On Sunday, around 30 people gathered in Denver to remember a young boy they had never met: Preston John Porter Jr., who was lynched in a small Colorado town exactly 125 years earlier.
“We're honoring Preston Porter Jr., a 15-year-old who was beaten and lynched, accused unjustly. It happened here in Colorado, right here,” said Vivienne Burrell, who attended the vigil on the University of Colorado Denver campus. “It's like he's my cousin. It's good that the truth is coming out, even though that's hard to swallow, it's the truth.”
Porter Jr. was one victim of a reign of racist terror in which mobs killed thousands of Black people over several decades. The group on Sunday gathered both to honor Porter’s life and to ensure his horrific killing is not forgotten. He was burned alive before a mob of 300 people in Limon — a town 75 miles southeast of Denver — after being held in Denver.
"I feel a very strong sense of responsibility with Preston to protect him and protect the story that we've helped people see,” said Javon Mays, the former Aurora poet laureate and a teacher at William Smith High School.
Mays is part of the Colorado Lynching Memorial Project (CLMP), which has been memorializing Porter Jr. through community events and working to tell the stories of other people lynched in Colorado.
Lynching is the killing of a person by a mob, often without a trial. It was rampant in the American South for decades after the Civil War, but anti-Black mob killings happened in the West, too. There were at least seven confirmed anti-Black lynchings in Colorado.
