The Story of Segregation in Denver
The problem of unaffordability in Denver– and Colorado in general –has jolted lawmakers into action . Unaffordability threatens residents’ well-being and hinders their potential to prosper, dampening what has made Denver an attractive destination for many in recent years. For no group of Denverites has this threat hit harder than for Black and Hispanic residents. Although their median incomes and home values have markedly surpassed those held by most U.S. Black and Hispanic households over the last decade, their advancements remain among the most threatened in Denver by displacement. A 2019 report from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition named Denver the place where Hispanic residents face the most risk of displacement from gentrification. And despite Denver rolling out a pilot program to provide up to $25,000 in down payment assistance to members of redlined communities like the historically Black neighborhoods of Whittier and Five Points, it remains unclear if this will have much of an effect on Black homeownership in a city where homebuyers routinely pay tens of thousands of dollars over the asking price for homes that typically cost around half a million dollars or more.
By understanding the history of segregation that left residents of color at risk of displacement, we can also begin to understand how segregation produced a landscape of inequality and stifled new housing investment, which primed Denver for its current crisis. We can also see how Denverites of all colors have fought back against the segregation of the city by race since the 1910s–from the Cosmopolitan Club organized by Clarence F. Holmes to combat the KKK and racial terror during the 1930s, to the Park Hill Action Committee that fought blockbusting during the 1960s. Their efforts provide inspiration for the redress we must organize to achieve today.
The First Black Residents in Denver, Colorado
According to a report by Urban League researcher Ira D. Reid, the first permanent Black settler in Denver arrived in 1860. One of the first major Black settlements in Denver was Cherry Creek , where Black settlers established a homesteading community on flood-prone land during the late 19th century.
By the early 1920s, a majority of Denver’s Black community began to cluster in Five Points and in the nearby neighborhood of Whittier due to an abundance of railroad jobs in Five Points, continual flooding of Cherry Creek, and the clearance of Black homes in a former Black enclave of lower downtown to make room for a Broadway extension during the early 1920s. Five Points-Whittier was a proud and entrenched community. The dawn of systemic segregation in Denver would keep Five Points-Whittier the Black hub of Denver for many decades to come.
Early Attempts to Segregate
In Reid’s survey he noted that “[l]egal segregation of the Negro does not exist in Denver.”
This was not for lack of effort. Through the 1910s various neighborhoods in the city formed property owners’ and neighborhood improvement associations such as the Denver Property Owners’ Protective Association and the East Side Taxpayers’ Association, which together lobbied for Denver to adopt a racial zoning ordinance in 1916.
According to a draft of that ordinance circulated by the Black-owned newspaper the Denver Star, the ordinance was designed “to preserve peace and order within the City and County of Denver by preventing white persons and colored persons, so far as practicable, from residing in the same block.” The ordinance would achieve this goal by fining homeowners, tenants, and landlords who broke the law up to $50 per day, or over $1,100 per day in 2020 dollars.
“Every Real Estate dealer who belongs to the Real Estate Exchange knows just what speculating Real Estate Sharks have already taken options on certain East side property,” the Star declared in a 1917 piece endorsing a ticket of municipal candidates. “Don’t be fooled or misled. KILL JIM CROWISM NOW and if you cannot kill, Elect your friends.” Between local resistance and the Buchanan v. Warley (1917) case that ended racial zoning’s legality, segregationists would soon have to shift toward other methods of enforcing racial separation in Denver.
There was a growing pattern of bombings and other attacks on Blacks homes and businesses in Denver, which suggests a significant, organized campaign to defend racial boundaries to the south and east of Five Points, and to check Black expansion into Whittier. Though the list of these attacks is expansive and could cover pages, here are some of the most important ones according to the local NAACP's archives:"
On November 15, 1921, the 2112 Gilpin Street home of city parks employee and local NAACP member Charles E.A. Starr Street was bombed for the second time in five months, ironically on the eve that Starr planned to sell the home to a white family after tiring of prior racial intimidation. (The house had been previously bombed on July 7 when occupied by a different Black man named Walter Chapman.)
In 1924, a cross was burned on the lawn of Dr. Clarence F. Holmes, a Black dentist with an office in Five Points who helped found the local NAACP branch and was organizing at the time to desegregate Denver’s theaters. Around the same time, a cross was also burned on the lawn of another Black dentist named Thomas Ernest McClain, who soon thereafter relocated to the Black section of Whittier from his former home in the white neighborhood of Clayton.
On January 15, 1927 the home of Mr. E.E. Carrington at Vine and 23rd Street was then bombed successfully for the second time, after a stick of dynamite had badly damaged the front porch and broke several front windows just one month before. (In addition to these successful bombings, a third bombing was averted when Carrington managed to toss dynamite thrown from a passing car away from his house, while at another point three bullets were fired at his wife and her friend while they were standing on the rear porch.) Carrington ultimately decided to sell his home back to white owners. By 1927, the local NAACP branch declared racism in Denver “running riot.”
White Supremacy seeps into Denver's governing structures
Racism was “running riot” not just because of these bombings, but because of their links to an explosion in Denver’s Klu Klux Klan membership and the Klan’s rise to power in Colorado . By 1924 KKK numbered some 17,000 people in Denver, and at the state level comprised some 34,000-35,000 members. Using the power of these numbers, the KKK built a political machine that exerted significant control over state and local government. Denver Mayor Benjamin Stapleton, elected for the first time in 1923, was one such politician elevated to power by the hate group.
During Stapleton’s early mayoralty he appointed Klan members to run the city police on a “law and order” platform, meaning, in other words, that no hate crimes, cross burnings, or bombings of Black homes in Denver would fall under serious investigation while police remained under Klan control. Stapleton did later turn on some members of the hate group (he never fully repudiated the KKK, though he did prosecute some corrupt Klan-affiliated officers), but this would not prevent later Denverites from asking that his name be removed from the city’s former Stapleton neighborhood in 2020.
Five Points residents continue their resistance
Remarkably, despite the efforts of segregationists at every level, Five Points-Whittier residents found ways to resist the segregation taking hold in in their city. In addition to the Denver Star’s campaign to quash the 1916 segregation ordinance, through the 1930s Clarence F. Holmes joined local Jewish, Catholic, Japanese, and other multi-ethnic Denver residents to participate in the Cosmopolitan Club , a group dedicated to combating bigotry by fostering mutual tolerance and understanding. During the 1920s, Dr. Joseph H.P. Westbrook passed as a Klan member in order to deliver information on the group’s activities to local racial justice activists. And in 1927, NAACP officials also organized what the Colorado Statesman considered the largest political gathering in the city’s history to protest a proposal to segregate the city’s schools.
On top of resisting local forces of segregation and racial oppression, Black Denverites found ways to thrive in their neighborhoods. While nationally known musicians like Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald stayed at Five Points’ famed, Black-owned Rossonian hotel during the first half of the twentieth century, locals flocked to hear music at other venues like the Ex-Servicemen’s Club owned by unofficial Five Points “mayor” Benjamin Hooper.
Those looking to buy homes turned to the Black American Woodmen Life Insurance Company that provided mortgages to Black buyers when no other institution would, to local realtor and NAACP official W.F. Turner, or to Charles Lilburn Cousins , a self-taught Black developer and one of the richest Black men in the state.
Those looking for medical care could employ the dentistry of Dr. Holmes or the skills of Dr. Westbrook, or they could look to Dr. Justina Ford , the first Black female physician in Denver. Ford set up her own private practice in Five Points where she treated patients of all races and classes after being discriminated against by the Colorado and American Medical Associations. At one point, Ford was said to have delivered three-quarters of all Black children born in the city.
The Advent of Racial Covenants and Racist Mortgage Lending
After the failure of the push for a segregation ordinance and a separate failed push to add segregation to the Colorado constitution, Denver property owners associations and neighborhood improvement associations turned to covenants to restrict the Black population from moving outside of Five Points. From the late 1920s through the 1940s, the use of covenants spread from Denver neighborhoods like Whittier, Clayton , McCulloch, Regis Heights, Bonnie Brae, and Park Hill , all the way to suburbs across the larger metro area. At least 82 subdivisions built in Jefferson County were covered by restrictive covenants.
Two separate Colorado Supreme Court cases upheld the validity of racially restrictive covenants before they were deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948. In Chandler v. Ziegler (1930), the court opined that racially restrictive covenants were neither in violation of the 14th Amendment nor an issue of public policy. In Stewart v. Cronan et al. (1940), the state then reaffirmed that covenants were not against Colorado public policy when local NAACP member and Denver lawyer George G. Ross attempted to challenge them on the same grounds as the former Ziegler case.
Covenants did not just affect Black Denverites, but other Denverites of color as well. In 1950, two years following the Supreme Court’s striking down of covenants, a Japanese-American veteran named Katsuto Gow was refused veterans’ financing for a home on the far eastern border of Whittier because the home fell under the scope of a covenant. “I can’t believe I’ve worked eight hours a day and extra at night to save up $2,500 for a house and then have this happen,” Gow told a Denver Post reporter at the time. “Both the government agencies [the Veterans Administration and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation] authorized the loan and we bought our furniture. Then we found that only white persons could occupy the property.” Representatives of the VA and the RFC underscored their missions to remain unbiased in home lending when interviewed by the Post, but held that they had to rescind financing for Gow’s home because of an ability to secure title insurance. (Insurers refused to insure the title of Gow’s home due to the risk of potentially expensive lawsuits that might try to enforce the covenant.) Gow was therefore left excluded from a neighborhood even when the means of his exclusion had been outlawed. Past and present discrimination made granting a mortgage to this veteran of color “unsound.”
Gow’s story underscores how discriminatory home lending, or redlining, reproduced the exclusionary effects of covenants while also devaluing neighborhoods of color. The 1937 Residential Security Map of Denver created by local real estate professionals for the federal government graded Five Points “D,” or its lowest rating, due to the “combination of Negroes, Mexicans and...transient class of workers” living there. (Though the redlining map failed to mention it explicitly, Five Points was also home to a Japanese enclave, too.) Whittier was acknowledged by a local appraiser as one of the “best colored districts in the United States,” but also received a D rating despite its large, well-kept brick houses. “Were it not for the heavy colored population much of it would be rated ‘C,’” the appraiser concluded.
Due to the effects of covenants and discriminatory mortgage lending shown by the redlining map of Denver, the white homeownership rate jumped to 54.5 percent in 1960 from a 1940 citywide homeownership rate of 38.4 percent, while for Denver’s nonwhite population the rate remained at just over one-third of households. Across the Denver metropolitan area, the homeownership gap was even more pronounced. Nearly two-thirds of white households owned their homes in Denver’s city and suburbs by 1960 versus 39 percent of nonwhite households in the metro area in 1960.
Urban Renewal and its Discontents
During the 1960s, Denver built the I-70 and I-25 highways that essentially cut off neighborhoods such as Globeville in its North and West off from the rest of the city, forming an L-shaped belt of social, economic, and residential inequality beyond the asphalt borders that still persists in today’s Denver.
In Elyria-Swansea , the construction of the highway eliminated a vital commercial corridor and accelerated industrial development in the area, leaving behind a severed neighborhood and causing the mostly-Hispanic population of children who live there today to breathe the city’s most polluted air. Now, the Colorado Department of Transportation and the city are unrolling a multi-billion-dollar “cap-and-cover” plan for the highway as well as a plan to redevelop the surrounding neighborhoods.
During the late 1960s and 1970s, Metropolitan State University of Denver by its own account received $12.3 million in funds to conduct urban renewal in the mostly Latinx neighborhood of Auraria - also apparently the oldest neighborhood in the city.
The Auraria Urban Renewal Project, completed over residents’ protests, destroyed 330 homes and 250 businesses to make way for the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and University of Colorado Denver. Some families received $15,000 (or roughly $100,000 in today’s dollars) to find other homes besides the ones they formerly occupied in a neighborhood where the median home sold for $500,000 in 2019 according to PolicyMap.
Around the same time, the city also cleared 27 blocks of downtown for the Skyline Renewal project, removing many historic buildings and displacing 1,600 mostly low-income and working-class people. For years, all that replaced them were parking lots until interest in downtown development renewed during the 1980s.
Present Day Denver, Colorado
In Colorado, discriminatory policies by homeowners’ associations have taken the torch from past property owners’ associations. One homeowners’ association in particular , the Green Valley Ranch HOA in Denver, issued 50 foreclosures - 13 percent of all foreclosures in Denver in 2021 - while HOA foreclosures accounted for over one-quarter of all foreclosures in the city that year. These foreclosures were not for missed home payments but for extortionate bills racked up for late fines and fees: In one case, a couple went from a $2,000 fine to a $17,000 bill that the HOA said justified their filing for a foreclosure (they attributed the costs to attorneys’ fees). The eviction filings by HOAs also disproportionately appear to be affecting Black and Hispanic residents, and residents who need and qualify for affordable housing, too.
Recently, Denver intervened in the sales of 2 homes foreclosed upon by the Green Valley Ranch HOA , and that were resold through the Sheriff’s Department because these homes had affordability covenants designed to restrict who could purchase them. The state is also taking action to curb the ability of HOA’s to foreclose upon individuals’ homes for fines and fees. In early May, the State Senate passed a revised version of HB 22-1137 , a bill that would limit HOA foreclosures to unpaid assessments rather than fines, and which would cap fees and penalties for fines in addition.
For first-time homebuyers, navigating the Colorado housing market this last year has been a nightmare. This is especially true for people of color who lack the familial and intergenerational wealth required to make the all-cash or high down-payment, $50,000-$100,000-over-asking-price offers almost required to buy homes in Denver’s overheated residential market.
(Data source: American Housing Survey Data)
With the market not just failing in Denver, but all of Colorado, it is unclear where people of color and people of low- and even middle-incomes excluded from or displaced by this prohibitively expensive market can go. In addition to estimating a shortage of 325,000 homes needed to balance the housing market statewide, lawmakers also estimated the state is short 15,000 affordable homes.
As you can see, the story of segregation in Denver is not just a story of the past but one of the present. If you are interested in learning more about how this is also true of other cities in the U.S., check out our other stories of local segregation in Charlotte and Milwaukee , or read through the various research resources available on our website. You can also get involved in the Redress Movement's work by signing up for our email list, following us on social media, or reaching out to our field and digital organizing teams. Thanks for reading, and be sure to check up on our various feeds for further news and research updates!
