because all men over 21 in the territories had the right to vote. But the following year, the law was amended to exclude Black men. Hardin spoke eloquently on behalf of Black suffrage, and Congress gave African American men in all U.S. territories the vote in 1867. A Republican, Hardin was an at-large delegate to the national convention in 1872.

Photograph, Joseph H. Stuart

Born in 1855, Joseph Stuart practiced law in Denver for most of his life. He was active in the Five Points community, admitted to the Colorado Bar in 1891, and became one of the first African Americans elected to the Colorado General Assembly’s House of Representatives in 1894. He was also active in the women’s suffrage movement (women won the right to vote in 1893).

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