Club, owner helped integrate Colorado Springs

Fannie Mae Duncan didn't set out to change Colorado Springs, or to become a symbol of a racial harmony that seemed so unobtainable in the 1950s and 60s.

To her, the sign outside the Cotton Club, her nightclub on West Colorado Avenue, simply meant what it said: "Everybody welcome" - regardless of their skin color. The only prejudice was against those under age 21.

It wasn't about breaking down the barriers of segregation, or fighting for civil rights. It was about making people comfortable, which was good for business.

"If the Cotton Club helped bring people together, that's good," Duncan told The Gazette in 1989, 14 years after the club closed, about as much credit as she gave herself for the club's role in ending segregation here. She died in 2005.

Though the club is long gone, torn down in the name of urban renewal, Duncan's legacy as a pioneer in race relations has been cemented. Last month, the El Pomar Foundation inducted her into The Milton E. Proby Cultural Heritage Room, the first black person to have a plaque put up in the room at the Penrose House near The Broadmoor hotel. An effort is underway to build a downtown sculpture of her. "Everybody Welcome" is the name of an annual diversity festival.

A long way for a nightclub owner who didn't see things in black and white.

"Opportunity has a way of making all of us leaders sometimes. And she had an opportunity to welcome everyone in a business at a time when no one else could," said El Pomar vice president Theo Gregory. "I don't think she woke up thinking, ‘I'm going to make (desegregation) happen,' but as the opportunity was there, she had the courage to make it happen."

Barriers gave birth to idea

Duncan, an Oklahoma native whose family moved to Colorado Springs in 1933, opened Duncan's Cafe and Bar at West Colorado Avenue and Sahwatch Street in 1948.

In the late 1940s, the black population of Colorado Springs was a small, silent and segregated minority. The segregation was less institutional than in the South, but no less pervasive, in a state that in the 1920s had been run by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Alice Morgan, born in 1929, shared her recollections of growing up black in Colorado Springs for an oral history project by the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum in 1993.

Blacks couldn't eat at most restaurants or swim in public pools except on the day they were cleaned, she said. They had to swim at the "other side" of Prospect Lake, where there was glass in the water and no lifeguard. They sat upstairs at movie theaters.

When  she was older, looking for a house, real estate agents wouldn't take her to most neighborhoods.

"It's just not available for blacks. They'd tell you right off the bat," she said. She recalled one listing that said, "Reason for moving: blacks moving into the neighborhood."

"In the South, you knew where to go. You had signs. You knew what you could do," recalled Lu Lu Stroud Pollard, the first black person employed by the Civilian Personnel Office at Fort Carson, for the oral history project. "In Colorado Springs, you had no idea what you could or couldn't do and still you know the law said you could do everything."

The segregation extended to entertainment. Many of the era's most dynamic entertainers were black jazz musicians, who often played Denver. But venues in Colorado Springs wouldn't book them, and hotels wouldn't give them rooms. At the same time, the growth of Camp Carson - which became Fort Carson in 1954 - was bringing a new wave of black residents to the area.

Duncan, a music lover, saw an opportunity. Taking the name of the Cotton Club after a famous Harlem club, she opened the doors in the late 1950s.

"Everybody Welcome"

Colorado Springs police chief Irving Bruce was a nationally respected cop who had built a reputation for being able to spot a criminal on the street with his "camera eye." Folks in Colorado Springs knew him as "Dad."

In the late 1950s, the imposing, portly, cigar-smoking Bruce called Duncan into his office.

Blacks and whites were mixing at her club, Bruce told her. There had been some complaints.

"I check them for age. I didn't know I had to check them for color," she responded. Bruce got angry and told her she had to stop, according to an account Duncan told reporters many times over the years.

It wasn't the first time Duncan's ambitions ran against the wall of institutional racism. In 1954, she wanted to buy the Iron Springs Chateau in Manitou Springs to open a club. City officials denied her permit, which she later attributed to them not wanting a black-owned club.

But the mood was changing in Colorado Springs. Maybe it was that influential whites wanted to see the top-notch acts Duncan was attracting. Maybe Bruce didn't want the police to be the legal arm of segregation. Maybe he worried, as Duncan later said, of the possibility of a lawsuit by a patron who wasn't allowed in.

Bruce later called Duncan and told her to let in whoever she wanted, as long as they were 21. So began a cooperation with police. She called police if a wanted suspect was in the club, and police looked out for her. Bruce once interceded with a linen company who wouldn't take her business because she was black.

With the blessing of police, the Cotton Club became the premiere night spot in Colorado Springs, hosting a who's who of jazz and blues entertainers. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Muddy Waters, Little Richard, Flip Wilson. They all played the club.

Hotels in town wouldn't rent the entertainers rooms, so Duncan bought a 43-room mansion on North Corona Street where they could stay.

Black Fort Carson conscripts mingled with Colorado College students and wealthy white guests from The Antlers across the street. Duncan hired waitresses of all races, so anyone who walked in could see a familiar face. She presided over it all like a queen, always dressed smartly, never hesitating to throw out someone who had too much "ignorant oil" - she never touched a drop of alcohol herself.

So many people, blacks and whites, kept calling to ask if they could come, Duncan decided to put a sign in the window.
It said, "Everybody Welcome."

City ends club's run

By 1975, the Cotton Club had fallen out of favor with city fathers.

Colorado Springs was changing. The growth of Fort Carson and other military installations was pushing population ever northward and eastward, and downtown was attracting a seedier element. There were shootings and stabbings. "Ladies of the evening" began frequenting the club and the streets. Fort Carson declared the club off-limits for soldiers.

City urban renewal officials paid Duncan a visit.

"They came to my club and had to push their way in, it was so crowded," she told The Gazette in 1981. "Yet they told me it wasn't a good business area. People liked to make the area sound rougher than it really was."

The city gave her $168,000 for the two buildings she owned, over her objections. She said she had been offered more than twice that amount six months before by a private buyer. The club was torn down to make way for offices of the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper, bought and shut down by The Gazette's owner, Freedom Communications Inc., 11 years later.

When she tried to re-open at 530 E. Pikes Peak Ave., city council denied her liquor license, citing neighborhood opposition. In 1977, she was indicted for allowing gambling at another establishment she owned, the Last Word Recreation and Pool Hall on South Hancock Street. The charges were  dropped.

Duncan decided it was time to walk away. She left town in 1981, and lived in Connecticut, then Denver, where she immersed herself in the social scene and charitable work, a passion all her life - she was one of the founders of the 400 Club in Colorado Springs, which provided money, food and clothing for the underprivileged.

Though she remained bitter about how the city treated her, she likely would be thrilled to know she is remembered as a pioneer and philanthropist, worthy of statues and plaques.

"She couldn't get that type of send-off when we left in 1981," said her adopted daughter, Renee Bragg, in a recent interview. "I don't think, in the ‘70s, when she just closed down her establishment, she was going to get the credit for a lot of the social progress that Colorado Springs and different groups of people enjoyed in that town."

Club changed culture

Lu Lu Stroud Pollard, the Fort Carson employee, left Colorado Springs in 1962. When she returned 17 years later, she barely recognized the town.

"When we came back in ‘79, there were all these opportunities and all of these people - oh, it's amazing the change! Just totally amazing," she said, as part of the Pioneers Museum oral history series.

Segregation had ended. She was able to buy a house in any neighborhood. Blacks could find jobs, get served in restaurants and swim wherever whites did.

Desegregation probably would have occurred without Duncan's club. The civil rights movement had brought new attitudes and laws throughout the nation, and local civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Milton E. Proby fought for equal rights here. Churches and civil rights groups organized "blockbusting," finding all-white neighborhoods that wouldn't be opposed to blacks moving in.

But the Cotton Club gave a public face to this effort, and showed everyone it could be done, in a city where burning crosses sometimes showed up on the lawns of black churches and residents. Duncan's club was not about bringing down the barriers of segregation and racism. It was about music and good times. Skin color was checked at the door.

"She did not set out to be different in that way, but she was an intelligent businesswoman," said friend Kay Esmiol, who has written an unpublished biography of Duncan. "She didn't see black and white issues. She saw beyond that."

"She was the right person at the right place at the right time to accomplish what she did and it was important for the city to see it was possible."