Enlightened Free Thinking Nubian Kings And Queens

Lucile Berkeley Buchanan-Jones was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Colorado.  Buchanan was born on June 13, 1884, on the second floor of the family’s mule and horse barn in the town of Barnum, southwest of Denver, Colorado.  She was the daughter of Sarah Lavinia and James Fenton Buchanan, emancipated slaves from adjoining plantations in northern Virginia. Sarah and James Buchanan were married in 1872.  Within ten years  of their marriage the couple, and their four Virginia-born children, migrated to Colorado. When the Buchanans arrived in Colorado in 1882, Lucile’s mother, Sarah, bought five lots of land in an unincorporated area outside the Denver city limits from P.T. Barnum of the Barnum and Bailey Circus.  The Buchanans were one of three black families in this predominately first-generation European immigrant community. In 1903, 19-year-old Lucile enrolled in the two-year teacher certification program at the Colorado...

The Colfax Massacre occurred on April 13, 1873. The battle-turned-massacre took place in the small town of Colfax, Louisiana as a clash between blacks and whites. Three whites and an estimated 150 blacks died in the conflict. The massacre took place against the backdrop of racial tensions following the hotly contested Louisiana governor's race of 1872.  While the Republicans narrowly won the contest and retained control of the state, white Democrats, angry over the defeat, vowed revenge.  In Colfax Parish (county) as in other areas of the state, they organized a white militia to directly challenge the mostly black state militia under the control of the governor.   Colfax Parish reflected the political and racial divide in Louisiana.  Its 4,600 voters in the 1872 election were split between approximately 2,400 hundred mostly black Republican voters and 2,200 white Democratic voters.  One incident however, touched off the Colfax massacre.  On...