Thread by @ConorMichael28

With the Stapleton neighborhood set to change its name, I spoke with Bob Goldberg, a top expert on the history of KKK in Colorado, to find out more about Mayor Ben Stapleton. Goldberg believes Stapleton's decision to join the KKK in the early-1920s was all about political power.

"I would call him a political animal. I never had a sense that he was prejudiced personally. Ben Stapleton was ambitious, and he allowed his ambition to disrupt his moral compass. He thought, 'I want to be mayor, and I will make a compromise to be mayor and stay as mayor.'"

Even though he was the Klan's choice to become Denver mayor in 1923, Stapleton kept his ties to the group quiet. But when he won the election that year, Stapleton, a good friend of Colorado Grand Dragon John Galen Locke, began installing Klan members to key posts in his admin.

The Klan had a huge influence in politics across the state of Colorado during a period of a few years in the 1920s. "I rank Colorado as the second most powerful Klan state in the country after Indiana," says Goldberg. There were 34-35k Klan members in Colorado during that time.

Stapleton was a Democrat. Clarence Morley, the KKK governor, was a Republican. That's because the Klan didn't view political power through a partisan lens. "We are not Republicans, we are not Democrats, we are Klansmen," the Colorado Grand Dragon would say, Goldberg reports.

Once he won the election, Stapleton let the Klan run unchecked. Cross burnings, racially-motivated assaults, and threats against activists weren't investigated. Klan marches past synagogues on West Colfax and Catholic churches happened without penalty.

And the KKK created an economic caste system in Denver. "The Klan would list the merchants who were okay to work from and buy from, and would boycott Catholic and Jewish merchants," says Goldberg,

The one thing Stapleton wouldn't do early on was appoint a Klan member to become police chief. This upset the Klan leadership, so they were ready to submit a recall petition. But then anti-Klan individuals submitted their own recall petition in 1924.

With his political career in jeopardy, Stapleton relented and appointed a Klan member as Denver police chief. He also became vocal about his support for the Klan.

"I have little to say, except that I will work with the Klan and for the Klan in the coming election, heart and soul. And if I am re-elected, I shall give the Klan the kind of administration it wants," Stapleton told Klan members at a rally in July 1924.

"This is a statement that he never regrets," says Goldberg. "I never found a regret, a repeal, an apology in regard to that." And Stapleton easily won the election.

But in the aftermath of the election, Stapleton turned on the Klan. In April 1925, he launched vice raids that revealed a network of corrupt Klan policemen. The Klan had gained traction because they had originally promised to end corruption, but had become corrupt themselves.

"That was 1 of the key reasons for the decline of the Klan: if you join the Klan because you were worried about kids being given booze or prostitution or crime waves, and then you turn around, and the Klan is doing the same thing — a lot of people became disillusioned."--Goldberg

It's unclear when Stapleton left the Klan, since he did so quietly. "The sooner it was forgotten, the better for Ben Stapleton," Goldberg notes, adding that in all his research, he never found any indication that Stapleton repudiated his membership in the Klan, or apologized.

Stapleton continued serving as mayor until 1931, took a break until 1935, and again served as mayor until 1947. The airport that his administration built was named after him in 1944, a decision that eventually led to a neighborhood built on the airport site being named Stapleton.

I also spoke yesterday with Vince Bowen, a Black Lives Matter 5280 activist who has been pushing for the past five years to change the name of the Stapleton neighborhood.

"We have this view in America that racism is a personality trait. You have to be a nasty person."

Bowen added, "But racism is a system, it’s a stratagem. It’s used by the powerful to serve their interests."

Noting that racist individuals can be "lovely people," Bowen says that "they’re doing something that is killing people and strangling the life of their liberty."

And here's a piece about a historian's analysis of Mayor Ben Stapleton. westword.com/news/ben-stapl…

Oh yeah, here's an anecdote that I didn't end up including in the article: Bob Goldberg, the expert on the history of the KKK in Colorado, lived in Denver for two years in the '70s. He alternated between digging through newspaper archives and interviewing former Klan members.

Goldberg originally sent out 25 letters to former Klan members asking if they would sit down for an interview. He didn't hear back from any. "I was very naive when I started my research," Goldberg says. So then he decided to change his name around next time he sent out letters.

On the letter head for the next batch of interview requests, Robert Alan Goldberg became Alan Roberts. And then Goldberg started receiving many responses and says that some of those he met with were "law and order advocates" while others were "nasty, nasty bigots."

For example, one of the former Klan members that Goldberg interviewed said, "You can smell a Jew that’s sitting in the room." Goldberg, who at this point was still Alan Roberts, asked him how. The man proceeded to say more obscenely anti-Semitic remarks.

And Goldberg says that he always revealed his true identity at the end of these interviews. "Well nothing wrong with that," former Klan members would say after learning this, despite the fact that they had been going on anti-Semitic rants beforehand.

"Here are these 70 or 80 year old men at this point. Bigotry doesn’t die easily," Goldberg says.

That's it. That's the thread. Promise this time.

Ah wait, that's not the end of the thread. For those interested in reading Goldberg's book 'Hooded empire: the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado,' here's a PDF provided by his institution, the University of Utah. collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id=705…

And now the thread is over.