How Black Colorado businessmen changed voting rights across the nation
As Colorado celebrates 150 years of statehood this year, historians are sharing how Black community leaders here fought to secure voting rights for people across our nation.
A replica of a petition signed in 1865 is now on display at History Colorado.
"We are standing here at one of these attempts at statehood that failed, and one of the main reasons it failed is because of questions about identity and belonging, and whose state this would be, and who had rights here," said Katherine Mercier, a historian and the exhibition developer for the History Colorado exhibit "38th Star: Colorado Becomes the Centennial State."
It was on the third attempt to create the state that framers of the Colorado constitution created what many saw as a "gross injustice."
"Now, in 1865, they said, 'Yes, we're ready to be a state. We want to get the train here,' that kind of thing. But they put a word in their proposed constitution, and that is the word "white". When describing who can vote, they say that white men, who are citizens, can vote," said Mercier.
Barney Ford, one of the most successful businesspeople in the territory, formerly enslaved in the South, was among those who led the fight against any form of statehood that denied voting rights to Black men.
"Black men had had the right to vote in Colorado territory. And when they heard this new proposed constitution said that only white men could vote, they began to organize," added Mercier.
One hundred and thirty-seven signatures were collected for the petition demanding that Congress oppose Colorado statehood.
"There are some Congress members who say, 'We cannot allow Colorado to become a state if Black men do not have suffrage in the state. We just fought a war over this issue, and so we cannot allow this to happen,'" said Mercier.
The effort by the territory's Black business leaders fueled a national debate about Black suffrage, and eventually Congress outlawed any territory from denying voting rights to men on the basis of race. The Territorial Suffrage Act granted any man of voting age the right to vote in a territory, regardless of race.
Mercier said, "And this happens even before Black men have the ability to vote in all states in the United States. And so it has this enormous larger impact."
This petition by local businessmen for "even-handed justice" shaped state and national history.