Losing Ground: Colorado’s Minorities

Losing Ground presents a disturbing yet compelling portrait of a state where black and Latino residents are falling further and further behind their white counterparts. That state is Colorado.


I-News journalists analyzed six decades of reports from the U.S. Census Bureau to track the state’s poverty rates, family income, high school and college graduation rates and home ownership. The analysis uncovered surprising trends in racial and ethnic disparities. Minority gains made during the era of the civil rights movement eroded with time.

Social progress from civil rights movement lost

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By some of the most important measures of social progress, black and Latino residents of Colorado have lost ground compared to white residents in the decades since the civil rights movement.

Minority gains made during the 1960s and 1970s have eroded with time, an I-News Network analysis of six decades of demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau found. In other categories, the gaps between whites and minorities have steadily widened since 1960.

Civil rights activists march with political leaders, including Denver mayor Wellington Webb and Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, center, during a parade through Denver marking Martin Luther King Day in 1990. (Photo courtesy The Denver Public Library)

Civil rights activists march with political leaders, including Denver mayor Wellington Webb and Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, center, during a parade through Denver marking Martin Luther King Day in 1990. (Photo courtesy The Denver Public Library)

The analysis focused on family income, poverty rates, high school and college graduation and home ownership. Health data and justice records examined also revealed disparities.

Similar racial and ethnic inequities appear nationwide. But one glaring fact about Colorado is that it went from a state that was by most measures more equitable than the national average in the first decades covered by the analysis to one that is less so now.
According to most experts, racial and ethnic inequality will pose a significant future handicap for a state in which minorities are a rising population. Show more text →

Losing Ground Charts

Latino and black residents of Colorado are falling further behind the state’s white residents in some of the most important measures of social progress. An I-News Network analysis of six decades of U.S. Census data shows that the gaps between the three communities narrowed somewhat during the years surrounding the civil rights movement, but have widened in the decades since.


Civil Rights Era Timeline

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Ann Carnahan Espinola wrote more than 2,000 bylined stories during her two decades at the Pittsburgh Press and Rocky Mountain News. Her many awards include the National Education Writers Association award for distinguished reporting and the Shining Star Award, presented by the Colorado Press Association for the most consistently excellent reporter.

She was part of a News team whose coverage of a fatal wildfire was named as a top-three finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ann was the first reporter in the history of the Rocky Mountain News to be inducted into the Scripps Howard Hall of Fame. At the News, she was named best reporter by her co-workers and won the editor-in-chief’s award for outstanding worker. Her beats included city hall, police, and civil and criminal courts. She also wrote an investigative column as well as a series of stories updating the lives of newsmakers after they faded from the limelight.

Ann is originally from Pennsylvania, but has called Denver home for more than 25 years.


Burt Hubbard is the editorial director of I-News. Burt is well-known in the journalism world for his data analysis skills. His numerous awards include two prestigious Best of The West awards, a national education award for investigative reporting, and Reporter of the Year in Colorado.

He also was a top-10 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting for the Rocky Mountain News and is enshrined in the Scripps Howard Journalism Hall of Fame. Burt has taught computer-assisted reporting and internet research to graduate students for 11 years at the University of Colorado School of Journalism and Mass Communication. For the past three years he has led research symposiums for journalists and citizens throughout Colorado on behalf of the university. Burt recently left the Denver Post to join I-News.


  • Richard Iron Hammer

    How sad it is to see such a trusted and respected
    organization as PBS do a critical and seemingly in-depth piece on disparities
    only to completely ignore the most disparate of populations, the
    “Minority’s Minority”, American Indians.

    In almost every category, this segment of the population
    continues to show the most disparate rates in health, infant mortality,
    poverty, high school and college graduation, and home ownership. And yet, even
    this study has seen fit to marginalize these people right off the page.

    I am made to feel that these people are not considered
    worthy of being counted. It almost seems; that this never was their land; that
    they never existed; that they don’t exist today or; that they do not deserve to
    exist.

    Shameful!

    Still, I suppose it should not be a surprise, being that we
    live in a State where people still celebrate the name of a baby-butchering
    terrorist like Chivington by fixing his name to streets, sites, and various
    other locations, honoring a man who avowed that Colorado Indians, “have to be
    roundly whipped — or completely wiped out”(1).

    (1) http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/chivington.htm

  • Jack Frost

    Why are we not surprised that our regional PBS would step into class/racial problems by advocating
    government solutions to what might very well be natural, unchangeable differences.  Unless children are conceived by two responsible
    and committed-to-each-other adults who will raise those children in an environment that encourages and rewards
    learning and effort,  share with those children the warm, joyful, and uplifting rewards of love and respect, and
    hold before them the challenge to push themselves to their limits of learning and achievment then what we now have is what you get.  As my father used to tell us back in the Great Depression “It’s no disgrace to be poor but it is a disgrace to remain poor.”

    Richard Iron Hammer’s (is he a real American Indian or a Churchill convert?)  comments are interesting but need some in-depth context.  I grew up long ago between the Navajo and Apache Indian Reservations (my grandfather was a small off-reservation trader) in Northern Arizona on what became Route 66.  I often heard tourists comment on our environment after driving through the Navajo Reservation between Grants, New Mexico and Flagstaff, Arizona.  ”How terrible for the US Government  to put those poor Indians out in such non-productive desert land.”   Growing up there I often wondered the same thing.  Later in life I read  a copy of the “TREATY BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA & THE NAVAJO TRIBE OF INDIANS / WITH A RECORD OF THE DISCUSSIONS THAT LED TO ITS SIGNING”  (published by KC Publications, Flagstaff, Az. 1968).  I highly  recommend that every responsible, thoughtful citizen  who is being asked by PBS  to support its interpretations  of  contemporary social, educational, and financial issues  to please read it.  Then I suggest a drive through that Reservation between, for example, Farmington and Shiprock, New Mexico during the growing season and notice the difference in what’s growing on the East side of the Reservation Line and the West side, both of which have the same land and water rights from the San Juan River, but the Navajo farms on the west side were neglected and barren compared to the profit-motivated farmers on the east side.  Another read I suggest are comments  by John Greenway, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado (Boulder) back in 1969, regarding “guilt-ridden, history-distorting paleface.”

       

     

  • jbholston

    This is an awesome piece of work.  Thanks for doing it.  Sharing it everywhere.