Leroy Smith: 20th Century Impresario of Denver's Five Points District

By LeRoy O. Smith

This memoir of a man who was instrumental in shaping the vibrant Five Points neighborhood that is now Denver’s only Historic Cultural District begins with his roots. His parents fled the Jim Crow laws of Texas on an eight-month 1903 wagon train into Indian Territory where Leroy Smith was born in the oldest black town of what had by then become Oklahoma. His personal “Great Migration” began when he walked across the border into Arkansas. Working and vagabonding his way northeast to be rescued when he received a bus ticket from a friend who suggested he come west to Utah for a decent job on the railway.

Working the trains, Leroy was drawn to Denver which he had learned was the “Harlem of the West.” There he met Lulu Ann Green, convinced her in a whirlwind courtship to marry and join him as a partner in a tiny shop they rented for ten dollars a month. Leroy bought black newspapers, hair products and vinyl music on his Chicago train runs that Lulu sold to Denver’s fast growing black population.

By 1941 Leroy could quit the railroad to create the “Rhythm Record Shop” in a two-story building he purchased in the busy Wellton Street business district known as “The Points.” In 1944 he held his first dance concert which his ingenuity handily saved from disaster and began booking the great names of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, gospel, jazz, etc. to cities in Colorado and surrounding states. Often referred to as “the Mayor of Five Points,” he was known as a cool band leader who sold “race music,” black hair products and quality goods within the “red lines.”

Smith was also a gifted sportsman who hunted, fished, and pitched on black baseball teams. He soon added the words “and Sporting Goods” to the already expanded merchandise found in his shop, offering fishing and hunting licenses with gear. He became Colorado’s first black outfitter licensed to sell firearms with his sports equipment. He was named an honorary game warden and—after lobbying for an officer-manned lockup only three doors away—an honorary police officer.

An audacious masonic leader, Leroy fought city hall to bring black Shiners to his ingeniously desegregated Denver hotels for conventions. He paid to advertise his ventures on the radio by becoming, his own disc jockey on his midnight “Rockin’ with Leroy” show. His sharp instincts for enterprise and entertainment lifted him into business, cultural, mining, and other endeavors that inspired the diverse neighborhood to action. His political inclinations led him to success in opening the second floor of his building as the Voters Club, a swinging night club with live music and famed visitors which he used to rally African Americans to vote and fight for their American civil rights.

All proceeds from sale of this scrapbook of photos, letters and memories are destined solely for the support of Denver’s Black American West Museum & Heritage Center.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781644248751

Book preview

Chapter 1

Origins: Texan Roots in Native American Soil Nurtured by African American Blood, Soul, and Fears

What Junior knows of Leroy Smith’s story begins with his grandfather, George Washington, born a slave in February 1852, and his grandmother, Sally Caviness, born in March 1858. Though little is known about Sally, both George and Sally had belonged to slaveholders in the South before the Civil War. After the Civil War, George worked as a teenage farm hand for Adam and Martha Collins and other Texas landholders. By 1880, he had taken the surname Smith and married Sally. They were soon the proud parents of two daughters aged five and three, and a year-old son, Henry Charles, known as Charlie, born April 6, 1879. The family worked hard as sharecroppers and somehow obtained land in DeWitt County, Texas, that they owned jointly with their friends Albert and Sallie Evans.

Both the Smith and Evans families first came to Junior’s awareness as settlers in a small African American community located on the banks of DeWitt County’s Brushy Creek. With the arrival of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad (SAAP) in 1887, Brushy Creek became the wrong side of the tracks when the SAAP established the new town of Yoakum, Texas, named in honor of one of its principals, Benjamin Yoakum. Not by coincidence, residents of Yoakum opened a separate school for the black children of Brushy Creek a year later in 1888.

Knowing that more was expected of him as the eldest son in the family, young Charlie accepted responsibility for the hard work of a field hand, learned to ride a horse, and occasionally labored in the Yoakum rail yards. He developed heart, character, and spirit, protecting his family during the infrequent raids by the sometimes hostile local Tonkawa Tribe. He also learned to safeguard himself from the injustices and uncertainties he encountered as a black male living within a caste system imposed by Jim Crow laws, the earliest of which had been enacted in Texas in 1866.

The DeWitt County book of marriages lists eighteen-year-old Charlie’s marriage to Mary W. Canfield on February 14, 1897, in Yoakum, Texas. According to the family’s oral history, the couple had one child—Rosie Lee—who was born on August 8, 1899. The Smith family story says that Mary died in childbirth, and Charlie left Rosie in the care of her grandparents when he left Texas in 1903 to move north to Indian Territory with family friends Albert and Sallie Evans.¹

The Evans Family

The Evans family played an important role in the lives of all the Smith family. Albert and his wife, Sallie Evans, were close friends with Charlie’s parents, George and Sally Smith. The two couples jointly owned their own land as early as October 6, 1881, only fifteen years after the end of slavery. The Smith and Evans children grew up together and were surely fast friends who became a family to one another. Young Charlie Smith had honed his bullwhacking skills by helping Albert Evans on cattle drives to northern railheads and was said to have become a skilled drover.

A son of the new state of Texas, Albert Evans had been born in DeWitt County in 1854 to a fifteen-year-old slave named Harriet. Harriet was listed as a slave of Jacob Carroll, a successful South Carolina plantation owner who moved west to Forsyth County, Georgia, where he made his fortune, possibly in cotton and rice. Harriett’s mother, LaVicey Duncan, another on the list of Carroll’s thirty-eight slaves, had given birth to Harriett in February of 1839; two years later, she had a son named Vincent Hill. Harriet and Vincent grew up with the eight Carroll children and may have been playmates and friends. Carroll took LaVicey, Harriett, and Vincent with him when he and his brother Dennis Carroll Jr. moved their large households from Georgia to Arkansas in the late 1840s. Carroll later left Arkansas and again moved his family and slaves, this time to DeWitt County, Texas, where he eventually bought a spread north of Brushy Creek in Gonzales County. He is thought to have increased his wealth through the cotton industry in both Arkansas and Texas.

Nothing is known of either Harriet’s father or of her husband who was said to have died shortly before Albert’s birth. One might speculate that Harriet’s father may have been an older relative of the Carroll family named Lewis Evans or one of his slaves since LaVicey Duncan appears as Lavissa Evans on the license of her later marriage to Harold Tippins.

Harriett’s second child named Elsie, born in 1859, was fathered by Dan Golden of nearby Fayette County. Her third child, a son named Samuel, was born in September of 1862. Carroll sold Harriett and her three children to his daughter Elizabeth C. Anderson for $1,000 on April 3, 1862. Shortly after her sale, Harriet jumped the broom with Samuel’s father, George Shepherd. The couple had eight more children.

Little is known of Albert Evans’s early life, but one can imagine that growing up in the state that fought two bloody wars of secession over the issue of slavery had a profound impact on his life. Colonizers from the United States had moved to the Mexican state of Texas and taken their slaves with them. After the Mexican government abolished slavery in 1829, the Texas Revolution of 1835–36 erupted over the slaveholding issue. The US colonists, known as Texians, declared their independence from Mexico and proclaimed the Republic of Texas. In 1845, the United States annexed the Republic of Texas resulting in the 1846–48 War with Mexico.² Albert was only seven years old when Texas joined the other southern states in seceding from the Union in 1861, and just eleven on June 19, 1865, when the Civil War ended and African American slaves in Texas learned that Lincoln had freed them two years earlier with the Emancipation Proclamation.³

Albert may have observed the skills of a cowpuncher while still a slave on the Carroll ranch, and he very likely helped his uncle Henry Tippins work cattle while he was a teenager, enabling him to earn enough money to acquire land in Brushy Creek. In 1874, twenty-year-old Albert married twelve-year-old Sallie Shiner, a Native American from nearby Shiner, Texas. Five years later, Sallie—having sprouted into a woman—had her first child, the start of the couple’s family, which would grow to include thirteen children.

Together with his uncle and friend Henry Tippins, who was only five years his senior, Albert continued to work as a drover, driving cattle from the holding pens of Yoakum, Texas, up the Old Chisholm Trail to railheads in Kansas.

On a cattle drive north, Albert and Henry witnessed the Oklahoma Land Run of April 22, 1889. That first land run opened the Unassigned Lands originally intended as reservation land for Native American tribes that had lost their lands elsewhere to American settlement. President Benjamin Harrison had opened this prime central area of Oklahoma territory to settlement in March, shortly after his inauguration.⁴ Remarkably, the land grabbers created towns like Stillwater and Guthrie in the span of just half a day.

On their return trips to Texas from drives, Albert and Henry stopped in some of the black townships that resulted from the land rush. They came to understand why some referred to the territory as the promised land of a black haven, a place free from the discriminatory laws passed by southern states to control the black freedmen no longer under control of slave holders. Tippins succumbed early to the dream of a better future away from fears of racial intolerance, false accusations, and violent lynchings. Perhaps influenced by Frederick Douglass, who saw African Americans who remained in the South as surrendering to a caste system imposed on former slaves, Tippins sold his eighty acres of land on Brushy Creek for $500 and moved north to settle in the safer town of Senora near Henryetta, Indian Territory. Albert frequently visited Henry in IT at times, paying fifteen dollars for a train ticket. Albert would be influenced by four more land runs that opened sections of both the Indian and Oklahoma Territories.⁵

By 1895, Henry had finally persuaded Albert that he and his large family would find a more promising life in Indian Territory. Albert had begun to divest himself of his property on October 10, 1889, selling his share of the land that he jointly owned with his half sister Josephine and her husband, Lewis Jackson, to his friends George and Sally Smith for one dollar. On January 29, 1903, he sold what remained of his land for $381.25 to W. L. Lawrence and set in motion his own migration up north away from dark fears of vigilante justice and unlawful, crowd-pleasing lynchings.

When Albert and Sallie decided to head north, they became the heart of a wagon train that left Yoakum on Easter Monday, April 13, 1903, with their twelve children. They were joined by Albert’s half brothers, Samuel (wife, Betty), Henry (wife, Mary), and Archie and William Shepherd, his half sisters, Josephine (husband, Lewis Jackson) and their ten children, Rosalee (husband, Jesse White) and their four children, and Carrie Shepherd. A cousin Barney Hilliard and his pregnant wife also joined them, as did a man by the name of Otto Jones, and their recently-widowed young family friend Charlie Smith. Albert owned three of the seven covered wagons in which the fifteen adults and twenty-six children traveled. Albert also owned four mules and a horse and led the train as de facto wagon master.

The wagon train of pioneers traveled north, stopping frequently en route to say goodbye to family and friends and to finalize legal records. They pressed on for over thirty-three weeks—almost seven months—through the Texas towns of Belmont, Bastrop, Temple, Waco, and Fort Worth. They crossed the Red River into Indian Territory near Colbert, where the Hilliard’s, whose infant had not survived the rigorous journey, decided to go no farther. As the caravan crossed the river, the children sang of money growing on trees in anticipation of their bright future.

On the way, the pioneers received sad news by telegram informing them of the deaths of Sallie’s 62-year-old mother, Mary Shiner, and a week later, her 104-year-old French Creole Indian grandmother, Mariah Washington. They had a run-in with armed, bullying white roughnecks who accosted them and appeared to be thieves or worse. They stopped to sell game meat or to gather fruit or chop cotton and took on other arduous labor such as performing day labor in the railroad yard at Wybark to make ends meet. On December 4, 1903, the pioneers finally arrived at their destination—the homestead of Albert’s friend and uncle, Henry Tippins, near Dewar, Indian Territory. Members of the party were given lodging in nearby Wild Cat in a recently vacated one-room house of ole man Mose Grayson.⁶

Soon after their arrival on the prairies of Indian Territory, Charlie Smith sought the hand of Albert’s second daughter, Lucinda Evans, in marriage. One could conclude that Charlie had joined the wagon train because he had eyes for the comely twenty-one-year-old. Whatever the case, they married on January 23, 1904, less than two months after their arrival. Mina, as Lucinda was called, had been born on the Brushy on May 24, 1882, and was three years younger than Charlie. She gave birth to their first child, daughter Estelle, on October 18, 1904. Charlie and Mina’s second baby, Della, died shortly after her birth on February 9, 1906. Their grief over the loss of their daughter soon gave way to the joy of the birth of their third child, Benny Lee, on June 18, 1907.⁷

While the pioneers built a two-room log cabin with an ash-covered floor, they lived for several months camped on the old Grayson place, within earshot of Henryetta’s first fire station alarm. Doubtless influenced by Booker T. Washington’s visit to nearby Boley, Oklahoma, the party continued building four more homes for the Samuel and Henry Shepherd families, the White family, and the Jackson family. The men learned coal and mineral mining skills in nearby Henryetta mines, and the group constructed a church that served as a school. In less than two years, they had established their own African American community.⁸ During that time, the Evans’s oldest child, Lilly, married Deacon Rayford Brunner, a freedman who spoke with a dialect, and their fourth child, Laura, married one of ole man Mose’s sons, Charles Zellious (or Zealous).

Not yet content with their lot, Albert and Sallie moved their family east to Tiger Mountain where Joe Tiger and his family of the Muscogee Creek Nation lived. There, Sallie gave birth to their thirteenth and last child, Albert Jr., born January 27, 1906. The Evans family lived among the Creek tribe into which their daughter had married. They grew to know such local Native American notables as Joe Tiger, his sister Brice, and their relatives Moty and Ira Ivory