July 14, 1970
Roosevelt Hill, Jr. and his wife, Myrtes, had just taken six University of Colorado-Denver students to the Colorado State Penitentiary in Canon City to speak to inmates. The topic was “Awareness of the Black Man.” The goal was to encourage inmates to pursue college once their sentences were completed.
The students included Reginald Mines, Thaddeus Bynum, Toye Moses, Lawrence Hardy, Donna Pugh (AKA Opalanga Pugh), and Julia Minter. Minter, who was 17, lived with the Hills, who promised her parents that they would look out for her.
Hill stopped at a Taco Bell in Colorado Springs to get everyone a bite to eat, before driving the state-owned station wagon into the nearby Ivywild Mobil service station to fill the tank. He gave one of the three attendants on duty a Colorado state-issued credit card for payment, according to police reports. After a lengthy wait, he went into the station to check on his payment. Myrtes, Hill and Minter walked into the store a few minutes later. Mines soon followed.
Mines recalled, “We pulled in and waited for the attendant. He came out, put gas in our vehicle, took the credit card that was given to Mr. Hill by the school, and went to process the payment,” then added, “This took a long time, and Roosevelt got out of the car and went in to see what was taking so long. Everyone was tired after a long day and ready to get back home.”
According to Mines, an argument ensued between Hill and the clerk, Ellis Leon Little, over the validity of the card. Little, a 21-year-old Fort Carson soldier, was working part-time at the station.
According to the Fort Carson Information Office, Specialist 4th Class Little, a Vietnam veteran, was assigned to the 59th Transportation Company and had been there since August 1969. His hometown was listed as Richmond, Kentucky.
Mines entered as Hill was engaged in an argument with Little. Hill, seeing that Little would not accept the CU card, began to reach into his pocket to make a cash payment.
Then there was a gunshot.
Hill turned, facing Mines, and fell into Myrtes’ arms and then to the floor, blood spurting from the chest wound from the .38-caliber pistol.
Chaos ensued.
Mines, panicked, moved to a pay phone to call the police. He turned to Little, who was now next to him and still holding the gun. Mines asked him for a dime, then lunged at Little in anger and punched him. Mines slipped on the blood on the floor and soon found himself facing away from Little, who now held the gun to the back of the student’s head.
Myrtes’ voice stopped him.
“You don’t have to shoot anybody else!” she screamed, holding Roosevelt in her arms. “You already killed my husband!”
Mines watched as Hill’s life slowly drained away.
He had only been on the job for two weeks.
El Paso County Sheriff’s Deputy Gary E. Vitcovich initially reported that “a carload of Black men apparently drove into the station and an argument ensued when the unidentified attendant attempted to check a credit card,” the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph reported.
Hill was taken to St. Francis Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Helen Ringmaiden, a fellow student, was supposed to have been on that trip but somehow had been left behind. When Mines returned late that night, he went directly to her home, his clothes still covered in Hill’s blood.
“He kept saying ‘I tried to put him back together; I tried to put him back together.’ He later said that he didn’t remember the blood,” Rigmaiden recalled. “Colorado Springs was not the Deep South. We didn’t know what to do, and quite frankly, neither did the CU dean, who simply told us to hire somebody else.”
State Senator George Brown called on the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to launch a full-scale investigation into the shooting. In an interview with the Gazette, he expressed outrage over the incident. He said Hill was a “widely respected member of the Black Community. It is urgent that fast action be taken in this case. The Black community is obviously disturbed over the situation.”
But El Paso County District Attorney Robert L. Russel told the Gazette Telegraph that Brown had no grounds to call for an investigation because the Colorado Springs Police Department was handling the investigation “fairly and properly.”
In a letter to Russel, Suzanne T. Rogers, president of the NAACP Colorado Springs branch, demanded “that a complete report of findings be made public to preclude the possibility of any suspicion that any facts have been misrepresented or concealed.”
Who was Roosevelt Hill, Jr.?
Roosevelt Hill, Jr. grew up in Bessemer, Alabama, in Jim Crow South, graduating from high school in the mid-1950s. As a student at Tennessee State University, he pursued his dream of being a sax player. He majored in music, and became president of the college marching band, also known as “The Aristocrat of Bands.”
He pledged Alpha Phi Alpha, marched with The Student Nonviolent Action Committee, and earned his commission in the U.S. Army. Rather than joining the military and taking the commission, he chose to move to Denver and teach at Whittier Elementary School. However, in 1970, driven by the Black Student Alliance, the University of Colorado-Denver (UCD) created the Black Studies Department, and Hill was chosen to lead it.
“The group kicked down the door of the dean’s office. The dean tried to ignore us. We got his attention,” said former UCD student Helen Rigmaiden. “Then the dean said we needed to hire a director. We picked Mr. Hill.”
The Outcry
Friday, July 24. Ten days after the shooting.
The El Paso County Grand Jury decided not to indict Little on a Thursday night, but did not make a public comment until the next day at a crowded press conference held by Russel. The jury convened over three nights, hearing approximately 10 hours of testimony from 16 witnesses including Myrtes and Little.
It took the grand jury one hour to reach its decision.
“When we returned to Colorado Springs for the grand jury hearing, we all went in individually and told our stories,” Mines said. After the hearing, we gathered outside the court only to find there had been no indictment.”
State Public Defender Rolle R. Rogers said of the incident, “All agree the untimely death of Mr. Hill was a most unfortunate incident.”
According to the Gazette Telegraph, before the grand jury announcement, Little was put on a train and transferred by the Army to his home in Kentucky.
The decision caused considerable controversy both in Colorado Springs and Denver, and Russel was severely criticized by those who said the case should have been tried in open court.
A request to reopen the Hill-Little matter was made in district court on August 6. Denver lawyer Irving P. Andrews filed on behalf of Myrtes and student-trip participant Bynum.
The UCD Black Students Association requested a parade permit from the City of Colorado Springs to demonstrate disapproval of Russel’s actions. Meanwhile, Black law students in Denver wrote to the Denver Post and accused Russel of improper use of the grand jury.
“It is the function of the proceedings of a grand jury to ascertain whether prima facie grounds for a criminal prosecution have been made out sufficient to warrant a trial by jury,” the complaint read. “A grand jury, however, is not authorized to try the case and determine guilt or innocence of the accused, or to pass on the credibility of the testimony presented to it.”
On August 12, Urban League of the Pikes Peak Executive Director John S. Holley also weighed in. He wrote: “The fact that Hill was a Black man while the man allegedly holding the gun was White is ample reason to take every precaution to ensure that a just decision is rendered in the case, since there has been substantial history in the United States courts of dealing lightly with the death of Negroes where Caucasians are involved.”
District Court Judge William M. Calvert refused to reopen the case. It was never revisited.
And then it was over.
Cecil Glenn, who had been considered for the director position at the time of Hill’s hiring, was hired as his replacement.
To this day, few of those who knew Hill and were impacted by his killing speak about that night, still traumatized by it and the grand jury decision. His body was flown back to Bessemer, Alabama, his hometown. Myrtes moved to Chicago, where she eventually remarried. She passed away in her 80s.
Several Black leaders viewed Hill’s killing as another instance of racial injustice within the legal system. The failure of El Paso County to issue an indictment has sparked outrage and many calls for justice over the past five decades. After all the community protests and appeals for further investigation, multiple efforts to reopen the case have been unsuccessful.
Many of the students impacted by the killing left the school, with some blaming themselves for El Paso County not bringing an indictment against Little. Minter dropped out. Moses and Rigmaiden transferred to CU-Boulder.
No one was ever the same. Their innocence was gone.
“After Mr. Hill was killed I took incompletes and took the summer off,” recalled Rigmaiden, who eventually graduated in 1977.
“We were so young,” she said. “This stuff doesn’t just go away. Roosevelt Hill should never be forgotten.”
Sidebar
Scholarship Honors Legacy of Roosevelt Hill, Jr.
By Helen Rigmaiden
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech in 1965 during the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama had a powerful message, one with beautiful cadence and refrain: “How long? Not long.”
In the case of the murder of Roosevelt Hill, Jr. 55 years ago, not much was done by the University of Colorado-Denver community. At the time of his death, he was director of the Black Studies Department. He was murdered while purchasing gas in Colorado Springs by a Fort Carson soldier who worked part-time at the station. Mr. Hill, a former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was reaching into his pocket when he was shot in front of his wife and two students – the youngest of whom was only 17.
How long? Not long.
The seeds of Black Studies at the University of Colorado-Denver were sown by a determined group of students. Among them was Hiawatha Davis, a visionary leader whose story is as remarkable as it is inspiring. Davis served 18 months at the Colorado Correctional Facility in Canon City for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War.
The conscientious objector emerged from incarceration with a renewed commitment to social justice. After his release, he enrolled at UCD and became a driving force behind the creation of the university’s first Black Studies Department.
It was Davis and his peers who organized Mr. Hill’s fateful prison visit in 1970, convinced that it would transform lives inside and outside of the prison walls.
I was a UCD student when Mr. Hill was murdered. In 2023, I revisited his story. I was moved to action after learning that CU-Boulder had honored six Latinx students who lost their lives in a 1970 car bombing. I resolved that Mr. Hill’s sacrifice had gone unrecognized long enough.
I reached out to CU President Todd Saliman and requested that the university formally honor Mr. Hill’s legacy. Saliman agreed, setting into motion a collaboration effort with UCD Vice Chancellor Antonio Farias and the Black Studies faculty and involving the six students who had travelled with Mr. and Mrs. Hill.
I felt the it was my responsibility to ensure that Mr. Hill’s story would not be forgotten. Honoring him would bring healing for those students, as well as the community, who still carry deep wounds from that horrible night.
After 18 months of dedicated work, the Roosevelt Hill, Jr. Endowed Scholarship was established this year. This scholarship will offer current inmates in Colorado the opportunity to enroll in UCD’S Prison Education Program, where they can earn certificates and build pathways to brighter futures.
For those students who knew Mr. Hill, this initiative is both a tribute and a fulfillment of his mission, and ours.
As the community gathers to remember Mr. Hill, the first director of the Black Studies Department, and a tireless advocate for justice, we reaffirm our commitment to the values he embodied. This scholarship is more than a memorial. It is also a promise to keep his vision of hope, education, and equality alive for generations to come.
How long? Fifty-five years.
For more information regarding this program, you may email me at hprigmaiden402@gmail.com.
If you would like to donate to the Roosevelt Hill, Jr. Endowed Scholarship fund, go to:
Links
https://digitalcollections.ppld.org/nodes/view/997883
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/08/02/archives/colorado-negroes-amused-by-slaying.html
