As Elise Schmelzer reminds us at the Denver Post, it wasn't just Tulsa. No, there was no massacre in Denver in the 1920s, but the KKK quite literally ran the city. Consider it a world no one should ever have forgotten. Here's how her long piece begins. Tom
"Nora Flaherty saw the cross burning in front of St. Dominic Catholic Church in north Denver and ran to her home a block away to get her husband.
"He grabbed an ax and helped put the fire out, but the Ku Klux Klan members who constructed the symbol of hate already had fled, as Dennis Gallagher tells the story that’s been passed down by his family. Like other longtime Denver families, dealing with the Ku Klux Klan’s one-time dominance of the city has been a generational problem for Gallagher and his kin.
"His father was bullied by self-identified Klansmen about being an Irish Catholic when he joined the Denver Fire Department in 1938. In 1970, Gallagher was knocking on doors as a candidate for the Colorado House of Representatives and met a man who said he was a member of the Klan and thus would never vote for an Irish Catholic.
“There’s never been an apology for what the Klan did,” said Gallagher, professor emeritus at Regis University, former city auditor, city councilman, state senator and state representative. “I think that has affected the city for generations.”
"Ripple effects of the Klan’s takeover of Denver’s power structures over the course of just a few years in the mid-1920s are still felt, especially after the release by History Colorado this spring of digital copies of the Klan’s membership ledgers from that time period. The more than 30,000 names in the documents include those of the men the Klan’s political machine installed as Colorado’s governor, Denver’s mayor and police chief, judges, state senators and representatives.
"But the ledgers also show how pervasive the Klan was in day-to-day life, where the people they persecuted and intimidated would encounter them. The membership rolls show Klansmen worked at banks, pie companies, railroads, grocery stores, pharmacies, the zoo, the parks, the post office, cab companies, cafes, the stockyard, the city jail, the courthouse, laundry businesses, cab companies and this newspaper. They also worked at Denver landmarks, like Elitch Gardens, the Brown Palace Hotel, Union Station and Lakeside Amusement Park.
"Those targeted and demonized by the Klan — Blacks, Latinos, Catholics, Jews, immigrants of any kind — lived in fear, said Robert Goldberg, a history professor at the University of Utah and author of “Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado.” They knew the Klan was pervasive and that many parts of the government charged with protecting them were actively involved in the white supremacist organization.
“They were made to be second-class citizens in their home,” Goldberg said. “Their neighbors were either active antagonists or passive bystanders to their pain.”
"The stories of that pain and resistance to the Klan have passed down through the generations of families who have lived in Denver over the past 100 years. The work, too, of pushing back against the Klan’s legacy continues as new groups form to espouse the KKK’s brand of white supremacy and public spaces still bear KKK members’ names.
"Many iterations of the Klan and similar groups have appeared in Colorado and the U.S. since the Reconstruction era, Jared Orsi, a professor of history at Colorado State University, said during a recent History Colorado event. Although they do not always have the same stated goals or organization, there is a common thread through them all.
“It’s an episodic phenomenon,” Orsi said. “It’s a periodic welling up of deep and dark waters in the American soul. In that darkness lurks a very narrow and excluding definition of who is an American, and a suspicion and fear — even a hatred — of anyone who seems to lie outside of that definition.”.....
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