In her 93 years, Margaret Murlee Hart, who was among the first African-American teachers hired by Denver Public Schools, wrote more than 500 songs, earned a doctorate, created reading programs for kids, and turned computer code into art.
She was the most “gifted person, and talented person,” in a family that over the years produced the first African-American pilot to fly coast to coast, a visual artist and a chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said her son Philip Hart, himself a writer, educator and documentary filmmaker.
“Her family was a family of high achievers,” he said.
Murlee Hart, who was born in St. Louis, Mo., died Sunday at her Denver home.
She grew up in Ames, Iowa, and Wichita, Kan., where she attended Wichita East High School, before going to the University of Kansas. There she met her future husband, Judson D. Hart.
She graduated at 19, and the couple married in Cheyenne before moving to Denver in 1940.
Her husband finished his bachelor’s degree at University of Denver.
The couple lived in the Platte Valley housing project and had three boys: Philip, Christopher (now NTSB chairman) and Judson Jr., a visual artist, who lives in San Francisco.
Her uncle James Herman Banning was the first African-American to receive a pilot’s license from the U.S. Department of Commerce, and to fly coast to coast, from Los Angeles to Long Island, N.Y.
Life wasn’t easy for a young, black couple starting a family in 1940s Denver.
“He started his Denver work career as a janitor,” Philip Hart said of his father. “She could not find a job as a college graduate and was a homemaker,” he said of his mother. “Even with the challenges a 1940s Denver presented to a young black couple, they moved here with the hope of better opportunities than in Kansas or Missouri.”
In 1950, they bought a home at 2842 Vine St., with a mortgage loan from Equity Savings and Loan, then one of the only financial institutions in Denver that would grant home loans to black people.
Murlee Hart went on to get a master’s degree in education at the University of Denver then a doctorate from the University of Colorado.
She became one of the first African-American teachers at a Denver public school, and then a reading specialist, creating and publishing reading programs for students.
She taught at Fairview and Columbine elementary schools before becoming a teacher and administrator at Denver Public Schools Diagnostic Learning Center.
“At heart my mother was a teacher and lifelong learner. She felt there was always something to teach and to learn,” Philip Hart said.
Judson Hart, who died in 1998, became a high-ranking executive with the Denver Housing Authority and retired as regional director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Murlee Hart was a computer coding whiz. After she retired in the mid-1980s, she used her talent to create art “that is full of colors, abstractions and geometries infused with a musical influence,” Philip Hart said.
She is survived by her sons, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren; as well as nieces Vicki Dillard Jones and Stephanie Turner and their children and grandchildren.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or @dpmcghee
