Decades long fight over Stapleton name comes to an end

Exclusive interview with Walker Stapleton

BY JESSICA ROE -- GOVERNMENTAL REPORTER

Stapleton

It was the name of a Denver mayor who served five terms. It was the name of our state’s first commercial airport. It was the name of a neighborhood, shopping, and a dining district.

Until it wasn’t.

In an era where George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, at the hands of the police, brought the nation to a time-sensitive evaluation of what-is-not-right and what needs-to-be-fixed, the name “Stapleton” quickly became a target in the last few weeks.

As of Monday afternoon, throughout the soon-to-be-formerly-named-Stapleton-neighborhood of north Denver, signs were already being covered up with tape and paint.

“That was fast,” posted Denver Public Schools At-Large Board of Education member Tay Anderson on his Facebook page. “Why couldn’t they have done that years ago?”

Anderson was referring to the decades-long controversy of the use of the Stapleton name in connection to the densely populated and highly trafficked urban district located just south of Interstate 70 and east of Quebec St.

Early in former Mayor Benjamin Franklin Stapleton’s political career, around 1923, he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Initially, he denied his membership. Then, he publicly came out as a Klansman, until the Klansmen then turned on Stapleton. As a result, in 1925, Mayor Stapleton then led police vice raids that exposed members of the Klan serving on the police force. That same year, he welcomed Denver’s first ever National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) convention in Colorado.

The Klan’s power ultimately led to Stapleton getting banned from city hall, before he eventually returned as state auditor in 1932

CONTINUED ON PAGE 10