By John C. Ensslin
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

In the late 1960s, the focal point of Chicano activism in Denver was an organization known as the Crusade for Justice.

It was founded in 1966 by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, who had converted his fame as a champion boxer from the barrio into a career as a political activist.

A former bar owner and bail bondsman, Gonzales in 1965 wrote a poem called I Am Joaquin in which he blurred his own identity with those of his heroes, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata:

I am Joaquin,

lost in a world of confusion

caught up in the whirl of gringo society

confused by the rules

scorned by the attitudes

suppressed by manipulation

and destroyed by modern society

The Crusade would change that society, although its legacy remains in sharp dispute. Some contend it was a subversive organization that was behind a rash of Denver bombings during the 1970s.

Others see it as a catalyst for change that paved the way for a generation of Chicano political activists during a time of prejudice and neglect suffered by people of Mexican descent.

One thing is certain. The Crusade marked a turning point in the history of Denver.

Gonzales' sense of social injustice started early. He was born in Denver, but he would have been born in Keenesburg if medical facilities there had been open to farm workers like his father, who was working in a beet field at the time.

Gonzales had a brilliant career as a boxer, one that later landed him in the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame. In 1946, he won the National Amateur Athletic Union bantamweight title.

His work as a bar owner and bondsman led him into a career in politics. At first, he took a conventional path.

He helped run the Viva Kennedy campaign for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and later became a district captain for the Democratic Party.

His reward from Mayor Tom Currigan: an appointment to head the Denver Neighborhood Youth Corps in 1965. But a falling-out followed, and Currigan fired him.

Disenchanted with the Democratic Party, Gonzales took his own organization, Los Voluntarios (The Volunteers), and broke from the party.

It was during a speech at a demonstration outside City Hall in 1966 that Gonzales said, "We are on a crusade for justice." The title stuck.

The crusade took many forms.

Unhappy with what it saw as the city's neglect of swimming pools in poor neighborhoods, the Crusade organized a "splash-in" at a pool in a predominantly white neighborhood in southeast Denver.

Dissatisfied with a public school system it felt did little for Chicano students, the Crusade started its own school, the Escuela Tlatelolco. Staffed by volunteers, it eventually offered free bilingual classes and lessons in Chicano culture to 300 children between the ages of 3 and 8.

A fateful turning point in the Crusade's history occurred in the early morning hours of March 17, 1973.

Two Denver police officers arrested a man for jaywalking in the 1500 block of Downing Street, in front of Crusade headquarters.

The arrest -- for a rarely enforced city ordinance -- touched off a confrontation the likes of which Denver has not seen since.

A crowd gathered to protest the arrest. A gunbattle erupted. Then an explosion ripped the upper floors of the Crusade-owned Downing Terrace apartments.

The blast tore a gaping hole in the building's upper floors. Debris rained on officers who had crouched for cover beside a pair of Volkswagen Beetles.

When the fighting ended, one man was dead and 17 people were injured, including 12 police officers.

Gonzales charged that police had lobbed grenades in an assault on Crusade headquarters.

But police sniffed the acrid air and accused the Crusade of storing explosives inside the apartment building.

"It was a regular arsenal inside," Detective Sgt. James C. Jones said, detailing 30 weapons and dummy hand grenades found in the rubble.

The bombing was one of several events that led to a gradual decline in the Crusade's influence in the city. That process accelerated in September 1975 when Denver police arrested two men in a plot to blow up a police substation in southwest Denver.

One of the men arrested was Crusade member Juan Haro, who was caught transporting the bomb by undercover cops who, with an informant's help, had been tracking his movements.

A Denver jury acquitted Haro and a co-defendant in the bomb plot. Haro, however, was found guilty of bomb possession charges and spent six years in prison.

Corky Gonzales declined to be interviewed for this story. He was severely injured in October 1987 when the car he was driving crashed into a house after he suffered heart arrhythmia.

Nita Gonzales, his daughter, still runs the Escuela Tlatelolco, a private school with about 75 students. It is one of the Crusade's most lasting legacies. It turns 30 next year.

But there are other legacies, Gonzales says.

She remembers what a voracious reader her father was. He read literature, philosophy, poetry. He insisted that his eight children read, then think and talk about what they had read.

"The legacy is political activism," she said.

The Crusade helped turn the city into a place where Federico Peña could be elected mayor in 1983 and where Hispanics could serve as police chief, fire chief and manager of safety.

In a recent book, The Crusade for Justice, former Crusade member Ernesto Vigil summed it up this way:

"The Crusade for Justice, for a span of 15 years, was the most powerful and effective organization to fight for the rights of people of Mexican descent in the state of Colorado in this century.

"No organization will rise to match the Crusade, much less surpass it, until it first learns from the legacy of the Crusade's rich and largely unrecognized history."

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images available at the Colorado Historical Society (303) 866-2305

Online: InsideDenver.com, keyword "2000."

On TV: at 10 p.m.: Colorado History: Colorado's bid for the 1976 Winter Olympics pits the political old guard against the new guard.

September 21, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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