Chicano and Chicana students at Denver’s West High School on March 20, 1969, led what became one of Colorado’s largest and most violent school protests after district leadership took no action to address students’ concerns about discrimination in the classroom.
This story is part ofColorado at 150. Each Fifty for 150 story focuses on an event that helped define Colorado over 150 years of statehood. Newsline is publishing one Fifty for 150 story every weekday in reverse chronological order until the sesquicentennial, Aug. 1, when the final of 50 stories, about the declaration of statehood, will appear.
The “blowouts,” as they were called, marked one of the defining moments of El Movimiento, the Chicano civil rights movement in Denver and beyond, during the national wave of activists fighting for civil rights in the 1960s…