Denver City Councilwoman Shontel Lewis plans to withdraw a proposal requiring the council to read a statement acknowledging the impacts of slavery before its weekly meetings.
Lewis, who is running for mayor, said during a Tuesday committee meeting that she wouldn’t proceed with the idea after other council members asked her and a supporting coalition to consider broadening the scope of the acknowledgment.
“What we heard was that the specificity of the acknowledgment mattered to them. And so this acknowledgment names a particular part of American history: the forced, uncompensated labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants,” she said. “Naming the history does not diminish the experiences of other communities whose labor was exploited.”
, titled a “labor acknowledgment,” focused on the impacts of stolen and forced labor of enslaved Africans and the legacy of that system. It would be similar to , which honors earlier Native American inhabitants of the area.
Lewis first presented the labor acknowledgment idea in July, and the committee decided to postpone a vote on it until a month later. In August, the committee postponed it again, until this week.
Council President Diana Romero-Campbell had asked whether the labor of other groups, such as migrant workers and people detained in Japanese internment camps, could also be included in the script. She suggested adding language that would have recognized other groups’ labor in addition to the impacts of chattel slavery, the Middle Passage and Jim Crow laws.
“We acknowledge systems of debt, servitude, and exploitation of Indigenous peoples; Immigrant and American-born workers of African, Asian, Latin American descent; and working-class populations that make invaluable contributions to our Denver community,” Romero-Campbell’s script read, in part.
Lewis said the coalition she worked with, which included the city’s African American Commission, its LGBTQIA+ Commission, Justice for Black Coloradans and the Center for African American Health, thought the broadened language would group all of those histories together, diminishing their injustices.
“Different communities experienced different systems of exploitation, exclusion, displacement and violence, and those histories deserve the dignity and precision of being acknowledged for what they were, not flattened into a single narrative,” she said.
Lewis added that she would be willing to work with other council members if they chose to pursue a different labor acknowledgment in the future.
