Pulitzer-winning "1619 Project" author to keynote free event honoring Denver civil rights pioneer
The legacy of educator and civil rights leader Rachel B. Noel will be celebrated this week when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones visits Metropolitan State University of Denver as the school's annual Rachel B. Noel Visiting Professor.
Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project, will deliver a keynote address at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday at Shorter AME Church. The event is free and open to the public.
The visiting professorship honors Noel, who, in 1969, helped found what is now MSU Denver's Department of Africana Studies — at the time called the Department of African American Studies. Noel worked with MSU professor Ali Thobhani to launch the program.
"They worked together to found this department at a time of very severe civil unrest around racial identity and racial inequality," said Jasmine Harris, chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Metropolitan State University.
Noel was the first African American woman elected to public office in Colorado. As a member of the Denver School Board, her landmark Noel Resolution led to the U.S. Supreme Court's first school desegregation order outside the South.
Her vision for education was plainspoken. "It is right for all of us as human beings to work together to learn together," she said in a video clip provided by the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame Veterans of Hope Project.
Angela Noel, daughter of the late educator and civil rights activist, said her mother's push for educational equity was not without resistance.
"Equal educational opportunity for all children — who can argue with that? Genuinely, who can? But she had to fight for it," Angela Noel said.
Harris, the first woman since Rachel Noel to lead the department, said maintaining deep community ties remains central to its mission.
"It is really important to maintain the integrity of this department and the engagement with not just the students on campus, but the broader Denver community," Harris said. "We are here to support Black people in Denver, Black students on campus."
Students currently enrolled in a department course on U.S. relations with African nations are among those who will have the opportunity to hear from Hannah-Jones during her visit, studying, in a sense, in the very space Noel built for them.
The Noel family said she believed history had the power to propel future generations forward.
"It fires their imagination, it steels their courage, it opens visions for new ways to do things," Angela Noel said. "When they see what she has done, they can be inspired in something different, in their own way, for their own reasons, but still impactful for the community."
In a Colorado Women's Hall of Fame video clip, Noel summed up her life's work: "Nothing but the best for our children. We won't have a better world unless that happens."
Tuesday's free keynote at Shorter AME Church begins at 5:30 p.m., with doors opening at 5 p.m. On Wednesday, Hannah-Jones will visit with students on the MSU campus.
