If you ask any farmer or rancher today if it’s tough making a living in Colorado’s Arkansas Valley, there’s not going to be much debate. It’s tough. Of course, when the weather cooperates, it’s ‘livin’ the life.’ Crops come in right on schedule with a quality as good as any in the state.
Now imagine making a go of it here a hundred years ago on a plot of land then not known for great yields or even hints of one. Add to that, trying it as a pair of Black women.
But that is exactly what Josephine and Leonora Rucker tried and very nearly succeeded way back in 1915, a time when Jim Crow often comfortably, frequently and often complicitly held sway in communities both large and small.
The Rucker sisters’ story is told in fascinating detail in “The Dry: Black Women’s Legacy in a Farming Community,” an exhibit now open to the public at Denver’s History Colorado, 1200 Broadway.
The exhibit is the result of the work of Dexter Nelson II, who spent “a little over a year” traveling across the tiny towns that dot Colorado Highway 50, an asphalt arrow that pierces directly through the heart of the Arkansas Valley and towns like Crowley, Fowler, Rocky Ford, Sugar City and more.
Producing “The Dry,” for History Colorado, said Nelson, now a researcher for the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library, was a journey in far more ways than simple miles. “It impacted in a few different ways,” he said. Just coming to know what these two sisters tried and their perseverance carries an emotional weight. “Luckily, said Nelson, a new to Colorado Oklahoman, the Ruckers some- how had the prescience to chronicle their story in hundreds of black and white photographs, each with its own handwrit- ten explanation.
The Rucker sisters moved to Colorado shortly after the Homestead Act was expanded allowing women and African Americans the opportunity to acquire government land if they were willing to live or homestead on it. Josephine and Leonora jumped at the chance to create a new life, one free of the experience Black citizens then lived daily in America.
The ’why’ in the Rucker sisters’ choice of unoccupied land in Otero County is a whole other story. Nelson said when they were looking for a new start, they saw a land that had just come through a period of heavy and hearty rains, leaving a lush and vibrant landscape. They didn’t see the monotone and barren patches of land that often curse the region in dry years, he said. But they stayed becoming not just one of the pioneering Black families in the Valley, but the pioneering Black family in the Valley.
The 21st century discovery of the Rucker story adds a layer to Colorado history that chronicles the sacrifice Black people were willing to make to escape the yoke of racism. For Nelson, it also finally shines a light on a history too often hidden in plain sight.
As a young African American growing up in Tulsa, stories of the Tulsa Massacre, like that of the Rucker sisters and ‘The Dry’, were missing. Not until high school or college, Nelson said, did he first learn of it.
The racially inspired Tulsa Massacre occurred over two days in May and June of 1921. Hoards of armed vigilantes stormed Tulsa’s Greenwood section, a part of town that had been called ‘Black Wall Street,’ for its thriving commerce. The mobs burned buildings and indiscriminately killed hun- dreds of men, women and children. Even dropping bombs from airplanes to erase any trace of Black life and commerce in Tulsa.
But missing chapters and storylines of Colorado and the country’s Black history are not missing by those who lived it, including former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. As Mayor, Webb had a hand in much of the city’s and state’s contemporary history, including signing off on DIA, the city’s main library, the Pepsi Center (now Ball Arena) and a number of major construction efforts. Much of city government is conducted in the building that bears his name.
As a young boy, Webb said he commuted each summer between Chicago and Denver, often with his grandmother, a woman he speaks about both formally and reverently as “Mrs. Helen Gamble.”
“She taught us how to navigate,” said Webb, during a time when a degree of respect, often undeserved, was simply a part of life. Webb likes to tell the story of pre-teen and naive Wellington.
It was on a train to Austin, Texas, the prize for winning “an oratorical contest,” that the train stopped in Amarillo. There, the Mayor remembered, was when his grandmother told him to get up and move or, more basically, give up their seats. It was his first lesson in societal survival. “When you cross the Mason-Dixon line,” she told him, it’s just what you did. “The front of the train was reserved for Whites,” the matriarch said.
Another of her shared survival skills, he recalled, was preparation for a road trip to the South. “She would always pack a shoebox with fried chicken, fruit and sandwiches,” because making a routine stop along the way could often lead to an undesired encounter. “Culturally,” the mayor said, “people knew what they could do and what they couldn’t.” While Colorado has not fallen into the darkness of other states where American history, good and bad, is still taught, Webb holds dear a time when the state practiced its own abridged version of the past, particularly as it applied to African American history.
“When it came to the 1860’s, teachers would always say, ‘Lincoln saved the union.’” They would skip over the fundamental reason for Lincoln’s rescue, he said. Webb said he still owns a college history text that sanitizes American history. It’s a book he labeled as “filled with non-facts and written by someone ignorant or bigoted…and taught at a teachers’ college.”
Much of Colorado’s Black History can be found at Denver’s Black American West Museum & Heritage Center at 3091 California Street. “It represents whole generations of Colorado’s Black migration,” said Daphne Rice Allen, Chair of the Museum’s board.
The museum is the repository of the names, pictures and stories that chronicle the African American experience in Colorado, said Rice Allen. “We have a historical connection to all the veins of Denver, to all those founding people,” she said. “We are here!”
