Born: 19 January 1847, United States
Died: 23 February 1919
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Elizabeth Piper
African-American educator, journalist and activist Elizabeth Piper Ensley is remembered for work as a leader in the Colorado suffrage movement and in local women’s clubs.
In 1869, Piper travelled to Europe as a young woman. After returning in 1870, she began a circulating library in Boston and became a public school teacher in Trenton, New Jersey. While living in Washington, D.C. in the 1880s, she was a faculty member at the historically Black Howard University, and later taught at Alcorn State University in Mississippi. She would later use her connections in Boston and D.C. to help raise funds for relief efforts when the Silver Panic of 1893 caused many miners in the Denver region to lose their jobs.
When Ensley moved to Denver in 1887 with her husband and children, African-Americans made up only about 2 percent of the city’s population. Her husband died the following May and their infant child, who had just been born in March 1888, passed away that June.
Ensley went on to become the Denver correspondent for the national publication of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), The Woman’s Era, the first monthly newspaper published by and for African-American women.
Having previously worked with women’s suffrage groups in Boston, Ensley joined a campaign to add a state women’s suffrage amendment to the 1893 ballot in Colorado that would enable women to vote in all elections, not just school board elections. She served as treasurer of the Colorado Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association, and helped raise funds for the initiative in addition to working to persuade African-American men to vote yes. With the approval of the amendment that November, Colorado became the second state where women won the vote.
As a clubwoman, Ensley founded the Colorado Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (CACW) in 1904, uniting eight organizations from across Colorado to present community and educational programs like the George Washington Carver Day Nursery. She also served as the second vice president of the Colorado Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, the only African-American member of the predominantly white board. She co-founded the Colorado Colored Women’s Republican Club with Ida Clark DePriest to educate African-American women on the process and importance of voting, as well as the social and political issues involved.
In 2020, Ensley was named an honoree of the National Women’s History Alliance and inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.