by Mark Smiley
In June 2019, a neighborhood group, Rename St*pleton for All, launched a campaign to change the name of the Stapleton neighborhood due to former Denver mayor Benjamin Stapleton’s affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan. On Monday, August 19, 2019, property owners overwhelmingly voted against the name change.
Of the 10,550 eligible voters, 3,590 people cast their vote, a 34% turnout. Sixty-five percent of the property owners around the land once occupied by Stapleton International Airport voted to keep the name which many felt was surprising due to the amount of publicity the name change had received. “I understand why people would want to change the name but, in the end, I voted to keep it as is because where does it end?” said Tara Johnson, property owner. “This is my neighborhood and I am proud of the name.”
“I was trained as an historian,” said Harold Scramstad in a statement to the Stapleton Front Porch. “If we start holding everybody in the past to the almost unreasonable standards that we’d set for ourselves, almost nobody is going to measure up. We should keep the name and invest it with all the qualities that we want a community to be — that 100 years from now, people will say, “Stapleton, that was the experimental community that really worked very hard to get it right.” Not, “There’s a community that in a smug or self-satisfied way thought it was solving its problems of the future by changing its name, because that didn’t really change anything.”
The Stapleton Master Community Association (Stapleton MCA) oversaw the election and indicated that the amount of voters nearly tripled the usual turnout. “We are disappointed and saddened by these results, but we are not especially surprised,” Rename St*pleton For All, said via Facebook. “Our work is not done. We love our neighborhood, and we invite all supporters to join us in doing the work to make our community one that truly welcomes and includes all.”
Stapleton served as mayor during the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s and appointed Klansmen to lead the police department and other city offices after his election to office in 1923 and to fight off a subsequent recall effort. But by 1925 he opposed the Klan and helped destroy its political influence in Denver and Colorado. “People seem to forget that Mayor Stapleton’s ties to the KKK were short-lived and he championed the eradication of them soon after he was elected,” said Tim Miller, property owner. “All of the good that Mayor Stapleton did seems to have been erased from history.”
The charge to change the name of the neighborhood dates back a quarter of a century. When the old airport was leveled in the 1990s and Denver International Airport opened, the neighborhood formerly occupying Stapleton Airport was named Stapleton. Backlash over the name dates back to this time and was revived in 2015.
Even though this name change was rejected by voters, the campaign has had an impact in other areas. In 2017 and 2018, the Rename St*pleton for All group was successful at having organizations drop the name Stapleton from their organization. The Stapleton Foundation became The Foundation for Sustainable Urban Communities, the former Stapleton Development Corporation now only uses the acronym SDC, and the Stapleton Citizens Advisory Board is now just the Citizens Advisory Board.
Those efforts have continued into 2019. Earlier in August 2019, Denver Parks and Recreation agreed to rename the Stapleton Recreation Center in Globeville, and this spring, the name of the Denver School of Science and Technology’s original campus changed from DSST Stapleton to DSST Montview.
Not all efforts of having organizations change their name have been successful. In May 2018, the SUN board asked Stapleton residents to vote on whether to change the RNO’s name from “Stapleton United Neighbors” to “Central Park United Neighbors.” A 66% vote in favor was needed and it fell short by eight percentage points.
The vote cast on August 19, 2019, needs to be ratified by the Stapleton MCA Board of Directors. Brookfield, the master developer has the ability to veto the board’s decision, but it is unlikely they will go against the vote.
“For an entire generation, Stapleton was an airport — it did not cause racial issues,” said Richard Caldwell in a statement to the Stapleton Front Porch. “It was the place the Space Shuttle landed on a 747; the Beatles, Nixon, and The Rolling Stones landed. We all lined the fences to watch planes come and go, people from all backgrounds and races — and we got along fine.”
For more information on the Stapleton MCA, visit www.stapletoncommunity.com.