Elizabeth Taylor’s Legacy of Resilience

The story of the West is far more pigmented and more feminine than Hollywood or the ‘guns and outlaws’ histories will every portray. Elizibeth Austin Taylor (Morris) was born in Kansas in 1874, and she may have spent some of her childhood here in the Grand Valley, it is unclear. It is known that her father, William Austin, was one of three local African American men that petitioned for the use of the name African Methodist Episcopal Church, in 1883, for the nascent Black congregation.

The congregation would meet in the vacant lot for 9 years before the Wright Chapel, later re-named the Handy Chapel, would be built. The community and the chapel they will build, would later in life become Elizabeth “Lizzie” Austin Taylor’s flock and family. But first….

By 1891, Elizabeth was in Salt Lake City, Utah marrying William Taylor. The two would begin publishing the Utah Plain Dealer, the first Black paper in Utah, in 1895. The paper served Salt Lake City and many of the isolated black communities in the region. The Plain Dealer had many subscribers here in the Grand Valley including some well-known Black settlers: Elijah Hines, Thomas Langdon, James Harris, John Newman. “Peace if Possible; Justice at Any Rate” was the papers slogan and was a platform for advancing racial equality. Elizabeth Taylor also formed The Western Federation of Colored Women, she also ran organizations mouthpiece, The Western Women’s Advocate. The WFCW held meetings in Grand Junction, and it’s likely that women from the local Black community traveled to Salt Lake City to the first convention of the WFCW in July of 1904, which was addressed by both the governor of Utah and the mayor of Salt Lake City.

During her newspaper career she also ran the household and raised four children, a fifth died as a baby from whooping cough. In 1907 her husband too died of an illness. She somehow kept the Utah Plain Dealer running until 1909 or 1910. Her son William Taylor, in an August 3rd, 1969, Daily Sentinel article, some 60 years later remembered helping “Lizzie” fold and address the paper at the dinner table as child.

Late in 1910, Lizzie was addressing the “Emancipation Day” celebrations in SLC in September, or early 1911, Elizabeth and her children moved to Grand Junction. They found and integrated into a community, which she had helped foster. Her father, now a widower, lived here. The community had its own all black Mason Lodge, (that her late husband had helped create) Its own church that her father chartered and helped build and where she would minister for 16 years. The AME would thrive under her guidance. Two small houses were added as a parsonage and as a place for Blacks that were new to the area to get on their feet. It also served as hostel for traveling Blacks that could not get served in Grand Junction’s hotels and restaurants. The Green Book was a guide for black motorists, listing establishments that were friendly or would at least serve blacks, not once (1936-1967) did Grand Junction have a listing in the Green Book.

Elizabeth was the minister of the Handy Chapel during the height of the Ku Klux Klan, and while many of the histories of the Klan locally contend that the Klan in Mesa County didn’t target the local Black community, Josephine Elizabeth Dickey, her granddaughter, tells a different story. Lizzie had a brick thrown threw her window one night, and “she was told to move because people of her kind were not welcome where she was living.” as told by Josephine Dickey to Margery Brennan in her unpublished history thesis. “A Social Reflection: Grand Junction’s Black Community 1880-1965.”

Elizabeth’s sons, William “Wesley” Taylor and Booker T. Taylor continued her legacy. Booker T. would go on to minister at the AME while Wesley Taylor would organize outings and camping trips for the congregation. William Taylor’s daughter Josephine would spend her life fighting for the local Black community and its “Handy Chapel.”

Josephine Dickey was instrumental in forming the local chapter of the NAACP in 1980. She organized and was at the first Martin Luther King Day observances and march in 1981, an event that continues to this day, and most importantly she served as a godmother to the younger generation of active Black Junctionites. Shannon Robinson, in her Mesa County Public Library oral history called Josephine “Grandma Dickey,” though they were not blood relatives. She explained that Josephine was “Grandma Dickey” to the entire black community.

Elizabeth Taylor, Newspaper Woman and Activist, Amy Tanner Thiriot. https://www.utahwomenshistory.org/bios/elizabeth-taylor/

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via www.newspapers.com, Utah Historic Papers via https://digitalnewspapers.org/ ,Colorado Historic Newspapers via www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org

“Social Reflection: Grand Junction’s Black Community: 1880-1965” By Margery Grandbouche (Brennan) Unpublished manuscript courtesy Margery Brennan.

Oral history #1 with Shannon Robinson, Mesa County Library’s Oral History Social Justice Archives. Item Id: Mesa 1352.

Illustration by Brooke Smart for Better Days with Permission.