It wasn’t that long ago that Kansas legislator Virgil Peck said undocumented immigrants should be shot from planes. That may be an extreme view, at least so publicly expressed by someone so prominent, but almost every day someone on talk radio says something nearly as offensive.
This week’s legislative kick-off, with African-American men leading both the Colorado Senate and House of Representatives, is historic indeed, and many have highlighted the import of the moment. After all, it was less than a century ago that the Ku Klux Klan dominated much of Colorado politics, even claiming then-Gov. Clarence Morley a member. But it would be wrong, as has been suggested in some news reports, to claim that the only targets of the Klan of the early-to-mid 1920s in Colorado were people of color. Rather, as historians have detailed, the primary motivation of the Klan in Colorado was to promote “100 percent Americanism” — and that meant also targeting Jews and Roman Catholic immigrants.
James Moore, who lives in Colorado Springs, fought for years to rectify his brother’s death. In 1964, Charles Moore and a friend, both 19-year-old black males, were found dead in the Mississippi River. Decades later, James Moore pieced together a painstaking narrative that named James Ford Seale, a Ku Klux Klan member, responsible for the disappearance and ultimate death of his brother.
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