A proposal to add a labor acknowledgment to Denver City Council proceedings has been delayed by the Finance and Business Committee after members raised questions about its wording, intentions and place in the council’s opening proceedings.

The proposal, put forth by District 8 City Councilmember Shontel Lewis, who recently announced her candidacy for mayor, would require the council to read a labor acknowledgment in addition to the traditional Pledge of Allegiance and the city’s current land acknowledgment, which was adopted in 2020.

Lewis, who is Black, aims to have the Denver City Council acknowledge that “our country’s economy, infrastructure, and resulting generational wealth would not exist as they do today without the stolen and forced labor of enslaved Africans and the visitants who suffered the horror of the trans-Atlantic trafficking and shadow slavery.”

While committee members were receptive to the idea, there were questions surrounding whether the additional acknowledgment “would be more divisive than commemorative.”

The full text of Lewis’s proposed acknowledgment includes naming the actions of the Ku Klux Klan in Denver and Colorado, among other “uncomfortable” incidents.

Other committee members suggested that the acknowledgment could be expanded in scope to include additional affected groups such as Chinese and Japanese immigrants.

“I mean, even with, like, our land acknowledgment, and a lot of land acknowledgments in general have become words on paper, you know and hollow in a lot of ways,” cautioned Denver City Council Pro Tem Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez.

Denver City Council President Diana Romero Campbell said that systems of “colonization” have affected many communities and called for more time to study the proposed procedural change.

“When I think about, you know, the work of migrant workers, I think of the Japanese and the Exclusion Act; I think there are multiple things that could be captured if we’re going to do this,” Romero Campbell said. “I’d like to be really thorough about it and think about it so that it is reflective of a broader Denver and Colorado experience.”

The committee voted to delay the proposal until Aug. 11, when further discussion and revision may be made.