NEH funding also was awarded for two other humanities projects at CU Boulder

University of Colorado Boulder Department of History Associate Professor Henry Lovejoy has won a $60,000 fellowship from the  to allow him to research and write a book about involuntary African indentured labor between 1800 and 1914.

Lovejoy’s research focuses on the political, economic and cultural history of Africa and the African Diaspora. He also has special expertise in digital humanities and is director of the Digital Slavery Research Lab, which focuses on developing, linking and archiving open-source data and multi-media related to the global phenomenon of slavery and human trafficking.

Additionally, Lovejoy spearheaded the creation and update of the website , a living memorial to the more than 700,000 men, women and children who were “liberated” but not immediately freed in the British-led campaign to abolish African slave trafficking.

The term “Liberated Africans” coincides with a now-little-remembered part of history following the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 by the United Kingdom’s Parliament, which prohibited the slave trade within the British Empire (although it did not abolish the practice of slavery until 1834).

Around the same time, other countries—including the United States, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands—passed their own trafficking laws and operated squadrons of ships in the Atlantic and Indian oceans to interdict the slave trade.

However, in a cruel twist of fate, most of those “liberated” people weren’t actually freed—but were instead condemned as property, declared free under anti-slave trade legislation and then subjected to indentures lasting several years.

Lovejoy said the NEH fellowship is allowing him to take leave from work to write his book, focused on lax enforcement of anti-slavery laws, migratory patterns of African laborers, their enslavement and subsequent use as indentured laborers around the world from 1800 to 1914.

“I’m deeply grateful for being awarded this opportunity, as the NEH plays such a vital role in supporting the humanities by funding projects that foster our cultural understanding, historical awareness, and intellectual inquiry,” he said.

Meanwhile, Lovejoy said he is also writing a biography about Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a “liberated African” who was apprenticed by Queen Victoria, after conducting research in royal, national and local archives in England, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Lovejoy also wrote the book , a biography of an enslaved African who rose through the ranks of Spain’s colonial military and eventually led a socio-religious institution at the root of an African-Cuban religion, commonly known as Santería. 

Lovejoy’s NEH fellowship was one of three NEH awards to CU Boulder faculty. Other awards granted were:

Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Professor Patrick Greaney won a $60,000 fellowship to research and write a book about German manufacturer Braun, National Socialism and the creation of West German culture between1933-1975, focusing on Braun from the beginning of the Nazi regime through the 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany. Greaney’s research focuses on literature, design and modern and contemporary art.

Wilma Doris Loayza, teaching assistant professor at the Latin American and Latinx Studies Center, and affiliated faculty of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, along with co-project directors Joe Bryan, Leila Gomez and Ambrocio Gutierrez Lorenzo, won a two-year, $149,925 grant to develop course modules and educational resources about Quechua and Zapotec language and culture as part of efforts to expand and strengthen the Latin American Indigenous Languages and Cultures program.

The awards to CU Boulder faculty were part of $22.6 million in grants the NEH provided to 219 humanities projects across the country. The awards were announced Tuesday.

“It is my pleasure to announce NEH grant awards to support 219 exemplary projects that will foster discovery, education, and innovative research in the humanities,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe.

“This funding will strengthen our ability to preserve and share important stories from the past with future generations, and expand opportunities in communities, classrooms, and institutions to engage with the history, ideas, languages, and cultures that shape our world.”

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CU Adjunct Professor Peter H. Wood’s seminal 1974 book on race, rice and rebellion in Colonial America recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with an updated version

If Peter H. Wood wants to stump some University of Colorado history majors about early American history, he’ll ask them which of the original 13 colonies was the wealthiest before the American Revolution and also had an African American majority at the time.

“Often, they will see it as a trick question. Some might guess New Jersey or New York or Connecticut, so most people have no idea of the correct answer, which is South Carolina,” says Wood, a former Rhodes Scholar and a Duke University emeritus professor. He came to the CU Boulder Department of History as an adjunct professor in 2012, when his wife, Distinguished Professor Emerita Elizabeth Fenn, joined the department.

South Carolina colonial history is a topic with which Wood is intimately familiar, having written the book , which was first published in 1974 and has been described as   W. W. Norton published a 50th anniversary edition of the book in 2024.

Recently, Wood spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about how he first brought the story of colonial South Carolina to light, reflecting on how the book was received at the time and why this part of history remains relevant today. His responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for clarity.

Question: How did you become aware of this story of colonial South Carolina, which was unfamiliar to many Americans in 1974 and perhaps still is today?

Wood: I knew when I was an undergraduate that I wanted to study early American history. After a two-year stint at Oxford in the mid-1960s, I came back to Harvard for graduate school.

At that time, the Civil Rights Movement was going on. I’d been very interested in those events, as most of my generation was, and I wanted to see how I could put together my interest in interracial problems with my interest in early American history.

What I found was that early American history was very New England-oriented in those days. Ivy League schools were cranking out people writing about the Puritans, and when they wrote about the South, they would mainly write about Virginia. They talked about Jefferson and Washington. South Carolina had hardly been explored at all. There are only 13 British mainland colonies, after all, so to find that one of them had scarcely been studied was exciting.

Specifically, I was motivated by the Detroit riot in 1967, watching it unfold on television in the summer of 1967. Roger Mudd, the old CBS reporter, was flying over Detroit in a helicopter the way he’d been flying over Vietnam. He was saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on down there.’ I realized that he was supposed to be explaining it to us, but he didn’t really have a very good feel for it himself. No white reporters did.

And the very next morning I went into Widener Library at Harvard and started looking at colonial history books to see if any of them covered Black history in the very early period … and South Carolina was completely blank. So, that was what set me going.

Question: If there wasn’t any significant scholarship about South Carolina prior to the American Revolution, particularly about African Americans living there, how did you conduct research for your book?

Wood: I went to the South Carolina State Archives in Columbia, not knowing what I would be able to find. I understood that if I did find materials, they would be written by the white colonists … because enslaved African Americans were not allowed to read and write. There wasn’t going to be anybody who was African American keeping a diary.

But what I did find was that the records were abundant. That’s partly because these enslaved people were being treated as property; they had a financial value. So, when I would open a book, there would be nothing in the index under ‘Negroes’ (that was the word used in those days). But I would look through the book itself and there were all kinds of references to them. They just hadn’t been indexed, because they weren’t considered important.

At every turn, there was more material than I expected, and often dealing with significant issues. …

And when you’re researching early African American history, you learn to read those documents critically. The silver lining of that sort of difficult research is that it forces you to be interdisciplinary and to use any approach you can.

So, I ended up using some linguistics and some medical history (about malaria) and especially some agricultural history. Most people back then—and most Americans still today—don’t realize that the key product in South Carolina was rice. I argued successfully and for the first time in this book that it seemed to have originated with the enslaved Africans. The gist of the book is that these people were not unskilled labor; they were skilled and knowledgeable labor, and it was a West African product (rice) that made South Carolina the richest of the 13 colonies.

Question: With regard to Black Majority, you made the statement, ‘Demography matters.’ What do you mean by that?

Wood: I realized early on that demography was a very radical tool in the sense that it obliges you, or allows you, to treat everybody equally. In other words, to be a good demographer, you have to count everybody: Men, women and children, Black and white, gay and straight—everybody counts equally. As a born egalitarian, that was appealing, especially in a period where there were lots of radical ideas bouncing around that I was a little leery of.

But demography seems very straightforward, as in: All I have to do is count people. So, the very title of the book, Black Majority, is a demographic statement. It’s not saying, ‘These people are good or bad’ or anything else. It’s just saying, ‘Here they are.’ It becomes what I call a Rorschach test, meaning it’s up to the reader as to what they want to make out of these basic facts. …

The book—especially in those days—was particularly exciting for young African Americans, because they’d been told they didn’t have any history, or that it was inaccessible.

Remember, this was even before Alex Haley had published Roots. I actually met Alex while he was working on his book, because I was one of the only people he could find who was interested in slavery before the American Revolution. Most of the people who were studying Black history—which was only a very small, emerging field in those days—were either studying modern-day Civil Rights activities and Jim Crow activities, or maybe the Civil War and antebellum cotton plantations.

Question: You initially undertook your research on this topic to write your PhD dissertation. At what point in the process did you think your findings could make for a good, informative book?

Wood: Very early on, I thought I wanted to write a book. I mean, I wanted to be able to publish something and I wanted to start at the beginning. … If I could go all the way back to 1670, when this colony began, and find records, and tell the story moving forward—instead of going backwards from the Civil Rights movement—I wanted to do that.

If I could write a book about that, then it would show lots of other people that they could write a book about Blacks in 18th-century Georgia or 19th-century Alabama, for example. All of those topics had seemed off limits at the time.

So, I was going to start at the beginning and move forward and see how far I had to go to get a book. I thought, ‘I’ll probably have to go up to 1820,’ but by the time I got to 1740, by the time I got through the —which was the largest rebellion in Colonial North America, in 1739, and it was unknown to people—I had enough for a book.

I had enough (material) for a dissertation so I could get my degree, but I also had enough for a book. And, luckily for me, it was just at the time when there was a lot of pressure on universities to create Black Studies programs, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

That put a lot of pressure on New York publishers to find books about Black history. And so, Alfred Knopf in New York took the book and gave me a contract within two weeks. I was very lucky in that regard: That was a moment where it was just dawning on everybody that, ‘My goodness! There’s a huge area here where we have not shone a searchlight.’ …

I'll tell you a funny story. At Knopf, they said, ‘You should go talk to our publicity director,’ because they were excited about this book. I walked into her office, and she was this burly, blonde advertising woman. Her face just dropped. She said, ‘Oh, Dr. Wood, I thought you were Black!’ And then she brightened up. ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I'll get you on the radio.’ (laughs)

So, that just illustrates, if I’d been Black, it would have been even better, but at that point, anything was grist for the mill, especially if it was opening up new territory in American history.

Question: That actually raises a question: Did you face any criticism as a white author writing about Black history, like author William Styron did?

Wood: That was the controversy about William Styron’s 1967 book,  Styron was a white Connecticut author, and quite well-informed and well-intended. He had been raised in Virginia himself, so he’d grown up with versions of this story.

He was not a historian. Still, he wanted to try to write about from Turner’s perspective. So, he had the freedom of a novelist, of trying to put himself inside Nat Turner’s head. That effort was troublesome to a lot of folks.

It bothered some Black folks because it was a white author trying to do that and showing a complicated version of things. It was also upsetting to some white folks. If they knew about Nat Turner at all, it was that he was some crazy madman who killed people, so the idea that you should try to get inside his head, that was upsetting to them.

But, in answer to your question, I was lucky in that … the critique that white people shouldn’t do Black history had not really taken hold. At that time (1974), very little was being written about African Americans in Colonial times … and so there was a desire for anything that could shine some light on the subject.

Question: Why do you think Black Majority has maintained its staying power over the years? And what changes were made for the 50th-anniversary edition that W. W. Norton published?

Wood: As I’ve said, it came along at the right time. Along with other works, it opened up a whole new area, and so early African American history is now a very active field.

When I did the revisions for this 50th-anniversary edition, I didn’t change it drastically, because it is a product of the early 1970s, of 50 years ago. I think the points I made then have held up pretty well. That’s why I’d say it has been influential in the academic community, but for the general public, not so much.

Question: Why do you think that is?

Wood: It’s very hard to change the mainstream narrative, especially in regard to our childhood education about early American history. From elementary school on, we hear about Jamestown and about the Puritans; we learn that colonists grew tobacco in Virginia, but almost nothing beyond that. …

I think that’s part of our failing over the last 50 years. The idea of having a national story that everyone can agree upon has fallen apart, and I wish we could knit it back together. It may be too little, too late. But if we if we can ever manage to knit it back together in a more thorough, honest way, African Americans in Colonial times will be one of the early chapters.

Twenty years ago, I worked on a very successful U.S. history textbook called Created Equal, where I wrote the first six chapters. Even then, our team was trying to tie all of American history together in a new and inclusive way—one that everyone could understand and share and discuss. … I hope that book, and Black Majority, is more relevant than ever. 

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Cadavers used in anatomy classes were buried in unmarked lots in Columbia Cemetery

The University of Colorado Department of Medicine and Surgery opened in Boulder in 1883 with two students. By 1890, the medical school included more than a dozen students, two of them women. In order to graduate, each student was required to dissect an entire human body.

Records of these cadavers reveal a little-known cross section of life and death in Boulder County. The body parts were interred in unmarked lots, where they remain today, in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery.

Prior to the school's opening, Dr. Lumen M. Giffin moved to Boulder from New York to become professor of anatomy and physiology. In the early days, tuition for the three-year program was a one-time fee of $5 for in-state students and $10 for those from out of state. The courses included lectures, chemical laboratories and dissections.  

CU Boulder alum Silvia Pettem is an acclaimed local historian and author of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon.

One of the bodies donated to Giffin's class was that of miner Frederick Nelson. He had sought refuge from a forest fire and suffocated in the shaft of the Bald Mountain Mine near the town of Sunset. His relatives were unknown, and no one claimed his remains.

Many of the deceased met similarly unusual or violent deaths. According to coroners' records, in 1909 Herman Schmidt's skull was crushed by a falling rock while he worked as a laborer on the construction of Barker Dam, below Nederland. Schmidt was a recent immigrant with no known family or friends. 

No one knew anything about Michael Clifford at the time of his death except his name. He was murdered in a drunken brawl in the town of Marshall. The university also welcomed his body.

Few, if any, of the cadavers used in the classroom dissections were female until 1914, when Cyrus Deardoff donated the body of his 70-year-old wife, Ellen, who had been declared insane and starved herself.  

Cyrus had, at one time, been a prominent gold miner in Ward. However, he died destitute a few months after Ellen's death. He saved the expense of a funeral and the stigma of being consigned to a pauper’s grave by agreeing in advance to give the university his body, as well.

The year was a busy one for the medical students. By then, CU had purchased its second cemetery lot, and bought a third one a couple years later. 

Additional bodies came from people who died by suicide or from influenza or other infectious diseases. Some, like Thomas McCormick, died from an overdose of morphine in the county jail.

Then there was William Ryan, a farmer, who had suffered from chronic alcoholism and was found dead in bed. He had no family, but he did have a watch and chain and a horse and buggy. CU got those items, too.

In 1924, citing a lack of appropriate medical facilities, CU's medical school moved to Denver. In 2008, the school transformed itself again with a move to the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

A year before the school left Boulder, Giffin died of a stroke at age 72. At the time, he was the oldest physician in Boulder. He, too, was buried in Columbia Cemetery—intact and in his own grave with family members. But while Giffin is resting is peace, the other bodies in Columbia Cemetery are resting in pieces.

Top image: Luman M. Giffin (center) and his class in the CU Medical School during the late 1890s. (Photo: courtesy Carnegie Library for Local History, Boulder)

Silvia Pettem is a CU Boulder alum (1969) and is the author of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon. This column originally appeared in the Daily Camera. She can be reached at .

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CU Boulder alum and regent emeritus Peter Steinhauer shares Vietnam experiences with students, to be featured in the in-progress documentary Welcome Home Daddy

Peter Steinhauer joined the U.S. Navy because that’s what young men of his generation did.

“I was brought up to finish high school, go to college, join a fraternity, get married, spend two years in the military, then work the rest of my life,” he explains. “Of everybody I went to high school with in Golden, most of the boys went in (the military).”

So, after graduating the University of Colorado Boulder in 1958—where he met his wife, Juli, a voice major—he attended dental school in Missouri, then completed a face and jaw surgical residency, finishing in 1965. And then he joined the Navy.

Peter Steinhauer (left) and Steven Dike (right) after Steinhauer's presentation during the Oct. 18 class of The Vietnam Wars, which Dike teaches.

He had two young daughters and a son on the way, and he learned two weeks after being stationed at Camp Pendleton that he’d be shipping to Vietnam, where he served from 1966-67.

“How many of your grandparents served in Vietnam?” Steinhauer asks the students seated in desks rimming the perimeter of the classroom, and several raise their hands. Steinhauer has given this presentation to this class, The Vietnam Wars, for enough years that it’s now the grandchildren of his fellow veterans with whom he shares his experiences of war.

Even though Steinhauer had given the presentation before, the Oct. 18 session of The Vietnam Wars, for students in the Honors Residential Academic Program (HRAP), was different: It was filmed as part of the in-progress documentary , which chronicles Steinhauer’s experiences during and after the war and his deep love for the country and people of Vietnam.

“Pete told me once that he dreams about Vietnam all the time, but they’re not nightmares,” says Steven Dike, associate director of the HRAP and assistant teaching professor of history, who teaches The Vietnam Wars. “He’s spent his life as a healer and an educator, and I think one of the values (for students) is hearing how his experiences in the war informed his life after it.”

‘An old guy there’

Steinhauer, a retired oral surgeon and CU regent emeritus, served a yearlong tour with the 3rd Marine Division, 3rd Medical Battalion in Da Nang, Vietnam. Lt. Cmdr. Steinhauer was a buzz-cut 30-year-old—“an old guy there,” he tells the students—with a Kodak Instamatic camera.

He provided dental care and oral surgery to U.S. servicemen and servicewomen as well as Vietnamese people, and he took pictures—of the rice paddies and jungles, of the people he met, of the nameless details of daily life that were like nothing he’d experienced before.

“This was the crapper,” Steinhauer tells the students, explaining a photo showing a square, metal-sided building with a flat, angled roof. “There were four seats in there and no dividers, so you were just sitting with the guy next to you.”

When the electricity went out, he and his colleagues worked outside. When helicopters came in with the wounded, it was all hands on deck.

Left image: Pvt. Raymond Escalera holds the since-deactivated grenade that Peter Steinhauer (to Escalera's left) removed live from his neck, in a photo that made the front page of The Seattle Times; right image: Peter and Juli Steinhauer (on right) visit Raymond Escalera (white shirt) and his wife in California.

“They’d be brought off the helicopter and taken to the triage area,” Steinhauer says, the photo at the front of the classroom showing the organized chaos of it. “A lot of life-and-death decisions were made there, catheters and IVs were started there. The triage area is a wonderful part of military medicine.”

Steinhauer also documented the casualties, whose starkness the intervening years have done nothing to dim. One of his responsibilities was performing dental identification of bodies, “one of the hardest things I did,” he says.

Then there was Dec. 21, 1966: “A guy came in—it was pouring rain, and we had mass casualties—and he came in with trouble breathing,” Steinhauer recalls. “We discovered he had an unexploded M79 rifle grenade in his neck. We got it out, but a corpsman said, ‘Doc, you better be careful with that, it can go boom.’”

Not only did Marine Pvt. Raymond Escalera survive a live grenade in his neck, but about 12 years ago Steinhauer tracked him down and visited him at his home in Pico Rivera, California. “We call four or five times a year now,” Steinhauer says.

Building relationships

Steinhauer and his colleagues also treated Vietnamese civilians. “One of the most fun parts of my year there was being able to perform 60 or 70 cleft lip surgeries,” Steinhauer tells the students, showing before and after photos.

Peter Steinhauer (left) and medical colleagues in Vietnam, with whom he worked during many of his 26 visits to Vietnam since the end of the war.

He then shows them a photo of the so-called “McNamara Line” between North and South Vietnam—a defoliated slash of brown and gray that looks like a wound that will never heal.

Healing, however, has happened, and continues to. “I was blessed by the ability to go back to a place where so many horrible things happened during the war and make something beautiful of it,” Steinhauer says.

In the years since he returned from war—and met his almost-one-year-old son for the first time—Steinhauer has gone back to Vietnam more than two dozen times. Acknowledging that his experience is not all veterans’ experience, he says he has been blessed to learn about Vietnam as a country and not just a war.

“How veterans dealt with the war, how they’re still coming to terms with it as we’re getting further away from it, are really important issues,” says Mark Gould, director and a producer of Welcome Home Daddy. “It’s not just a war that we quote-unquote lost, but it was the most confusing war the United States has ever fought. We never had closure, but that didn’t stop Dr. Steinhauer from reaching out. Our tagline is ‘Governments wage war, people make peace,’ and that’s what he stands for.”

The idea for the documentary originated with Steinhauer’s daughter, Terrianne, who grew up not only hearing his stories but visiting the country with him and her mom. She and Gould served in the CalArts alumni association together, and several years ago she pitched him the idea for Welcome Home Daddy, which they are making in partnership with producer Rick Hocutt.

Peter Steinhauer with his children upon his return home after serving in the Vietnam War; the "Welcome home daddy" message inspired the title of the documentary currently being made about Steinhauer's experiences during and after the war.

The documentary will weave Steinhauer’s stories with those of other veterans and highlight the relationships that Steinhauer has built over decades—through partnering with medical professionals in Vietnam and volunteering his services there, through supporting Vietnamese students who study in the United States, through facilitating education and in-person visits between U.S. and Vietnamese doctors and nurses. At the same time, Juli Steinhauer has grown relationships with musicians and other artists in Vietnam. Both parents passed a love for Vietnam to their children.

An ugly war, a beautiful country

The stories of Vietnam could fill volumes. In fact, Steinhauer attended a 10-week course called Tell Your Story: A Writing Workshop for Those Who Have Served in the Military in 2008—offered through the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and the Division of Continuing Education—and wrote Remembering Vietnam 1966-67, a collection of his memories and photographs of the war that he published privately and gives to family, friends and colleagues.

About 10 years ago, Steinhauer asked to audit The Vietnam Wars—“wars” is plural because “we can’t understand the American war without understanding the French war,” Dike explains—in what was only the second time Dike had taught it.

“So, I was a little nervous,” Dike remembers with a laugh, “but he comes in and is just the nicest guy in the world. I asked if he’d be interested in sharing his experiences, and he’s given his presentation during the semester every class since.”

In the Oct. 18 class, Steinhauer shares stories of bamboo vipers in the dental clinic, of perforating vs. penetrating wounds, of meeting baseball legends Brooks Robinson and Stan Musial when they visited the troops, of a since-faded Vietnamese tradition of women dyeing their teeth black as a symbol of beauty.

“It was an ugly war, but it’s a beautiful country,” Steinhauer says. “Just a beautiful country.”

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CU Boulder historian serving second term in position, focusing on an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of Colorado’s history

William Wei, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of history and faculty affliate in the Center for Asian Studies, has been named state historian by History Colorado, his second time receiving the honor.

William Wei, CU Boulder professor of history and Colorado state historian, is the author of Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State.

Wei was one of the five founders of History Colorado’s State Historian’s Council, which “reaches across the state to aid in the interpretation of the history of Colorado and the West, providing opportunities to expand the understanding of the historical perspectives, cultures and places of Colorado.”

The State Historian’s Council was founded in 2018 and comprises five interdisciplinary scholars who provide complementary perspectives and rotate the state historian position every year on Aug.1, Colorado Day. Wei’s first term as state historian was from 2019-2020.           

"It is a great honor to be appointed the Colorado state historian again,” Wei says. “I remain committed to ensuring that Coloradans receive an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of the Centennial State's history. This commitment naturally extends to Colorado's marginalized communities, whose stories have often been neglected, overlooked and forgotten.”

Wei was named the 2022 Asian American Hero of Colorado and is the author of Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State. He also was a founding editor-in-chief of History Colorado’s and a lead advisor for the organization’s .

“William brings a broad global perspective alongside an encyclopedic interest in Colorado to the role of State Historian,” notes Jason Hanson, chief creative officer and director of interpretation and research at History Colorado, in announcing Wei’s second term. “He is passionate about how historical perspective can help us see the present more clearly and in ways that can truly improve people’s lives. I am excited for him to share his knowledge and passion with the people of Colorado as the state historian once again.”

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CU Boulder’s Paul S. Sutter looks back on the history of the Wilderness Act as it approaches its diamond jubilee

Passage of the was anything but a foregone conclusion.

First introduced in Congress in 1956, the “often-sidetracked Wilderness Bill,” as New York Times writer William M. Blair , underwent 65 revisions before finally surviving the House and the Senate and being signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Sept. 3, 1964.

“It was an eight- or nine-year period,” says Paul S. Sutter, professor of environmental history at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of : How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. “There are not too many pieces of legislation with such a lengthy history.”

Paul S. Sutter, a professor of environmental history in the CU Boulder Department of History, notes that understanding the 60-year history of the Wilderness Act requires understanding what wilderness is.

A lengthy history and a rocky one, with as many ups and downs, peaks and valleys as the terrain the Wilderness Act protects. But to understand that history, says Sutter, one must first understand what wilderness is.

The modern wilderness idea

The Wilderness Act defines “wilderness” as follows:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

That peculiar word, “untrammeled,” is crucial, says Sutter. “A lot of people assume it means ‘untrampled,’ but it doesn’t.”

To “trammel” something, Sutter explains, is to hinder or restrict its freedom of action. “So to trammel wild nature is effectively to harness it to human economic forces and activities.”

This desire to safeguard large stretches of land against such forces led to what Sutter calls the modern wilderness idea, or “the idea that we ought to be protecting lands from modern development as much as possible.”

That means, among other things, no roads. Roads are the oil to wilderness’s water.

“[T]here is no use fooling ourselves,” , whose photography captured the ethos of the modern wilderness idea and posthumously earned him a in his name, “that nature with a slick highway running through it is any longer wild.”

It’s this roadlessness, along with prohibitions against motorization and mechanization, that distinguishes wilderness areas from other nationally protected lands, says Sutter.

“A wilderness area doesn’t have visitor centers, doesn’t have bathrooms, doesn’t have the amenities we come to expect when we go to somewhere like Yellowstone or Yosemite. You have to go into a wilderness area either carrying everything you need or living off the land.”  

Howard Zahniser, Washington wizard

Once it became law, the Wilderness Act immediately protected just over 9 million acres and established the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS), which consists of congressionally designated wilderness areas within the lands controlled by the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Now, six decades later, the Act protects 111 million acres (about 173,000 square miles), a marked increase made possible, Sutter says, by mechanisms within the act itself that allow Congress to add more wilderness to the NWPS over time.

A sign at the boundary of Colorado's Collegiate Peaks Wilderness. (Photo: Tyler Lahti/Wikicommons) 

The man behind those mechanisms was , former executive director of The Wilderness Society, the Wilderness Act’s primary author and someone who, according to Sutter, didn’t quite fit the environmental-activist mold.

“When you look at the pantheon of famous wilderness activists in American history—from John Muir and Henry David Thoreau to Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall and Olaus and Margaret Murie—they tended to be these rugged outdoor people. Many of them were trained foresters or avid hikers. Zahniser was different.”

Though Zahniser—who wore a specially tailored overcoat with four large inside pockets for carrying books, Wilderness Act propaganda and Wilderness Society membership information—felt comfortable in the outdoors, his real strength was his political savvy, Sutter claims.

“He was this Beltway insider who was a mastermind at pulling together support for this bill.”

And pull together support he did, from both sides of the aisle.

“One of the most fascinating things about the Wilderness Act, and really all of the major environmental legislation that came after it—the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, all of the hugely important environmental legislative achievements of that era—is that they were overwhelmingly bipartisan.”  

Not so anymore, Sutter says, noting that environmental politics now is far more polarized and partisan than it was in Zahniser’s day.

“When I teach this to my students, that’s one of the things I really harp on—whether there’s any way we can reclaim some of that bipartisanship.”

Loving nature to death

The Wilderness Act has met its share of resistance over the years. One major source was the of the 1970s and 1980s.   

The Sagebrush Rebellion, says Sutter, sought to transfer ownership of western federal lands to the states. “A lot of people in the West had come to rely on public lands for their well-being and saw the Wilderness Act as a major threat.”

Though it eventually fizzled out after gaining little traction in Washington, D.C., the Rebellion did manage to garner a fair amount of support, most notably from Ronald Reagan, who during a July 1980 campaign speech in Salt Lake City, “I happen to be one who cheers and supports the ‘Sagebrush Rebellion.’ Count me in as a rebel.”

Another challenge that has continuously dogged wilderness activists is how to strike a balance between making wilderness accessible to as many people as possible without simultaneously undermining its wilderness qualities.  

“Back in the early years of wilderness advocacy, one of the frequent critiques of wilderness was that it was elitist, that it was a way of preserving nature for people who wanted to access it in a certain way,” says Sutter.

 

A wilderness area doesn’t have visitor centers, doesn’t have bathrooms, doesn’t have the amenities we come to expect when we go to somewhere like Yellowstone or Yosemite. You have to go into a wilderness area either carrying everything you need or living off the land.”  

 

“So critics of wilderness would say, ‘Well, if we build a road into a wilderness area, far more people are going to be able to see it and experience it.’ And the wilderness advocates would say, ‘But if you build a road into it, it’s not wilderness anymore.’”

This tension between preservation and accessibility—between loving nature and loving it to death—has always been central to discussions about wilderness, says Sutter. And it’s a tension he predicts won’t slacken any time soon. Currently, for example, there are debates about whether fixed rock-climbing anchors ought to be allowed in wilderness areas or whether areas long used by mountain bikers ought to be added to the NWPS, as the Wilderness Act prohibits any form of mechanized or motorized transport.

“We think of wilderness politics as being about environmental preservation and recreation versus mining, timber-cutting, grazing. But there are conflicts within the recreational community that have always demanded subtler forms of preservation. The modern wilderness idea emerged from such conflicts.”

And so, 60 years on, the work of the Wilderness Act continues, adapting to the demands of the present moment yet remaining rooted in the belief that wilderness areas provide an essential, if intangible, service—a service perhaps best articulated by none other than Zahniser himself, who died four months before the bill he’d spent the better part of nine years defending graduated into law.

“[W]e have a profound, a fundamental need for areas of wilderness,” Zahniser , “a need that is not only recreational and spiritual but also educational and scientific, and withal essential to a true understanding of ourselves, our culture, our own nature, and our place in all nature.”

Top image: the Uncompahgre Wilderness in the north-central San Juan Mountains of Western Colorado (Photo: )

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CU Boulder political science professor Kenneth Bickers reflects on what made the ex-president’s decision to step down following the Watergate scandal a watershed moment in American history and how it has influenced politics today

In a solemn television address 50 years ago this week, on Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon announced he would resign from office—becoming the first American president ever to do so.

It was a stunning turn of events for Nixon, who just two years earlier won his reelection bid by a landslide. However, as details of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C., became public, leading to congressional hearings and impeachment proceedings, Nixon finally bowed to pressure from Congress and the public to leave the White House.

“By taking this action,” Nixon said in an address from the Oval Office, “I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”

Kenneth Bickers, a CU Boulder professor of political science, notes that Richard Nixon's resignation "exposed the kind of deceit and corruption that can reach the highest office in the land."

At the time, Kenneth Bickers was a young teenager spending the summer at his grandparents’ house in Cheyenne. In the days leading up to Nixon’s resignation, Bickers would spend his mornings watching TV broadcasts of the congressional hearings regarding the Watergate break-in, as new damning details became public about the White House’s involvement and its attempts to cover up the affair.

“That was my education in politics. It was what got me interested in what would eventually be a major in political science and later a PhD in political science, and it was the seminal event of my development,” says Bickers, a University of Colorado Boulder Department of Political Science professor since 2003, whose area of focus is American politics and public policy.

With the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, Bickers recently reflected on what he believes made Nixon’s resignation a watershed moment in U.S. history, its lasting impact upon American politics, and offered his thoughts on how things might have gone very differently if Nixon had pursued a different path. His remarks have been lightly edited and condensed.

Question: Can you set the scene prior to Nixon’s election in 1972 and into 1973, as details of the Watergate break-in started to become public?

Bickers: In 1972, Nixon was the incumbent going into that election, and the economy was actually in really good shape. We were certainly mired in the Vietnam War, and there had been a lot of protests in the street, but those had kind of diminished from the high point of 1968 to 1969.

And then the Democrats had a catastrophic convention in 1972, with the naming of a Democratic vice-presidential choice, (Thomas Eagleton), who was subsequently replaced. It was one of the most poorly managed conventions since the 1920s, and so Nixon benefited from the ineptitude of the Democrats in 1972.

But Nixon also had a lot of assets going into that year, which was part of what made the whole Watergate break-in totally inscrutable. I mean, it should have been clear to anybody that he was going to win in a huge way. Nobody could have foreseen the magnitude at the time, but it certainly looked like he was going to win.

So why the third-rate burglary of the DNC in the Watergate building? And then why cover it up? None of that made any sense.

Question: Today, some may see Nixon’s resignation as inevitable, but a poll taken in 1973 found only 25 percent thought he did anything wrong that would reach the level where he should be removed. So, he still enjoyed widespread support at the time?

Bickers: That’s true. He still enjoyed wide support, and I think there was disbelief at the time that things could be as bad as the allegations suggested.

And I think if he’d been honest about how stupid that burglary was, if he had simply fessed up and taken his lumps at the time, none of that would have happened (the congressional investigations ultimately leading to his resignation).

This is where we learned that the cover-up is often worse than the crime, because it was the cover-up that was at the heart of the allegations against Nixon. He didn’t break into the Watergate; it was this team of former CIA operatives that did that, or it included some former CIA operatives. Whether it was paid for by his campaign or not, obviously a presidential candidate isn’t in charge of the books for a multimillion-dollar campaign operation.

So, it was the cover-up. And then the thing that ultimately sealed the deal was the Oval Office tapes with the famous missing section that had somehow inadvertently been erased.

Remember, at the time trust was still very high of our national leaders. And remember, huge majorities had voted for him just before that in the 1972 election—it was the second-largest victory in American history at that point. So, there were a lot of people who had supported him. And it takes a lot to move people away from their prior commitments, their prior beliefs and their prior expectations.

Question: Is it fair to call Nixon’s resignation a watershed moment in American political history? If so, what makes it so?

Bickers: It certainly was watershed, because he was the first president and the only president to resign. We’d never experienced that before.

The other thing is that it’s a watershed event because it exposed the kind of deceit and corruption that can reach the highest office in the land—and it changed the way people view politicians.

Confidence in the national government—trust in the institutions of our national government, the presidency, Congress, and so forth—absolutely craters starting in about 1973 and 1974, and it has never recovered. It has come back some, but never to the levels that existed when Nixon was first elected president, or when he was reelected president.

That loss of confidence in public officials has been a permanent change, and I don’t think it was just Watergate. The shifting (and in many cases untrue) stories about the Vietnam conflict, the protests and riots over civil rights, and the assassinations in 1968 of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.—all of those play into the absolute loss of faith in our leaders.

Here we are five decades later, and that’s still true. People are much less trusting of national leaders than was routinely the case before Nixon’s resignation. We are a much more jaundiced people than we were in the pre-Watergate era.

Question: In the 1970s, Republican and Democratic lawmakers came together in a bipartisan way on challenging issues, including pushing for Nixon’s ouster once details of the Watergate break-in came to light. Do you think it’s possible for Democrats and Republicans to work together that way today?

Bickers: We’re living in one of the most polarized periods in American history. We’ve had periods that were as polarized, but you’d have to go back a long way to find that, as in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and obviously the Civil War itself.

Maybe unusually, in the period coming out of World War II—when America was clearly on the top in the world in terms of its economic and military and political powers—while there were obviously differences between Republicans and Democrats, those differences were smaller, and there were more places where they could agree. It was Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. It was under Nixon that the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were passed, with Democratic support.

That’s gone. It’s hard to imagine anything big happening in a bipartisan way today.

Richard Nixon leaving the White House grounds in Marine One on Aug. 9, 1974. (Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Question: In his resignation announcement, Nixon said he hoped his action would hasten the healing process in the country. Do you believe it did that?

Bickers: Probably. We don’t get to replay history with a change where Nixon doesn’t resign and compare what did happen to what might have happened, but probably it did. And I think Vice President Gerald Ford showed quite a lot of courage in pardoning him. That may well have cost Ford the opportunity to be elected in 1976.

There were a lot of people—particularly on the Democratic side—who wanted to see Nixon criminally charged and potentially sent to prison, and that was short-circuited by the pardon.

But the pardon probably did help lower the temperature some, because I think to watch a former president tried in court for crimes and then potentially sent to prison, that inflames the supporters of that party and unites them in a way that might otherwise not happen.

Question: Any thoughts as to how Nixon would be remembered today, had it not been for Watergate?

Bickers: There were a lot of other things happening after Nixon’s reelection in 1972. The economy began to start showing signs of problems that were later going to swamp the Carter administration in the late 1970s. So, wage and price controls were instituted by Nixon after his reelection to try to bring down inflation. The post-World War II legacy of American manufacturing that was in Nixon’s period as president had turned and started going south—and permanently so at that point.

In the war in Vietnam, we were not getting out in a way that looked like it was going to be a success. We were going to have to abandon South Vietnam in some way, which of course did happen, but not until after Ford was president.

All of that was happening, and so that would have been part of his legacy. Had he finished the second term successfully, those would have been marks against him. But a lot of presidents have had recessions. A lot of presidents have had economic issues. Unfortunately, a lot of presidents have had foreign policy failures.

Nixon would have had all of those things on his record, but were it not for Watergate, he would have finished out his term of office and been viewed as a president of two consequential terms. That’s not how we remember him today.

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Thomas Andrews, University of Colorado Boulder professor of history, has been appointed faculty director of the Center of the American West. His appointment became effective in July.

Thomas Andrews

Andrews’ research and teaching focus on western American, environmental, animal, Indigenous and 19th- and 20th-century U.S. history. He is the recipient a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health Grant for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award and other fellowships. 

He is the author of Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, which won six awards, including a Bancroft Prize; Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies; and a book in progress about the Great Horse Flu of 1872-73. 

Andrews was born and reared in Boulder and graduated from Fairview High School in 1990 before earning his BA at Yale and his MA and PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before joining the CU Boulder Department of History in 2011, he taught at CU Denver. 

Andrews is one of only a handful of second-generation faculty members at CU Boulder. His mother, Martha Andrews, was a research librarian at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), and his father, John T. Andrews, joined INSTAAR and the Department of Geological Sciences in 1968 and is an emeritus faculty member.

“Professor Andrews is an exceedingly skilled and respected historian who has helped broaden and deepen our understanding of the history of the American West,” said Daryl Maeda, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

“The Center of the American West makes critical contributions to national thought and discourse about the American West, and Professor Andrews is particularly well suited to stand at its helm.”

The Center of the American West is a nationally recognized hub for illuminating the role of the western United States in regional, national and global issues, describing its mission as bringing people together to “explore the ongoing complexities of and challenges facing the western United States through education, research, programs and projects.”

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In advance of Tuesday’s Major League Baseball All-Star game, CU Boulder history professor Martin Babicz offers thoughts on why some fans remain loyal to baseball’s perennial losers

Every season, one Major League Baseball team earns champion success in the World Series while the rest place behind. And within that second group are a few teams that are the absolute stinkers of the league.

Think the Colorado Rockies in 2023, with just 59 wins versus 109 losses—and with a record of not scoring better than fourth place in their division for five years in a row.

Why do some fans stay loyal to such losers?

Martin Babicz, a CU Boulder associate teaching professor of history, co-wrote the 2017 book National Pastime: U.S. History Through Baseball.

Martin Babicz, a University of Colorado Boulder associate teaching professor of history, has some ideas. An instructor in the Department of History, the Stories and Societies RAP (Residential Academic Program), the Creative Minds RAP and the CMCI RAP, Babicz teaches a course called America Through Baseball, which examines American history since the Civil War, exploring how the social, cultural, economic and political forces shaping America were reflected in the national pastime. He’s also the co-author of the 2017 book .

Growing up in New England in the 1960s and 1970s, Babicz had plenty of chances to see Boston Red Sox and New York Mets fans lament their losing baseball teams on an almost-yearly basis. It’s given him insights on why fans stay loyal to losing teams, what factors can cause fans to lose faith in their teams and what he sees as the value of having a team to root for—no matter how bad they are, which he discussed with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine.

Question: In sports, Americans generally love winning teams. Why do you think some people stay loyal to perennial losers?

Babicz: That’s a good question, and I’ve thought about this on and off for years.

Baseball teams—in fact all sports teams—are local institutions. The Broncos, for instance, are a part of the fabric of Denver, just like the Rocky Mountains or Casa Bonita. But it is more than that. Sports teams are also family institutions. They are a part of our DNA, as support for the team is often passed along in a family from one generation to another. And just like a family won’t reject a child who is not as smart or as good looking as his siblings, it also won’t reject a sports team that is not as good as its competitors.

I think the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox might provide an illustration, as they both have very loyal fans. In 1998, both the Cubs and the Red Sox qualified for a wild-card playoff team. The wild card, which at the time was a relatively new thing in baseball, is a playoff berth awarded to a team that did not finish in first place.

Both the Red Sox and the Cubs had reputations for going on a very long losing streak of not winning the World Series, and there was some concern in baseball about what would happen if either of those teams ended up winning the World Series. Would the sport lose some of its luster among those fans? Would the teams lose some of their following?

Well, neither team won it in 1998, but the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, and the Cubs won it in 2016—and it didn’t damage the teams at all. Winning hasn’t hurt their popularity, so it’s not like you have to be a loser to be loved.

But if you look at the history of baseball, there have been baseball teams who did not do so well.

Think about the Washington Senators, the St. Louis Browns, or the Philadelphia Athletics. They went decades and decades with lousy teams and yet baseball remained popular in those cities. …

Disappointed Chicago Cubs fans watch their team lose to the Colorado Rockies during a May 2019 game. (Photo: Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune)

Question: It sounds like if a team has deep roots in a city, that can be a strong factor on whether fans will generally remain faithful?

Babicz: Yes, fans tend to remain faithful to teams that have deep roots in the community. Support for the team—even a losing team—becomes routine, almost ritualistic.

Take opening day, for instance. Some fans develop habits of skipping work or school and attending opening day every year, no matter how good or bad the local team is. And for many fans, tuning in the game on the radio is something they do whenever they are doing yardwork or work around the house, and they’ll continue to tune in, even if the team is lousy. And, of course, when an opportunity presents itself to attend a game, they’ll take it, even if they think their team won’t win.

And as I said, support for a sports team is often passed from parent to child. But if there wasn’t a team when your father and mother grew up, then there’s nothing to pass to you. …

If you look at football, Denver got a football team in 1960, and Miami got a football team in 1966. In those two markets, football had several decades to get established and to build a fan base before they were competing (for fans’ attention) against baseball teams. So, I wonder, had Denver gotten a baseball team in the early 1960s, would that team be as popular in the media as the Broncos are?

It really surprises me that almost every night it’s the Broncos who lead the sports news—even when it’s not football season. And it’s not like that in some other markets; it’s certainly not like that back east. Football is popular there, but the other sports get their day as well.

Question: Which professional baseball team has the worst record? Were they able to eventually turn things around?

Babicz: The worst team ever was the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. They won 20 games all year, but that was in the 1890s. The National League had a monopoly on teams and there were 12 teams in total. After that season was over, the National League decided to cut back to eight teams—and one of the four teams they eliminated was the Cleveland Spiders. So, they never had the opportunity to recover.

 

Baseball teams—in fact all sports teams—are local institutions. The Broncos, for instance, are a part of the fabric of Denver, just like the Rocky Mountains or Casa Bonita. But it is more than that. Sports teams are also family institutions. They are a part of our DNA, as support for the team is often passed along in a family from one generation to another.”

 

Question Are there any corollaries between winning and losing teams and the impact upon game attendance?

Babicz: Some interesting numbers can be seen with the New York Mets. New York City lost two teams in 1958, when the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers moved to California. And so the Yankees were left to dominate New York baseball until the Mets were created in 1962.

The first thing that just amazes me, and it doesn’t make any sense, is that if you look at the attendance of the Yankees in 1957, they drew 1.5 million people. The following year, they drew 1.4 million. Why would the Yankee attendance go down in 1958, if they no longer have competition? And the Yankees won the World Series in 1958, so it’s not like they were no longer a good team.

So, that’s the first thing that surprises me. But the second thing that surprises me is what happened when the Mets came to New York in 1962. That first year, they were absolutely terrible, but they drew 922,000 fans. But in 1963, the Mets, who were still a bad team, drew over a million people—and the attendance at Yankee stadium fell to 1.3 million, even though the Yankees were still pennant winners.

And in 1964, when the Mets were still a last-place team, they drew 1.7 million fans while the Yankees—who won the American League pennant that year—only drew 1.3 million fans. So, this last-place team is drawing 400,000 more fans than the American League pennant winners. And by 1969, when the Mets finally won the World Series, the Yankees drew just over a million fans, and the Mets drew 2 million fans.

I find those numbers interesting in that there’s something else going on in addition to not having competition or just being a winning team. … My thought is that baseball fans in New York, at least some of them, felt betrayed when they lost the Giants and Dodgers, and then they rallied to the Mets, even though they were bad for so many years.

Colorado Rockies fans watch the team lose to the Arizona Diamondbacks in a August 2023 game. (Photo: Hugh Carey/The Colorado Sun)

Question: Is there any evidence to suggest fans will stop being loyal to their losing team at some point?

Babicz: Well, the example of that is in the San Francisco Bay area right now, where the Oakland Athletics are leaving Oakland after the end of the season. Last year, the Athletics were the only major league team to draw fewer than a million fans; I believe there were about 800,000 people who went to an A’s game last year.

Now, in the Bay area, they already have the Giants, so there is another team there. But there is also frustration by many Oakland fans, who blame the team owner for not trying in good faith to stay in Oakland. So, you have to consider how much that has to do with the decline of attendance.

The other city that we saw lose a lot of fans was in Montreal, and that can almost completely be traced to the 1994-95 baseball strike that canceled the World Series. The Expos had the best record in baseball at the time and a strong fan base.

Many fans really expected Montreal to make it to the World Series, and perhaps even win it, but it was all scratched when the strike took place and the World Series was canceled. A lot of Expos fans felt betrayed, and they did not return to the game the following season. After a few seasons, Expo fans were still no longer supporting their team.

Major League Baseball later transferred the Montreal Expos to Washington, D.C., where they became the Washington Nationals.

So, it wasn’t so much having a losing team as it was this sense of betrayal. And I think there’s some of that in Oakland as well. That may be a bigger factor on (fan loyalty) than having a winning or losing team.

Question: Some teams were losers for years—even decades—and then eventually turned things around. Does that mean Rockies fans should keep the faith, or is that asking too much?

Babicz: I’ve thought about that since I moved here from the East Coast. So, the Rockies aren’t in the playoffs. I’d say, ‘Be excited that you have a baseball team and go to the games.’

Colorado Rockies pitcher Kyle Freeland lies on the field after an RBI single during a game against the Houston Astros in July 2023. (Photo: Kevin M. Cox/AP)

In the first 68 years of the 20th century, only one team in each league qualified for post-season play, and from 1969 to 1993, only two teams in each league qualified for post-season play. Baseball is about a lot more than just making the playoffs.

I think back to being a kid, remembering those Red Sox fans who would keep going to Fenway Park year after year even though the team hadn’t won the World Series since 1918. The other thing I think about is, although I grew up in southern New England, I was born in upstate New York, and one of the cities that competed with Denver to get a Major League Baseball team was Buffalo.

When MLB announced the Rockies and the Marlins as the expansion teams, Buffalo didn’t get a team. In fact, other than during the pandemic, when the Toronto Blue Jays played in Buffalo—because Canada wasn’t admitting people from the U.S. into Canada—Buffalo hasn’t had a Major League Baseball team in over a hundred years. I’m sure fans in upstate New York would love to have a baseball team—even if it was a losing team.

Now, you may think, ‘The Rockies are a terrible team.’ True. But at least there’s a team. Those fans in Buffalo don’t even have a major league team to root for.

Just because your team doesn’t make the playoffs is no reason to give up turning out to support your team. With playoff berths, there’s always a chance … next year.

Top image: Rockies fans react to a play during a game between the Colorado Rockies and the Arizona Diamondbacks at Coors Field on Aug. 16, 2023.(Photo: Grace Smith/The Denver Post)

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CU Boulder scholar Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders reflects on what has and hasn’t changed since 1964

Over a five-year span between 1865 and 1870, following the end of the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were ratified to end slavery (), make formerly enslaved people U.S. citizens () and give all men the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” ().

In the decades that followed, however, and despite provision that “the Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation,” various states and municipalities passed “Jim Crow” laws, abused poll taxes and literacy tests to limit voting and condoned racially motivated violence to enforce segregation and disenfranchise African Americans.

But on July 2, 1964, in the midst of a civil rights movement that had been growing in voice and numbers for many years, President Lyndon Johnson signed the (CRA) into law. This act integrated public schools and facilities; prohibited discrimination based on race, sex, color, religion and national origin in public places and in hiring and employment; and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, a CU Boulder assistant professor of African American and U.S. history, notes that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "shows what a major legislative change can accomplish, but beyond that, what else happens? The activism continues.”

Sixty years later, the Civil Rights Act is still considered a landmark of U.S. legislation, but does it mean today what it did in 1964?    

“Similar to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the CRA is something we almost take for granted as something that has existed for a good chunk of most people’s lifetimes,” says Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, an assistant professor of African American and U.S. history in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of History. “Everything from Brown v. Board on—the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins, all these things were leading to this Civil Rights Act.

“I think for civil rights activists, though, it’s a complicated story. A lot of the actual issues that lead to material conditions being different for Black people still have not changed enough. We haven’t closed the racial wealth gap, there’s still structural racism in policing, housing and employment. As violent as the moments at lunch counter sit-ins were, in a way the harder thing is saying, ‘Black people should be able to live in this neighborhood’ or ‘Black and white kids should be going to the same schools’ or ‘Black people are experiencing discrimination at these jobs and people in positions of power are keeping them away.’ People now are being told it’s either unfixable or it’s not a problem, and this is where we’re at 60 years later.”

Protecting civil rights

For almost 100 years following the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and despite three constitutional amendments that ostensibly ensured equal rights and legal protections for African Americans, most experienced anything but—and not just in the South, but throughout the United States. In in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court even ruled that segregation didn’t violate the 14^th Amendment.

So, it wasn’t just a culmination of big events that occasionally garnered media attention—Ku Klux Klan marches, the Tulsa and Rosewood massacres, the murder of Emmett Till—but the daily experiences of “redlined” neighborhoods, “sundown” towns, denial of employment, wage inequity, separate entrances and a hundred other inequalities and injustices that germinated the civil rights movement.

Residents of Montgomery, Alabama, walk to work during the 381-day bus boycott that began in December 1955. (Photo: Don Cravens/LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

“One of the things I always show my students about the March on Washington is what people were actually asking for, and that the desire for jobs and equal employment were such a huge part of why the march occurred,” Lawrence-Sanders explains. “We get caught up in MLK’s famous speech about integration, but one of the demands of the march was an end to police brutality and police violence, which is something they wanted in the Civil Rights Act that didn’t make it in there.”

As the civil rights movement increasingly gained footing and voice, federal officials were increasingly called on to respond. In the , Congress established the of the Department of Justice as well as the “to provide means of further securing and protecting the civil rights of persons within the jurisdiction of the United States.”

When John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he initially postponed supporting anti-discrimination measures, but soon couldn’t ignore the state-sanctioned violence being perpetrated against civil rights activists and protesters throughout the country. In June 1963, Kennedy proposed broad civil rights legislation, that “this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson continued pursuing civil rights legislation. After a 75-day filibuster, the Senate voted 73-27 in favor of the bill and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law July 2.

‘The activism continues’

“Now we tend to forget that this was not the end of the movement,” Lawrence-Sanders says. “A lot of further legislation followed. We were still seeing violent desegregation and busing well into the ‘70s.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom Aug. 28, 1963. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Housing discrimination, addressed in the , was another big issue—and remains one today, Lawrence-Sanders says. “We still deal with housing segregation and discrimination, and it’s often treated as the exception instead of structural racism, which has become a boogeyman term. The act in ‘68 had provisions about how renting and selling and financing a house can’t be discriminatory based on race or sex, and people violate that constantly. There was last month about a woman trying to buy a condo and the seller backed out because she’s Black.

“The frustrating thing about this is that Black people have always suspected that these incidences of racism happen and been called crazy or paranoid, and when these articles appear, Black folks are saying, ‘No, we’ve proven it, not just with the knowledge of how we’ve been treated over time, but it’s finally been exposed by data.’ When I was living in New York City, there were undercover investigations that discovered that taxis don’t stop for Black people, rental apartments don’t rent to Black people at same rate as white people, real estate agents are steering Black people to certain places and steering white people away.”

An important legacy of the CRA is that it established enforcement mechanisms for addressing discrimination, but it stopped short of addressing all the ways structural racism exists in society, Lawrence-Sanders says. It also often gets caught in selective historical memory.

“I think that’s why people tend freeze Martin Luther King in 1963 and the March on Washington,” she says. “Because after the CRA passed, activists were asking for things that went too far for the government. Collectively, we tend to have no use for activists when they demand more and say, ‘That wasn’t enough, we want more, we want to go further.’ The CRA shows what a major legislative change can accomplish, but beyond that, what else happens? The activism continues.”

Top image: President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. (Photo: Cecil Stoughton/Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum)

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