Denver opens African American library

In the 1800s, whites got their hair cut by Robert Smith, a black barber who set up shop in a neighborhood near downtown Denver.

Prosperous innkeeper Barney Lancelot Ford used his influence to keep Colorado from becoming a state until black men were assured the right to vote.

And Clara Brown, a freed slave like Smith and Ford, spent the $10,000 she made washing the clothes of miners in Central City for so many good deeds that she was buried with honors by the Colorado Pioneers’ Assn.

Their experiences are among countless stories about black cowboys, entrepreneurs, arts and political leaders told at the $16-million Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library, opening this weekend.

The library is in the Five Points area north of downtown, the only place where blacks were allowed to live at the turn of the century. Businesses there catered to blacks, who weren’t welcome elsewhere in the city.

The Rossonian Hotel, a frequent stopping point for jazz legends like Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, still stands. And several landmark businesses remain open.

The area also is home to the Black American West Museum and Heritage Center set up by Paul Stewart, who wrote in a center brochure that when playing cowboys and Indians, he always had to be an Indian “because there was no such thing as a black cowboy.”

The library welcomes visitors with a mural covering the archway above the first-floor entry. Painted by Yvonne Muinde, a Kenyan artist who lives in Oakland, it shows on its right side the black people who helped found Colorado. On the left side and above are national leaders, including Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Frederick Douglass. In the background are mountains. “This mural is almost a textbook of the history of African Americans in the United States,” library manager Gwen Crenshaw said.

The brick building is in the style of the architecture of the end of the century. “We wanted a building that fit in with the neighborhood,” she said.

The first floor is a regular branch library. A grand staircase leads up to an archive and research section on the second floor, available for scholars and others interested in the history of black Americans. It houses historical documents, including manumission papers, also called freedom papers, donated by area residents.

The third floor is a museum, devoted to the first blacks who came to the West, including a Moroccan slave named Esteban who was washed ashore in 1539 when his ship sank off the coast of Florida. He explored much of the Southwest.

The museum also has rooms for information on jazz and the arts, Smith’s barbershop and the photo studio of J.P. Ball, who made hundreds of daguerreotypes of Asian and European immigrants and black American settlers in Helena, Mont., in the late 19th century.