Robert “Bob” Edward Allen was only 26 years old and Chairman of the Young Democrats when he persuaded Denver party leaders to place his name on the Democratic candidate list for election to the Colorado House of Representatives in 1950. It would be the 60s before state legislators ran from individual districts rather than on county slates. Allen would serve for a decade in the House before moving to the Senate, where he served a single term from 1961-65. Although he first ran for the Legislature while living on Hooker Street in northwest Denver and later resided in Congress Park, he settled in Park Hill in 1964, where he lived for the rest of his life. Former Governor Dick Lamm remembers Bob as, “A true Park Hill liberal who burned with a pure blue flame!”

Bob passed last November at the age of 90. The Colorado House of Representatives will commemorate his legislative record during a memorial service scheduled for his birthday this April 1. His wife, Gerry, finds it an appropriate recognition as Bob frequently joked about having been born an “April fool.”

Allen was born in New York but moved to Denver in 1941 after his father accepted a position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Denver. Upon the former legislator’s death late last year, it would seem many of his most enduring achievements had been obscured by the passage of time. Lamm identifies him as one of Colorado’s “unsung civil rights heroes.” After three unsuccessful attempts, Allen repealed Colorado’s anti-miscegenation law in 1957, which outlawed all inter-racial marriages. Like many states, Colorado forbade ethnic and racial mixing at the altar — hard to believe in a time when nearly a quarter of all marriages in the state involve such partnerships today.

Allen also championed the state’s first fair employment act, forbidding hiring discrimination on the grounds of race, religion or gender. Perhaps his greatest achievement was the adoption of the Colorado Fair Housing Act, which he co-sponsored with African-American state Senator George Brown of Park Hill in 1959. Colorado became the first state in the nation to outlaw covenants, mortgage redlining and wink-wink real estate practices restricting the sale of a home to any willing purchaser. Gerry Allen recalls that their phone would ring late at night with death threats and abusive diatribes during the legislative debate on the bill. Denver police provided extra patrols in their neighborhood, but Bob wasn’t cowed by these expressions of hatred. Upon leaving the Senate, he and his family moved to Park Hill, Colorado’s pre-eminent integrated community where he remained involved in local issues for the rest of his life.

In 1965 he accepted an appointment as Director of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty office for Colorado. While running a small insurance office, he returned to law school. In 1970 Allen joined the public defenders office where he remained for eight years before opening his own legal practice, which he maintained for 30 years. In 1996 he also became an Adjunct Professor at Metro State teaching criminal and constitutional law classes until he was 88. His passionate liberal flame burned throughout his life.

Bob liked to recount a story his mother read to him from The New York Times when he was just a boy. It was the depths of the Depression, and the article described a socialite party held at one of the mansions along Millionaire’s Row in Newport, Rhode Island, where the hosts had trained a chimpanzee to wear a uniform and serve hors d’oeuvres to the assembled guests. The racial and class symbolism made a lasting impression on Allen. Eighty years later Bob would declare, “I haven’t changed. When I read about the Koch brothers today, I can’t help thinking about that chimpanzee!”

Without a doubt Allen’s commitment to a fair deal for every citizen has benefited tens of thousands of Coloradans. His legacy demonstrates that there is a place and a role for all opinions in the legislative marketplace — even those that may appear ahead of their time.

— mnhwriter@msn.com