Small-Town History

Ruth Cave Flowers, who moved to Boulder from Cripple Creek with her grandmother in about 1917, came to the foothills town looking for an education but was nearly denied her diploma from Boulder High School because of her color. Flowers went on to became one of the first African-American women to graduate from the University of Colorado. Lillian Wheeler, another early CU grad and the first black woman to get a barber’s license in Colorado, arrived in Boulder from Mississippi in the 1920s. To her, the same Boulder that turned its back on Flowers seemed like the promised land — compared to life in the South. Both of them lived in Boulder’s earliest black settlement, an area in the town’s Goss-Grove neighborhood known as the “Little Rectangle.”

These are some of the stories you’ll hear today when History Colorado’s Dan Corson shares his wealth of knowledge on the subject of “If These Walls Could Talk…Homes of Early Black Boulder Citizens,” which covers everything from Boulder’s Klan presence in the early twentieth century to personal histories like those of Flowers and Wheeler, people he says moved to Goss-Grove because it was then on the outskirts of town, prone to flooding and affordable for poor families.

Learn more when Corson speaks at 1 p.m. at the History Colorado Center, 1200 Broadway, in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibit, Race: Are We So Different? Lecture admission is $4 to $5; get the details at historycolorado.org or call 303-447-8679.

Mon., Oct. 27, 1-2 p.m., 2014