In Colorado Springs and the Pikes Peak region, the struggle for civil rights extended well beyond the ballot box. First enacted in 1885 and recodified in 1895 and 1935, respectively, Colorado civil rights law declared:
All persons within the jurisdiction of said state shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of inns, restaurants, eating houses, barber shops, public conveyances on land or water, theatres, and all other places of public accommodation and amusement, subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law and applicable alike to all citizens.
Yet despite the law, discrimination permeated every aspect of everyday life and dictated where people could play, swim, eat, or simply exist in public. Black Coloradans routinely encountered exclusion and mistreatment in everyday spaces like athletic fields, swimming pools, and convenience stores, creating sites where legal rights collided with discriminatory customs. The tenuous dynamic created an unequal playing field that affected opportunity, recreation, and sometimes, even survival.
Sports
During the Second World War, baseball lived up to its title of “America’s Favorite Pastime,” and Colorado Springs was no exception. Still, while the sport united many communities, opportunities on the diamond were not equal. Segregation limited where Black athletes could play, preventing them from joining teams within the all-white City League and prompting a group of Black WWII veterans to form their own team. Shortly after the war, the Brown Bombers were born, named for the legendary heavyweight boxer Joe Louis, or as first-baseman Joseph Morgan called him, “THE Brown Bomber.” Discrimination left the team without access to adequate uniforms, training, or equipment; They often played with bats and gloves held together with tape and nails and practiced wherever they could find space, including alleyways and gravel lots. The Brown Bombers faced racism at nearly every turn. They were mocked, threatened, and called racial slurs, and the color of their skin rendered their money all but useless. Discriminatory restaurants and motels left them without hot meals or overnight accommodations, forcing them to pack sack lunches and endure hours-long drives to out-of-town games, only to turn around and make the same drive home after the final outs.
Before long, the all-Black semipro team was sponsored by Fannie Mae Duncan’s Cotton Club, which allowed them to buy new uniforms and adequate equipment. The Brown Bombers went on to win city championships in 1949 and 1950, victories made particularly memorable because, as Joe Morgan later recalled, “We wanted to show the white guys that we were just as good—or better—because we weren’t allowed on their teams.” In the late 1950’s, a combination of the demands of family life, the Korean War, and the city’s new minor league Sky Sox team, brought about the end of the Brown Bombers. In 2014, after 65 years, the Bombers’ extraordinary story was officially recognized when they were inducted into the Colorado Springs Sports Hall of Fame. Former The Gazette reporter, Bill Vogrin—the man who pushed to recognize the Brown Bombers accomplishments—explained,
They would have been enshrined decades earlier had they been white. They didn’t let discrimination jade them. They persevered and went on to have amazing professional careers and lives even after the adversity they endured on the baseball diamond.
The Brown Bombers’ success reflected more than athletic ability. Their accomplishments were remarkable because they achieved them in the face of racial barriers that limited where Black athletes could play, compete, and thrive.
Public Swimming Pools
Exclusion from public recreational spaces sometimes carried tragic consequences. During the hot summer months, limited access to swimming pools left Black Coloradans to seek relief in other, sometimes dangerous places. In a 1980 interview, Evelyn ‘Effie’ Stroud Frazier recalled the day that white swimmers attempted to drown her brothers when they attempted to utilize the swimming pool at Monument Valley Park; She continued, “That’s why I never learned to swim—there was no place in Colorado Springs where a Black person could swim…” Rather than providing equal access, city officials reinforced illegal segregation when they designated one side of Prospect Lake for Black residents. While the whites-only side of the lake was furnished with a full bath house, the Black side held only a simple shack. Many accepted the segregated area and its inferior conditions, but some, including Effie’s sister Kimball, were loud in their indignation. Testimonies from others, like Alice Morgan, describe the hazards associated with the designated Black swimming area. Alice recalled glass bottles being thrown from passing motorists and the broken glass that littered the shoreline as a result.
In his memoirs, Dolphus Stroud wrote at length about the obstacles he and other Black kids faced while learning to swim in the early 1900’s. Eager to learn, Dolphus and many of his friends took advantage of the Monument Valley Park swimming pool outside of business ours. Each day, between 3:30am and 4:30am, the boys, ranging in ages from 7-14, climbed the six-foot fence surrounding the pool and enjoyed swimming undisturbed. They kept that routine for nearly a month until one morning Colorado Springs Police officers surrounded them with their guns drawn. Dolphus wrote the boys were taken to City Hall where officers, including the Chief of Police, cursed at them and berated them for several hours.
The boys were accused of being unappreciative of the opportunities they enjoyed in a liberal city like Colorado Springs, and were advised that they were members of an inferior race of humans who would sometime in the distant future attain a position of equality with the whites; but in the foreseeable future Black generations would have to realize they were socially and mentally inferior to Whites. He emphasized the expense the Black youngsters had caused the city since the pool would have to be drained, thoroughly scrubbed, and fumigated before it would be ready for use again by whites.
The boys were released but expressly forbidden from using the pool any longer.
The group eventually found a pool at an abandoned brick yard, located about three miles outside of Colorado Springs city limits. During one of their swim excursions, the boys challenged one another to a competition. At the time, none of them had reached the bottom of the pool, and it was decided that the first one to swim to the bottom and bring up a rock would be the winner. 14-year-old J.C. Piper, considered one of the best swimmers of the group, made an attempt. When J.C. failed to resurface after one minute, the others immediately began trying to find him. Dolphus recalled that after about ten minutes of searching, his brother Tandy finally located J.C. roughly 20 feet underwater, where he had become entangled in barbed wire and unable to free himself. The boys tried, unsuccessfully, to resuscitate J.C. They fashioned a makeshift stretcher and carried their friend three miles back home. The illegal exclusion of Black residents from safe, public recreational spaces like swimming pools forced many into dangerous alternatives, where unsafe conditions could—and sometimes did—end in tragedy.
Everyday Danger in Public Spaces
While discrimination often appeared in the form of segregation or denial of service, it could also escalate into violence. Such was the case for Roosevelt Hill, Jr., whose encounter with a gas station attendant demonstrated how racism could transform even an ordinary stop into a tragedy. On July 14, 1970, in his role as the Director of Black Studies at Colorado University, Denver, Hill, accompanied by his wife and several students, spent the day at the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City, Colorado. Hill had traveled to the prison to give a lecture on “Awareness of the Black Man” and to encourage inmates to join the university’s Black Studies program. On their drive back to Denver, the group stopped for gas at the Ivywild Mobil Service Station on South Nevada Avenue in Colorado Springs. Hill’s vehicle was serviced by three attendants, after which Hill handed over his state-issued credit card for payment. One of the attendants, Ellis Leon Little, refused to accept the card at face value and began attempting to verify it. After some time, Hill entered the service station where he and Little began arguing. While witnesses, including Hill’s wife Myrtes, offered conflicting accounts of the exact sequence of events, all agreed that the conflict ended after Little shot Hill in the chest. Roosevelt Hill, Jr. died before help could arrive.
An investigation took place in the weeks following Hill’s death, but a grand jury’s decision not to return an indictment against Little was met with anger and disappointment from Black residents, who viewed it as an injustice. Black activists held a meeting, where they labeled the decision “white honkie justice” and explained that “there are two kinds of law in Colorado Springs: ‘a law for whites and a law for blacks and around here the whites always come out on top.’” The following month, Myrtes Hill, along with the Urban League of the Pikes Peak Region and the Colorado-Wyoming Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), requested that the investigation be reopened, this time before an open court. Denver lawyer, Irvin Andrews argued, “If the shooting was accidental as the Grand Jury had said, Little should have been charged with involuntary manslaughter.” District Court Judge William M. Calvert denied their request.
In the minds of many Colorado Springs residents, the grand jury’s decision marked the end of the matter. The law put the matter to rest, but for Black residents, the decision was another painful example of the discrimination and unequal treatment they continued to face. In memory of his friend, Acting Director of the Black Studies Program, Serge Paul-Emile, published a letter stating,
The manner of his death brings quite clearly to the minds of many Black people that in this country the value of Black people as human beings is yet to be established. The young man who is responsible for his death was acting in a tradition which has long existed in this country.
Hill’s death was more than an act of violence; it was an example of how unequal treatment in public spaces could sometimes have devastating consequences.
Taken together, these stories expose a system where legal rights and social custom clashed. More importantly, they highlight the strength and resilience of the Black community. Amidst discrimination and inequality that often endangered their lives, they organized, created opportunities, built communities, and demanded the rights and recognition they deserved.