History requires perspective. I personally have lived through over a third of the history of Colorado state and a fifth of U.S. history. My great-grandfather, who fought in the first World War, was born in 1896. As a child I knew him. We talked and played cards in my grandparents’ “cook shack” on their property in Palisade. In his youth he almost certainly came across people who had fought in the Civil War, been enslaved, and lived through Jim Crow.
When you think about it that way—I personally knew someone who personally knew people who’d escaped slavery—a century of history is not so long. A hundred years ago there were people alive who remain alive today.
I wonder if my great-grandfather, living on the Western Slope, read the news in 1926 about the bombing of a house over in Denver. I wonder what he thought of that. (When I knew him I was too young and stupid to ask him any of the questions that I now desperately wish I could ask.)
Terror comes to Denver
Certainly the news made headlines along the Front Range. The front page of the Daily Camera for December 10, 1926, carried the top-of-fold headline, “Negro Family Fled Home as Bomb Blew.” (Here I’m reproducing dated language to accurately reflect the historical record.)
The article states, “A bomb or a charge of dynamite wrecked the front porch of the home of E. E. Carrington, a negro, 2253 Vine Street. . . . According to the police, the Carringtons are the only negroes living in the block, and there has been a strong sentiment among their white neighbors against their presence. Investigators are working on the theory that the purpose of the explosion was to force the negroes to leave.”
Scott Spillman, a historian formerly of Denver and the author of “Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today,” tells the broader story in his Summer article for History Colorado.
The Carringtons were not the only victims of racial violence in Denver. Spillman writes, “In 1920, a Black fireman named Claude DePriest moved into 2649 Gaylord Street, just northwest of City Park, with his wife and mother-in-law. Soon some 250 whites marched on the house two nights in a row to demand a sale. The Denver police declined to offer protection even as the group’s leader, Foster Cline—a lawyer who would later be Denver district attorney during the Carrington attacks—declared that he could not guarantee the DePriest family’s safety from the mob.”
The story continues: “A year later, Walter Chapman, a longtime government mail clerk and secretary of Denver’s Colored Civic Association, moved with his wife to 2112 Gilpin Street.” Someone “in a passing car threw a bomb onto the lawn,” Spillman writes.
Then “another Black family, the Starrs, moved in” to the same house. “In November 1921, another bomb exploded at the house” that “tore holes in Starr’s walls and shattered windows all along the block,” Spillman continues. The result? “The Starrs soon sold the property and moved.”
This domestic terrorism continued. A photo caption with Spillman’s article relates, “In 1925, the Denver Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the lawn of Dr. Clarence Holmes, a Black dentist in Five Points and early member of the Denver NAACP.”
The Carringtons suffered threatening letters, the first bombing, two shooting attacks, and another bombing attack. Spillman writes, “Early one evening in January, about two weeks after the shootings, E.E. Carrington was in his front room chatting with a friend when they heard something land on the porch. Carrington rushed outside and saw a bomb. Thinking quickly, he chucked it into the street, where it detonated with only minor harm to a neighboring house.” The Carringtons sold out and moved.
A broader culture of hate
So who ended up with the house? I discovered relevant facts in the records (with the help of ChatGPT to scan through documents). You won’t be too surprised to hear that, after violent racists drove the Carringtons from their home, the house ended up in the hands of a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
That the KKK was powerful in Denver and throughout Colorado during this era is by now old news. Here is a little detail about the first bombing from the December 18 edition of the Colorado Statesman: “Denver Branch N. A. A. C. P., with a number of leading citizens, called upon Mayor Stapleton and later upon District Attorney Foster Cline. Both officials promised their full co-operation in running down the perpetrators of the deed.”
We have good reason to believe that neither official was especially serious about that. As Spillman reports, Cline himself voiced veiled threats to black families. And Benjamin Stapleton, we now know, was a puppet mayor of the KKK, although he had turned on leaders of the organization. Meanwhile, the reprehensible bastard Clarence Morley was the KKK’s stooge governor at the time, so black families could not rely on state government to protect them either.
Although there’s no direct evidence I’ve seen that the KKK was directly involved in the bombings, circumstantial evidence that KKK members probably were involved is pretty strong. If you look at the map based on the KKK ledgers, you will see that the Carringtons were literally surrounded by dozens of Klan members.
Klan sentiments obviously ran high in the area. Indeed, right across the park, Klan member Jesse Dade Figgins served as director of the Denver Museum.
New details on the Klan link
And now there’s strong evidence that a Klan member acquired the Carringtons’ house. If you go to History Colorado’s site for the KKK ledgers and download the second volume, you will find the following listings. Member 22171 (page 493), Edward Matthews, is listed at 2534 Williams, just blocks from the Vine Street house. Also listed is member number 23391 (page 549), Roy Matthews, at 2534 Williams, so we can assume they were related.
What does Matthews have to do with the house? Here’s where the old directories come in, available through the Denver Library. If you pull up the 1926 book, you find the following listing for 2534 Williams: “Matthews Edw (Helen) O,” where “O” means owner. We know this “Edward Matthews” was the KKK member because the address matches the KKK ledgers.
Then, if you pull up the 1927 directory, you’ll never guess who is listed as the resident at 2253 Vine, the Carringtons’ house. Yep: “Matthews Edw (Helen),” the KKK member. While various details of the story might forever be lost to the mists of time, the fact that violent racists drove out the Carringtons and that the house then ended up in the hands of a KKK member cannot be coincidence.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
