DOING 90 IN AURORA: City’s advocate, Barbara Shannon-Banister, makes the mark

AURORA | We’re making a mistake, Barbara Shannon-Banister said last week.

Sure, during the nine decades that Barbara has fought the good fight, hard, in a remarkable effort to push Aurora, the state and nation past generations of pernicious racism, there have been monumental victories in Aurora.

Barbara celebrated her 90th birthday Oct. 9 among a crowd of community members who lauded the work she did for the City of Aurora and the community during a career that focused on making things right for everyone. It’s a career that’s spanned decades and hundreds of miles between Wyoming and Colorado.

It’s a career that involved launching the Aurora NAACP, managing the city’s community and race relations operations and navigating Aurora through an encyclopedia of local, regional, national and even global crises and challenges.

She was the power behind a cadre of programs that became Kaleidoscope Aurora, out to blend and celebrate all the city’s colors and residents.

Barbara conceded the long parade of victories in Aurora that culminated in the most diverse city in the state, also laying claim to the most inclusive Colorado community, but she considers herself ‘just the drum major.”

Aurora, however, has hit a string of sour notes during the past few years, she said from her Aurora home.

Whether the national gutting of “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs has washed into Aurora, or whether Barbara and the teams of people who joined her in setting the city apart in its push for inclusion became complacent, the move has been decidedly backward, she said.

“This has danger written all over it,” Barbara said.

She pointed nationally to what she said are clearly racist and disingenuous efforts to “remove the race” from issues surrounding college admissions or setting budgets for school districts.

Barbara said she was never surprised that political factions would push back against progress made by encouraging communities to confront and address issues of racism.

The road to Aurora’s progress on that front was never easy or fast.

But what’s missing now is the community engagement and appetite, especially among younger Aurorans to dig back in and ensure the city, and the nation, don’t move back to a time before the Civil Rights Movement inspired so much change that Aurora built on.

“I think communities are more separated now than they used to be,” she said. “Let’s say 20 years ago, it seems we were all fighting for and striving for the same goals and objectives.”

She describes it as a move toward territorialism born from fear. With so many people losing ground financially and with so much in flux, people are becoming insecure and insular.

“This is my territory,” Barbara said she sees and hears regularly. “I was born here, I was raised here, I was schooled here, I worked here, and now it seems like other people from other places want to claim my territory.”

The push against immigrants, in a city where almost everyone is from another country or another state, has fueled Aurora’s equity and inclusion recession, she said.

“We’re all immigrants,” she said. “The only people who were here ‘first’ were the Native Americans.”

Barbara said she’s seen what it was like before the Civil Rights movement. The progress that came after altered her life and the lives of millions like her.

She said she doesn’t want to go back.

The journey to Aurora

She was born Barbara Shannon in a Black New Orleans neighborhood as the Great Depression simmered and Nazi Germany began heating up.

She grew up in the thick of Deep South segregation and said she was happy to move away from it when she and her husband, Gaurdie Banister, fresh out of the Air Force, were expecting their first child.

They did a societal 180 and moved to Casper, Wyoming.

Gaurdie found work and eventually built a career at the local community college. Barbara studied piano, violin and voice at Xavier University of Louisiana before moving to Wyoming. She got a degree in humanities from the University of Wyoming in Laramie, eventually getting an honorary doctorate.

Along the way, Gaurdie got involved in employment equity issues at the college. Despite solid roots in Wyoming, the family moved to Aurora in the late 1970s with two kids.

“I was happy to come to Aurora,” she said. “I didn’t want to move into Denver because I felt like they had an established culture, and I didn’t see that culture in Aurora as I drove around and saw people. I didn’t see that many different kinds of folks … I thought this would be an opportunity for me to be in a place on the ground floor to help do some things in this city — little did I know it would last as long as it did.”

Gaurdie got work at the state Department of Labor. She found work at the City of Aurora in the planning department.

Somewhere along the way, Barbara Shanon Banister became “BSB” to most of the people she worked with.

“That’s ,‘Bay, Essay Bay’ in Spanish, she points out.

Despite one name and two ways to pronounce it, she’s had a slew of titles during her nearly 40-year-career at the city and her nearly 60-year tenure as a community activist in Aurora.

One of her first big achievements was working with a handful of others in Aurora to create the NAACP here. Gaurdie became the chapter’s first president.

In the 1980s, she began organizing and managing the city’s efforts to seek out ideas about diversity, inclusion and equity, long before it was called that. It was an extension of civil rights and a community with large non-white populations. 

Barbara was no stranger to protests.

In the late 1960s, she and Gaurdie were living in Wyoming when 14 black football players were kicked off their University of Wyoming college team for attempting to wear black armbands to protest during a game.

She was the inventor of several city programs created to meet diversity and racism challenges head-on.

The early 1990s saw a startling emergence of neo-Nazism and outlandish racism by a relatively small but potent group of far-right extremists.

Locally, Shawn Slater was a local guy among a group of white supremacists who grabbed plenty of headlines and local news airtime.

He led a variety of racist rallies in Aurora and the metro area, eventually rising in the ranks to become top dog in the Colorado Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He made The New York Times headlines when he said he wanted to run for Aurora City Council.

One day, as Barbara was at city hall getting to her office, she shared the elevator ride with Slater and another Klansman while they were seeking protest permits.

She was enjoined in a local fray when Rodney King riots in Los Angeles rippled across the nation, including in Aurora.

The push for mediating race issues and moving forward solidified following the L.A. riots in the early 1990s, she helped stem tempers after a group of local teenagers ransacked the Buckingham Square Mall across the street from the old city headquarters.

A few years later, she responded to racial insults targeted at her fellow black coworkers in city hall by braiding her hair in a display of solidarity.

She hasn’t taken out the beaded tendrils since, she said not long after her retirement.

The road to 2026 has been a wild ride, filled with nearly made-for-TV obstacles, which she regularly met with solutions.

When Black children were tagged and mistreated at a local skating rink, more than 20 years ago, she helped create Citizens Concerned About Minorities in Aurora. Rather than just posture and talk around racial problems, groups like CCAMA and the Key Community Response Team took issues head-on.

The Aurora KCRT met monthly and worked to assuage community ire after testy, public events. 

She established the International Cross Cultural Network of Aurora, which placed translators across city platforms. 

She was behind the Aurora Community of Faith, which aimed to relay city events and policies to various religious communities throughout the region. 

The list of groups, forums and commissions goes on.

The MLK Jr. Library in northwest Aurora has the only full-body statue of the library’s namesake in the state, a project Barbara worked hard for.

After retiring from the city, she was appointed to the Aurora Civil Service Commission, which she stepped down from just a few months ago.

She was honored in June with a street name and dedicated to her, which runs to the front doors of Aurora city hall.

One of Barbara’s biggest achievements was the Aurora City Council’s decision to dedicate funding to the Aurora Race Forum, which featured regular discussions on the implications of race in the city.

“It’s not to say races are banging our heads together, but we have differences and we look at life differently,” she said. “So why can’t I understand what you like to eat, and where you like to party, and where you like to go, what church you go to, etc. … You get to know me and I get to know you, and you’re not afraid of me and I’m not afraid of you.”

The solutions came along with the challenges

Most of those programs have either receded from the headlines or disappeared entirely.

Instead, local and regional news focuses on the city’s notorious reputation for excessive police force, especially against people of color.

She’s shocked by news rolling downhill from the U.S. Supreme Court decision to dismiss the need for and implementation of the Voting Rights Act.

She says Aurora appears to be losing sight of the goal of inclusion and equity without strong, demanding voices like Aurora had in the past.

She pointed to former Aurora Mayor Dennis Champine, an outspoken and colorful city leader who drew local and national attention to Aurora during the 1980s as it mushroomed into a large city. He served for five years as city council member and two terms as mayor, leaving the city government in 1987.
“He was instrumental in setting the tone and pace for ensuring fairness for everyone in Aurora that was unequaled anywhere else in the state,” Barbara said.

Likewise, former Mayor Steve Hogan, she said, was relentless in pressing the city to step up efforts to keep the need for inclusion, equity and the appreciation for Aurora’s diversity in front of every city administrator and employee.

Hogan sat on the city council as a council member and mayor for decades. He died in 2018.

“It wasn’t just earlier city leaders,” Barbara said. “When City Manager Jim Twombly came to Aurora, he was a critical force in ensuring that as city politics became increasingly complicated, this important work didn’t fall by the wayside.”

Twombly served as city manager for four years, retiring in 2023.

What made those people and their efforts successful was ensuring the messages were heard and delivered to everyone.

“We need to get back into the schools and back into the communities to let people know how it can be different and it can be better,” Barbara said.

Programs like media literacy, accurate and thoughtful history classes in public schools and city programs that reach out to the community to listen and react won’t happen unless those currently in power and prominence make it happen, she said.

“If you just listen to it — it’s diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Barbara said. “What about those three words is upsetting?”

She said she’s worried and disappointed that so much progress has been made and lost in Aurora.

Barbara said it was a major milestone when Kathleen Hancock was hired as the city’s first Black female firefighter in 2012, but disappointing that it took 13 years before she became the first Black female firefighter named a lieutenant.

Progress, again, she said, is that Aurora will soon install the city’s first Black female police lieutenant, Darnesha Montgomery.

The worry, Barbara said, is that it took until 2026 for it to happen in a department with more than 700 officers and administrators.

It’s time to step it up again, she said.

She’s running the Grand Designs non-profit group, which has produced a variety of cultural programs in Aurora and is now gathering a new audience on social media and podcasts with weekly shows featuring a wide range of people and topics.

In between all this are the quiz-game shows, which speak to who Barbara is and has been.
“You turn them on and start learning things and getting the answer to questions just that fast,” she said. “Every day, you learn all kinds of new things.”

What she’s confident about learning over the last several years, however, is that progress in fighting racism and offering everyone the benefits of diversity, inclusion and equity takes constant effort.

“I’m here to say we’re gonna do it, and BSB is gonna be right in front of the parade,” she said. “I’m not giving up.”