PERRY: A jar of dirt and the grim story of a boy, 15, burnt alive, teach a new critical Colorado lesson

We can be pretty smug here in Colorado, about a lot of things. 

This is a place where Republicans invented abortion rights for states. Colorado has long been taxing marijuana sales instead of jailing tokers as an antidote to the nation’s most futile prohibition. We don’t think twice here about voting by mail-ballot.

Most of us see the state as a long succession of progressive-libertarian achievements, above the gruesome fray tormenting the South, still in the shadow of the Civil War.

Not true.

Believing an exceptional Colorado belies the horror of the Sand Creek Massacre, the cruelty of imprisoning more than 10,000 Japanese Americans at Camp Amache, and burning a Black boy alive, chained to a railroad tie near Limon.

Aurora Poet Laureate Emeritus and teacher Jovan Mays is among those helping Colorado toward a clearer view of the state’s foggy past, which is not exempt from similar horrors from across the country.

He and others from the Colorado Lynching Memorial Project are in Montgomery, Alabama this week to culminate years of work alongside a national effort created by the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Mays, and fellow leaders of the Colorado project, are taking with them a big jar of dirt, filled from beneath a tree in Downtown Denver and alongside a railroad just outside of Limon.

The dirt was taken from where volunteers approximate the place a then 15-year-old Preston Porter Jr. was tortured by Denver police in 1900 after being accused of murder.  And the dirt also came from the place just outside of Limon where he was bound to a railroad tie, doused with kerosene and set ablaze as hundreds of enthusiastic members of the community gleefully watched.

You don’t see that on the Welcome to Colorful Colorado signs at the state borders.

The dirt is part of a related national memorial project, where permanent historical markers explain who was lynched and why. That Colorado marker is near the Denver Auraria Campus, the site of Denver’s first ‘ ‘modern” police station and city hall at the end of the 19th Century.

The giant-size jar of dirt collected from the same place, and from outside Limon, will join about 800 other, identical jars next week. They’re all labeled with the names of people who where the victims of unchecked and almost always unpunished lethal racial hatred during lynchings across the country.

Porter’s gruesome murder wasn’t the only documented lynching in Colorado. There were six more.

Porter was born in Ohio, lived in Kansas and moved to Limon with his family when he was 15. He went by “John.” His family moved just outside Limon for railroad work.

All this comes from research into past issues of the defunct Denver Times and official records and documents curated by the Colorado Lynching Memorial Project.

On Nov. 8, 1900, a white girl was murdered in the Limon area. The press insisted it had to be a Black migrant. Preston and his family were in Denver three days later, accused of the crime. Preston was tortured in a “sweat box” for days. Eventually, police told the boy they would lynch his family if he didn’t confess, so he did. All of this was detailed in documents and the newspaper.

Police, with the blessing of Colorado’s Gov. Charles Thomas, sent Porter back to Hugo, just outside Limon, to be lynched, an event forecast in newspapers in Denver and Kansas.

On Nov. 15, a crowd estimated between 200-400 people, some from as far away as Colorado Springs and Denver, gathered for the event.

Porter was tied and chained to a railroad tie, doused with kerosene and set on fire. 

“The great crowd”, said the Denver Times, “shook with pure enjoyment of the situation. And when, at one point in his extreme agony, Preston cried out: ‘Good Lord…forgive the people doing this.’”

The murder garnered national newspaper attention. No one was ever held to account.

Eventually, it was forgotten. But not by his family and the hundreds of thousands of Black Americans who for generations have lived in some state of fear or trepidation that Porter’s fate could be theirs. They haven’t forgotten. Neither have the millions of Black Americans who became victims of the evolution of lynchings: Jim Crow laws, red-lined communities, all kinds of systemic racism, even by contemporary police.

Aurora, as you read this, is under a consent decree to end a well-documented history of a “pattern and practice of violating state and federal law through racially biased policing, using excessive force…”

The Equal Justice Initiative and Colorado Lynching Memorial Project wants all of us to know that the mistreatment of Black people and other people of color didn’t end with the lynchings.

The memorials are about ensuring that, here in Colorado, and across the nation, we know what really happened, and how easily it happened. Memorial proponents want all of us to know how Porter’s lynching was part of something even larger than just the heinous crime committed against him.

It’s not about shame. It’s about the power of acknowledgment, and the commitment to make it stop.

I couldn’t immerse myself in Porter’s horror the way Mays and his memorial colleagues have. The cruelty or indifference people can muster makes me flinch, even more than a century ago.

I’m proud to know people who won’t just shrug or look the other way, no matter the cost.

Mays is the city’s first poet laureate. He’s long been the voice of all of Aurora, and he’s drawn us together in the past as we’ve struggled with the pain of the Aurora theater shooting.

If ever a job called for words of a poet to help us all understand and move past Porter’s murder and the abuse of others that came after, this would be it.

For more, go to: coloradolynchingmemorial.org.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jovan Mays is a director on the Aurora Sentinel Community Media board, which oversees the structure of the Sentinel Colorado non-profit corporation. The board does not oversee nor address the Sentinel’s autonomous editorial operations.

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