Franklin LaVeale Anderson, Colorado Law’s first Black student, pictured on far left.
Class portraits line the hallways of the University of Colorado Law School, the faces of former students gazing down at the building’s current inhabitants. In a dimly lit recess in the library hangs the 1899 class portrait. Its year is incorrectly labeled as 1898, and the students are left unnamed.
In the photo, twenty men stand. Only one of them is Black. I can tell you that he was Franklin LaVeale Anderson, a successful Boulder businessman and landowner who entered the law school in 1896 as the university’s first known Black student…