The Remarkable Eleven
One generation out of slavery. Eleven extraordinary lives.
Born on a Texas slave plantation, Rev. K.D. Stroud and his wife Lulu Magee Stroud raised eleven children in Colorado Springs. Historian John Stokes Holley named them the Remarkable Eleven in The Invisible People of the Pikes Peak Region. They used education as the technology of their time — and changed a city, a college, and a country.
Kimbal Stroud Goffman
Firstborn · The Atlantic Monthly, 1939
The eldest of the Eleven — a political strategist a sitting governor consulted, and one of the few Black women to publish in The Atlantic Monthly. Her essay “Black Pride” named the idea nearly thirty years before the movement caught up — written while she worked as a cook and maid, later anthologized beside Du Bois, Baldwin, and Hughes.
Kelley Dolphus Stroud
Phi Beta Kappa · 1928 Olympic Trials
Jack Stroud
Apollo Program Engineer
Helped send Americans to the Moon — the family’s literal reach for the stars, one generation removed from a plantation.
Effie Stroud Frazier
First Sachs Scholar · Chemist
Top of her class, winner of a National Chemistry Award, recipient of a personal letter from W.E.B. Du Bois, invited to the White House — and the catalyst for the Sachs Foundation. Yet the only work Colorado Springs offered a Black woman was cleaning homes. She lived that paradox for 85 years.
Tandy Stroud
Publisher · Voice of Colorado
Founded the first newspaper-publishing company in the Rocky Mountains owned by a person of color. Scholar-athlete, and grandfather of Frank “Rio” Shines.
Nina Stroud Pellerin
Educator · 1954
The first certified Black teacher in the Colorado Springs public school system.
Albert “Ben” Stroud
Founder · Ben’s Express Depot
Built Ben’s Express Depot and the Stroud Brothers enterprises — including the first contracted hauling service in Colorado Springs, in business for more than fifty years.
Bobbie Stroud
Music & Art Prodigy
Transcribed her father’s dream-born hymn, Anthem of Heaven, a century before it filled a museum hall.
Lu Lu Stroud Pollard
Civic Leader
Honored in Colorado Springs, where Lu Lu Pollard Park bears her name.
…and their siblings — the remaining lives that complete the eleven, their stories still being gathered from census records, parish registers, and family memory.
The legacy didn’t stop at eleven.
From a Texas plantation to the Apollo program, the opera stage, and the age of AI — the line carried forward to Joseph Stroud, who sat with Mandela and a president, and to today’s authors, founders, and athletes.