PERRY: The road to honoring diversity in Aurora has a name — Barbara Shannon Banister

It would be hard to imagine a better metaphor for the storied work of Aurora activist Barbara Shannon Banister than a road leading to our local self-government.

This week, Aurora will name the very street leading to city hall for Barbara, who for decades has worked to bring equity, compassion and evolution to one of the most diverse communities in the nation.

In typical “BSB” fashion, she said the honor was truly gratifying, but the decades of achievements in identifying and addressing issues linked to race, culture and diversity in Aurora were a collaborative march toward progress.

True, but Barbara has always been at the front of the parade.

The road to Barbara Shannon Banister street on the east side of Aurora city hall started in a Black New Orleans neighborhood, where she was born.

Barbara grew up in the thick of segregation and was eager to move away from it when she and her husband, Gaurdie Bannister, were expecting their first child.

They not only went West, where segregation was at least more subtle, they landed in Casper, Wyoming.

She recalled the relief she discovered that, despite real fears, people out here rode in cars and not just on horses.

Life was good there, Barbara said. Gaurdie, an Air Force vet, eventually rose to become an education leader at the local community college and became involved in employment equity work.

Barbara finished her degree in humanities from the University of Wyoming. She was bestowed an honorary doctorate later in her career.

And the road then brought them to Aurora in the late 1970s.

Here, she and Gaurdie became smitten with the burgeoning diversity of Aurora, and how it was emerging and evolving into something new and different, rather than typical red-lined communities in other large cities and outright segregation in the South.

They both helped found the Aurora NAACP, which Gaurdie went on to lead before his death from a pandemic-related illness in 2020.

Barbara took up work with the city in the early 1980s, rising to lead the city’s Community Relations Department for decades, until she retired from the city in 2019.

The road to her retirement was often a wild ride, filled with nearly made-for-TV obstacles, which she regularly met with solutions.

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

The early 1990s saw a freakish 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.

What are the odds?

Her storied career at Aurora city hall was rife with “what are the odds?”

Barbara’s trademark long braids started as a show of support for fellow Black city employees in the 1990s when a bevy of workers were targeted with racist insults.

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

Trouble erupted at Aurora’s two malls and Barbara found herself working to quell both unrest and distrust among Black youths and a jittery non-Black community, unsure what to expect or how to react.

She handled the crisis with her trademark commitment. Diversity and racial issues demand honesty, transparency and communication, she says.

Those qualities are what moved Aurora so far past neighboring communities when it came to creating a city that is clearly and openly nonchalant about shopping, learning and playing alongside folks speaking as many as 140 different languages, wearing possibly hijabs, hoodies or Hermes.

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.

It was all about frank talk and an up-front demand to solve issues rather than just perpetuate them.

Barbara said the city appears to have backed off of its successes by backing away from utilizing the programs, and the determination that worked so well. 

There’s no denying, however, that the Herculean work Barbara and other local diversity leaders did for the past several decades has, indeed, paid off in numerous ways.

Periodic crises were punctuated with endless other successes, too. 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.

Nearly every store, restaurant and service in Aurora is a kaleidoscope of cultures and races, much like the programs Barbara led pushed them to be.

And for the first time in the city’s history, the city council, the school boards, the legislative seats and even the county commissions are filled with representatives and officials that look like the communities they serve.

She’s far from done. Her Grand Designs non-profit group, which has produced a variety of cultural programs in Aurora, is now marching toward a new audience on social media and podcasts, with a first show out in January and more to come this year.

New generation. Same direction on a very long road.

Barbara truly helped clear the path to the cultural and racial progress Aurora enjoys. It’s only just that the road to the doors of city hall bear her name for the next generation of leaders determined to get there.

 Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com