ACT I
1
Terrance’s grandmother, Ernestine Boyd, was nineteen when she decided to run away. It was 1955. The eldest of ten, she was living with her parents and nine siblings in a small cabin on a cotton plantation in Bradley, Arkansas, where the family worked. She had just been promoted to cook, which seemed to be a blessing. She hadn’t enjoyed picking cotton in the baking sun, for two dollars a day. In the kitchen, she’d make three dollars, and the plantation owner and his wife, on whose property she’d lived since she was six, loved her cooking.
But a few days into the new job, Mr. Pearson, the plantation owner, came into the kitchen and grabbed Ernestine from behind. He tried to kiss her. When she pushed him away he said something that kept her up all night. He asked if she would like to see the “nigger” who’d recently come by on his bike to pick her up “lying in a ditch.”
Ernestine wasn’t sure yet if she was in love with the man on the bike. Tall, lithe, and spirited, she had many suitors. But by morning she was sure of one thing: she couldn’t bear to be the cause of someone else’s death.
She had an aunt who had recently uprooted from Mississippi, where Ernestine was born, to a place called Denver. Ernestine knew nothing about Denver except for a postcard from her aunt, depicting a line of snowcapped mountains marching across a sunny horizon. Without telling her family for fear of retribution against them, Ernestine skipped work the next day and made her way to the town bus. Carrying $110 and a small bag, she was leaving home, for good.
Her journey out of the South was solitary but hardly unique. Nearly five million African Americans left a former slave state between 1940 and 1979, the largest migration of the American populace in the twentieth century. As her bus rode north and west through the empty prairies of Missouri, Kansas, and eastern Colorado, she would have been hard-pressed to imagine the overcrowding that Black neighborhoods in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Oakland already faced, a burgeoning housing crisis that would help spark the civil rights movement.
Denver was the largest city within a radius of several hundred miles, a regional hub with a population of about 450,000. It had no professional sports teams. Vail Ski Resort was still seven years from opening. A rodeo and stock show were the capital city’s biggest event.
But for Ernestine, Denver appeared full of promise. When she arrived at the downtown bus station, vendors of different races were selling flowers and newspapers, and a line of taxicabs waited, accepting customers of any race. She got into one, without any idea where to tell the driver to take her.
Her unfamiliarity with the city was of no consequence. There was only one place for “Negroes” in Denver. Located about a dozen blocks northeast of the capitol, the Five Points neighborhood was established about a decade after William Larimer, a land speculator from Kansas, founded Denver City in 1858.
In 1879, Five Points grew during the “Exoduster Movement,” in which approximately forty thousand former slaves headed west to Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. By the turn of the century, following the gold and silver mining boom in the nearby Rocky Mountains, Five Points had its own cable car—Denver’s first—and was said to have more Black-owned businesses than anyplace west of Harlem.
The neighborhood’s most famous establishment, the Baxter Hotel, sat on its namesake corner, where five streets came together. Renamed the Rossonian in 1929, it was frequented in the 1920s by Duke Ellington. Later, it hosted Ella Fitzgerald, whose late-night performances there after playing Denver’s white venues gave Five Points its moniker, “Harlem of the West.” Like Harlem, Five Points was open to anyone, though few from outside the community visited. One who did was Jack Kerouac, who memorialized Five Points in his 1947 book On the Road, describing a walk through the neighborhood on a redolent “lilac evening … with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me.”
When Ernestine arrived, Five Points’ population was about twenty-two thousand. Most of the two-story Victorian-style homes had been divided into apartments. Vacancies were hard to come by. Discriminatory zoning and mortgage-lending practices, known as redlining, prevented Blacks from living in other neighborhoods.
Denver’s segregation was rooted in the 1920s, when both the governor, Clarence Morley, and the mayor, Benjamin Stapleton, were members of the KKK. Stapleton served five nonconsecutive terms, more than any other Denver mayor.
“Negroes are holed up in a small area which is getting worse and worse,” Mayor Quigg Newton, who defeated Stapleton in 1947, said when he took office. “They are victims of an unwritten law. Sooner or later there must be a breaking through.” But, as Ernestine got into a taxi that day, it still hadn’t happened.
Ernestine’s taxi driver, who also was African American, told her that he’d heard of a place that had a vacancy and took her. It was a two-story, eight-unit building. Ernestine waited on the porch. “Susie?” she heard a woman’s voice call. Susie had been Ernestine’s childhood nickname in Mississippi. She turned to see her aunt, whom she hadn’t seen since her aunt left the South several years earlier, standing at the entrance. She was the building manager.
* * *
FOR $11 A week, Ernestine got her own one-room apartment down the hall from her aunt. She answered a classified ad in The Denver Post to be a cook for a wealthy white family, and was hired, for $20 a day. Soon she had saved enough to buy burial insurance; she wanted to be sure no one in her family would be stuck raising money for her funeral. Then she began making a series of bus trips, back and forth to Arkansas, until she’d brought all nine of her siblings with her to Denver.
In Chicago and Los Angeles, massive public housing complexes such as Cabrini-Green and Jordan Downs were becoming temporary answers to overcrowding in Black neighborhoods. For its part, Denver slowly loosened the boundaries of Five Points. Some of its African American residents moved eastward toward the city’s grandest public space, City Park. But the neighborhood that Mayor Newton had singled out for an experiment in “purposeful integration” was on the other side of the park. Allowing Blacks to “jump the park” meant giving them passage to one of Denver’s most venerable neighborhoods, Park Hill.
Settled in 1887 by Allois Guillaume Eugene von Winckler, a Prussian baron and soldier, Park Hill had gun violence in its DNA. During the Spanish-American War, von Winckler hosted U.S. Army battalions, who fought mock battles there. A few years later, according to an account in The Denver Times, von Winckler drank enough strychnine to kill six men and shot himself in the chest, a suicide the newspaper called “one of the most remarkable on record.”
Von Winckler had begun creating a neighborhood for well-heeled industrialists and statesmen, and after his death, a group of investors who bought the land—including David Gamble, whose family owned Procter and Gamble—were careful about curating Park Hill’s development. It had wide boulevards separated by tree-lined medians and featured large Victorian and Tudor homes with carriage houses for the horses. Country living just outside town, according to its marketing.
But one last tract of Park Hill, the far north piece, remained undeveloped until the late 1940s. Denver’s new residents then included many military families relocating after the war to Lowry Air Force Base. Some became the first residents of the 2,600 small brick ranch houses that comprised Northeast Park Hill, just a few miles from the base. The neighborhood was also just across Quebec Street from Stapleton International Airport, named for the former mayor.
In 1956, the Federal-Aid Highway Act facilitated construction of the two major interstates that run through Denver, I-70 and I-25. A rapid development of the city’s suburbs began. Bigger homes with large backyards went for as little as $20,000. Young military families and other white residents were enticed to move out of the city.
While the federal Fair Housing Act wasn’t signed until 1968, Denver’s Association of Real Estate Brokers agreed by 1960—more than a decade after Mayor Newton’s appeal—to start showing properties in Northeast Park Hill to African Americans. One of the first was Ernestine Boyd.
She was shown a three-bedroom brick house on Pontiac Street. The price was $8,500. She loved it. She and her new husband, Richard, who sold fish at the city markets, had recently started a family. The people Ernestine cooked for helped with the down payment and connected her with a bank. She was approved for a thirty-year mortgage, at $112 per month. At twenty-four years old, a grandchild of slaves, Ernestine was a Denver homeowner.
* * *
NORTHEAST PARK HILL was alluring to Blacks in Denver. Its standalone homes, for sale and rent, had backyards and were walking distance from City Park. But the neighborhood’s most distinctive feature was a pair of shopping centers—still a new phenomenon in America—that had opened in the mid-1950s. What was particularly unusual about “The Dahlia” and “The Holly,” as they were eventually known, was that they were located not on a busy boulevard but on a narrow neighborhood street—33rd Avenue—five blocks from each other.
The Dahlia, owned by the local businessman Bernard Bernstein, had two strips facing each other across a wide parking lot. Businesses included a Miller supermarket, a tailor, a barbershop, and a bowling alley, the Dahlia Lanes. The Dahlia Lounge offered dinner and dancing, and was where Ernestine occasionally went to meet friends.
The Park Hill Shopping Center, soon renamed the Holly Shopping Center, was owned by Robert J. Main, a former FBI special agent. It had a department store, a dress shop, a pharmacy, and a hardware store. On the east side of the expansive parking lot was a Dar-E-Delight ice cream stand. A separate building on the north side of the square housed a Safeway supermarket.
For the neighborhood’s growing number of Black residents, the shopping centers became magnets for their civic and social life. Ernestine could always find a friend in the Holly or the Dahlia to catch up with, or to watch her young daughter, Suzanne. At night, the parking lots became gathering spots for African American youth, who listened to music and danced. Many felt an intense pride in their neighborhood. It was a place unlike any they had experienced.
* * *
AS MORE AFRICAN Americans moved into Northeast Park Hill, Denver’s “bold experiment” in racial integration earned Greater Park Hill the nickname “the conscience of the city.” President Lyndon Johnson, during a trip to Denver in 1966, directed his motorcade from the airport to stop so he could get out and see it for himself. “It would be difficult to believe that those were Negro homes if you hadn’t seen them standing there,” Johnson remarked. “When [people] ask ‘How can these cities handle some of their problems?’ The first thing I would say is, ‘Go and see Denver.’”
And yet Denver’s mayor, Tom Currigan, who grew up in Park Hill and was with President Johnson that day, knew the neighborhood’s reputation was misleading. While the city promoted Park Hill as a “model” of integration, the part of the neighborhood that had been the experiment in integration—Northeast Park Hill—had in fact become one of the nation’s most dramatic cases of white flight. Real estate brokers, looking to spur a wave of new sales, warned white residents that the arrival of “Negroes” would begin a downward spiral in home values. One flyer warned that Park Hill was becoming “Dark Hill.” Northeast Park Hill, which had been about 98 percent white in 1960, would be about 90 percent Black by decade’s end. Its schools were already badly overcrowded, and its unemployment rate was significantly higher than the city’s as a whole.
The Watts Riots of 1965 in Los Angeles, sparked by a drunk driving arrest, had exploded because of frustrations in the African American community about housing, overcrowded schools, and a lack of jobs. Five days of mayhem, broadcast on national news programs, saw helmeted police with batons beating Blacks; looting; burning cars; and bodies in white sheets loaded into ambulances. Thirty-four African Americans died, nearly a thousand were injured.
Mayor Currigan had assured Denver residents that “Denver is not Watts,” but he knew that racial tensions in northeast Denver were growing. While the KKK no longer held political office, a white supremacist organization that called itself the Minutemen—an offshoot of a Los Angeles group that terrorized Blacks—had announced its presence. Several members of Denver’s District 2, the police substation that patrolled northeast Denver, were said to be members.
Ernestine began to see racial epithets on driveways and sidewalks. A religious woman, she shied away from politics and found solace in radio preachers. But other African Americans in the neighborhood were galvanized. Rachel Noel, a sociologist from Virginia, led a group of activists to bring their concerns directly to Mayor Currigan.
Soon after LBJ’s visit, Currigan agreed to commission Noel’s group, which became known as the Group of 15, to independently monitor the Dahlia. That summer, the Group of 15 witnessed a racially charged environment ruled by District 2 officers. Rattling nightsticks around the windows of cars in which youth were eating takeout from the hamburger stand, they addressed them with racial epithets, including “nigger.” According to a report the group submitted, this often provoked youth to respond with their own insults. Sometimes they also threw rocks and bottles at the police. Their resulting arrests were carried out in brutal fashion. Some youth suffered severe head wounds.
Noel’s commission reported that riots were barely averted. “Police action in Dahlia could have provoked serious complications if intelligent people who had knowledge of the problems that exist for these young people had not intervened,” the scathing nineteen-page report delivered to Mayor Currigan stated. “The major problem facing minority youth is employment,” the report stressed, a conclusion the Kerner Commission report on the Watts Riots reached the following year. Job prospects, the Group of 15 wrote, were severely hurt by the heavy policing of the neighborhood, and the many arrests for petty offenses like jaywalking or “using filthy language.” Some youth were charged with false robbery or assault charges. “Police records are used to slam the doors of employment shut,” the Group of 15’s report said.
Urgent needs recommended by the report included job training—and a youth recreation center.
Copyright © 2021 by Julian Rubinstein
Maps copyright © 2021 Jeffrey L. Ward
