Item Description: Two large white foam board panels with "I CANt BReAtH!" spray painted on front. Panels are joined together with black tape. Brown paper remnants attached to top quarter of panels with black tape.
Project Description:
History Colorado launched the Colorado Voices: Community Activism and Protest collecting project in early June 2020 in response to protests against police brutality that occurred in Colorado and throughout the United States. These protests began in response to the death of George Floyd, a Black man, who was killed at the hands of Minneapolis Police on May 25, 2020. The death of Elijah McClain in custody of the Aurora Police Department in 2019 also was an important element in the Colorado protests. Protests occurred in the Civic Center near the Colorado State Capitol in Downtown Denver starting on May 26, 2020 and in Pueblo and several other Colorado cities in subsequent weeks. Long-standing disproportionate inequities and social injustices have prompted Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and white people to protest in solidarity, addressing the Black Lives Matter movement and other current and historical injustices, such as the naming of specific street names, neighborhoods, parks and the presence of historical monuments associated with oppression in the United States and Colorado. For example, Spring 2020 protests prompted the community to reexamine and demand the renaming of the Stapleton Neighborhood in Denver, which is named after Benjamin Stapleton, a mayor in the 1920s and a member of the Klu Klux Klan.
Branded under the title "History in the Making," the focus of the project documents Coloradans' stories about the protests and subsequent sociopolitical events throughout the state. By placing the current protests in context, History Colorado is building a robust collection and showcasing the important people and stories who’ve contributed to Colorado’s history of Community Activism. Staff involved with the project concluded that collecting in real time as the events unfolded was an efficient, proactive, and inclusive way to document the crisis, and to ensure that both contemporary and future generations could appreciate the stories of those who experienced these events first hand. Items considered for collecting included responses to storytelling tools, journals, audio recordings, photographs, videos, and other artifacts related to the protests to preserve and make available to the public. The general public was asked to contribute material directly to History Colorado and to share their stories through email, online surveys, journal submissions, and (socially distanced) community activities such as staff attending protests in mid-June 2020 and asking participants to answer targeted questions and then collating the responses. Collecting for the project is ongoing as of July 2020.