Jim Voorhees, a board member who helped lead desegregation of Denver’s public schools, died at his home Dec. 4. Voorhees, 93, suffered a stroke.
A memorial is planned in the spring.
Voorhees voted with the 5-2 majority in the 1960s when the Denver School Board voted for desegregation, which meant controversial busing.
The decision was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Years later, Voorhees, who served as president of the Denver School Board, said they did the right thing.
Credible evidence indicated “we had to get rid of some of the inequities in educational opportunity that existed in the schools,” he said in a 1995 Denver Post story.
“It was perfectly clear that the lower-achieving schools were located in the segregated and lower economic areas of the city,” he said in the story.
The times “were quite contentious,” said Dr. Dayton Voorhees, son of Jim Voorhees. People were so upset that busing foes marched around the Voorhees house in protest, he said.
Some didn’t expect Voorhees to support desegregation “because he was a conservative Republican,” said Dayton Voorhees, of Albuquerque.
“He really believed in the Denver Public Schools and thought he was doing a very important job,” said his daughter Jane Kiss of Grand Junction.
Voorhees worked as an oil-and-gas lawyer, spending many years with a firm he helped found, Moran, Reidy and Voorhees. He joined the Davis Graham & Stubbs law firm in 1980 and retired from there. The law firm said Voorhees had extensive experience in oil and gas.
James D. Voorhees was born Nov. 14, 1917, in Harrisburg, Pa.
He earned a bachelor’s degree at Yale University, served as a commander of a landing ship tank during World War II and returned to earn his law degree at Harvard University.
He married Mary Margaret Fuller in 1943, and they had three children. She died in 1990. In 2002, he married Rosemarie Stewart.
Jim and Mary Voorhees were on their way to Seattle after he finished college and stopped in Denver to visit a cousin, who said, “You don’t want to go to Seattle,” recalled Dayton Voorhees. They stayed in Denver.
In addition to his wife, son and daughter, Voorhees is survived by another daughter: Susan Voorhees Maxfield of Topeka. He is also survived by his stepsons, Henry Michael Perry of Houston and Mark Steven Perry of Phoenix; his stepdaughter, Ann Perry Strazza of Denver; four grandchildren; five stepgrandchildren; two great-grandchildren; two stepgreat-grandchildren; and his sister, Katrina Berman, of Moscow, Idaho.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
