Discovering Social and Racial Justice at the History Colorado Center in Denver

On a snowy day in Denver last week, we drove to the History Colorado Center to learn more about the history of this magnificent prairie town encircled by the majestic Rocky Mountains. The 14s peaks were visible in the distance snow-capped and hard to access by ordinary people. They call them 14s because they reach to the sky upwards of 14,000 feet, too high to ski and too high for ordinary people to climb.

History Colorado Center is housed in the $111 million building finished and dedicated on 28 April 2012, replacing its predecessor, the Colorado History Museum which closed in 2010. The former Colorado Historical Society, rebranded as History Colorado, administers the center.

The modern 4-story building is adorned in the exterior right front corner with a life-size statue of a buffalo. The atrium vaults four stories in a rectangular shape with different themed exhibits.

Past the entrance and the museum store is the large statue of a Union soldier, marked here and there by flecks of spray paint, having rested too high on its pedestal for the BLM vandals to destroy it.

The museum plaque accompanying the statue explains, “This monument stood in front of the State Capitol until it was toppled in June 2020 during protests for Black lives.” This statue was installed in 1909 to memorialize Colorado’s role in the Civil War.

The museum’s description of this statue is that “it holds multiple meanings for viewers today: a tribute to those who’ve served and sacrificed in the nation’s armed forces, a reminder of atrocities committed against indigenous peoples, a symbol of white supremacy and injustice, a casualty of destructive lawlessness, and more.”

It appeared that an attempt had been made by the curators to clean the paint before it was placed there. There is a photograph of the spray-painted pedestal the statue once stood atop with an explanation for its location and fate.

“After the statue fell, when some people said, ‘monuments like these belong in a museum,’ we decided to take them up on the suggestion and give everyone an opportunity to discuss what the monument means to them.”

Never mind that the statue did not fall by itself, it was brought down by a violent BLM mob while the authorities stood by and allowed it to happen.

A quick reminder that Denver is a sanctuary city for illegal aliens and Colorado is a highly Democrat blue state with Marxist red blood flowing through its citizens’ veins.

The museum is a hodge-podge collection of artifacts, chock full of political posters and real historical statements and Marxist opinions, socialists, social justice and racial justice propaganda, interspersed with bits of interesting history such as mining, the hard and lonely life in the prairie, the first school in Colorado, and Dust Bowl facts as it affected the state.

Some of the posters in the museum

An entire floor is dedicated to social justice, racial justice, and “white supremacy” opinions by various leftist groups and museum curators who focused on the evils of “white supremacy,” a made-up construct by radical leftists with no intent of taking responsibility for their poor choices in life. The leading motif of the entire floor is that white people are bad and everybody else is good.

I learned sobering facts about the Dust Bowl which affected Colorado prairie residents during the 1930-1936 period. A particular room gave visitors a sense of what people must have encountered daily, the howling wind, the lung clogging by fine dust which settled everywhere inside and outside, in some places several feet deep, and inside on everything families owned and their bodies.

One section on the first floor was dedicated to the town of Keota, Colorado, established in 1880. It was the “iconic homesteading mecca that faced drought and famine but was also filled with kindness and community.” The resilience of Coloradoans was remarkable. The highlight of this floor’s exhibits were the school and the general store with photographs of descendants of the original residents alive today.

Artifacts, archives, and photographs are exhibited in the Stephen H. Hart Library and Research Center. The collection is comprised of maps, clothing, photos from the 1850s, teapots, newspapers, marriage and death records, political posters, etc.

Mining and the hard life of miners is a most interesting feature of the museum center. Photographs of former miners from different times, their daily lives, descriptions and quotes from real people, how gold and silver ore were exploited, how the mountain was blasted, and how the buckets to retrieve said ores from the mines gave birth to the ski lifts and gondolas of today.

Several areas contained a lot of political propaganda about social and racial justice. All the nine principles of propaganda were used:

1.     The big lie was always chosen over the small lie because people tend to believe it more readily.

2.     The selling points were focused on two – social and racial justice which demanded that the land be returned to its rightful owners, the indigenous peoples and the Mexicans.

3.     The social and racial justice mantra was repeated so much that any visitors had no choice but to believe both.

4.     Blame was fully placed on white people who were debased, defamed, and dehumanized for their alleged wrongful deeds.

5.     Exhibits appealed to emotion only.

6.     Issues presented were not grey, they were life/death, good/evil, freedom/slavery, love/hate.

7.    Posters with slogans had no literal meaning, they appealed to strong emotions.

8.     Pandering ignored intellectual and reasonable arguments; statements had strong emotional tones.

9.     Moral limits were ignored in order to make an useful case for the construct of “white supremacy.”