Colorado’s Black History: How our state historian is preserving stories of the ‘overlooked, marginalized’

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Stories are how Claire Oberon Garcia understands the past. For more than 30 years, she’s taught Black literature at Colorado College. She digs into archives and pulls out stories that capture the Black experience in the early 20th century.

“Literature has a lot of ways of being true, of being illuminating, of conveying what happened, what something felt like,” Oberon Garcia said.

And now, her knowledge of Black stories is helping illuminate lesser-known parts of Colorado’s history.

Oberon Garcia is the first Colorado state historian who isn’t an historian.

History Colorado, which preserves and shares the state’s history in museums and archives, chose Oberon Garcia to bring a “fresh focus on Black history” to its State Historian’s Council.

“History Colorado really emphasizes that history is made of stories,” said Garcia. “And its mission is to collect and disseminate all of the stories of the peoples who have made up the past, present and the future of our glorious state.”

But many of the ways we’ve told those stories in the past, haven’t included the full picture, she said.

“Traditional history tends to focus on leaders, change makers, industries, people who are distinguished for one reason or another,” she said.

But that is just one perspective.

“I would argue that there are no pure facts; that facts are always filtered through our perspectives,” Garcia said. “And I think one of the gifts of literature is to show how rich and multifaceted facts and truth are.”

Read the rest of this article and watch the accompanying video on Denver7.com