The materials in this collection were primarily the collection of Areba Jackson, friend to Gretchen McRae, who acquired the materials after Gretchen?s death, and kept them until her own death. These materials were then given to the Museum as a wish of Areba Jackson through her attorney Fred Wise.

Gretchen, also Gretta, McRae was born on December 23, 1898 in the Mount Airy Township in the county of Surry in North Carolina. She was born to Bonaparte P. McRae and Martha Ann Hopper, who were also both born in North Carolina. In 1903, following the death of her mother, Gretchen moved with her family, which included her two older sisters Carye and Almena, her father and her grandmother Lucy J. Hopper, to Colorado Springs. 
    

The family bought a house at 822 South Weber Street, in the new, primarily black, neighborhood directly south of the downtown business district and lived there for the length of Gretchen?s life. The family also purchased the home at 805 S. Weber. Both houses no longer stand due to a redevelopment of that area long after Gretchen?s death.

Gretchen attended Lowell Elementary School and later graduated in 1917 from the Colorado Springs High School at the corner of Nevada and Platte. She was pictured in the back of the 1917 yearbook along with three other black students, and was captioned as ?the delight of her teachers.? Immediately following graduation, in 1918, Gretchen moved to Washington D.C. and worked as a clerk and stenographer in the U.S. Department of Interior, after a small job as an employee of a magazine subscription service. She lived with her sister Almena, who also worked as a clerk in the Department of Commerce.

During her time as a clerk in Washington D.C., Gretchen also took art classes at Howard University from 1921 to 1927. Her interest in art carried over when she moved to New York City in 1929. There, she completed three art classes from 1931-1932 at the Cooper Union Women?s Art School. However, her interest in art soon became overshadowed by her interest in civil and social rights, and she moved back to Washington D.C. to live with her sister Almena at 125 South Street.

In 1932 she issued a pamphlet titled ?Have You Depressionitis?,? which addressed economic and social issues of the time. In February 1934 Gretchen finally obtained an appeal conference with Secretary Harold Ickes for the purpose of calling for an end to segregation in the Department of Interior.

However, Gretchen?s time in Washington came to a close with the illness of her grandmother in 1937, and she returned to Colorado Springs to live at 812 S. Weber. After her grandmother?s death she began publication of her journal A Free Republic. This journal was created by Gretchen for the purpose of discussing inequalities that were often overlooked or ignored by other journals of the time. Gretchen desired to provide aid, through open discussion, for the solutions to economic and social ills of the nation.

In addition to her civil and social rights journal, Gretchen ran for the Colorado Springs City Council in 1943. Although unsuccessful in the race, she succeeded in the landmark event of a black woman being placed on the ballot during this era. Throughout her campaign Gretchen became an advocate for the poor minorities of Colorado Springs who were otherwise socially segregated by the community of the time. She continued to publish her monthly publication of A Free Republic, and the last recorded meeting for her publication was in September of 1945.

At the end of 1946 Gretchen?s father died, and Gretchen found herself alone and in financial hardship. At this time Gretchen continued to write about the civil rights and social ills of the country. She would take hundreds of notes on the subjects and produce eloquent and strong essays that she would then try to publish in periodicals across the nation. This did not prove to be as successful as she had hoped. Therefore, Gretchen decided to rely on her rental property at 805 S. Weber.

This business endeavor proved to be another hardship in her life. Shortly after fixing up the rental property and successfully renting it out, the local housing expediters informed her that she was breaking the law by renting her property at too steep of a price. This ruling of the housing expediters cost Gretchen a lot of money and the ability to ever rent her properties again, despite the fact that the rent she charged for them was comparable to other rental properties in the same area. For the next nine years Gretchen was stepping in and out of courtrooms and filing endless amounts of motions and appeals. It is no surprise that Gretchen decided to represent herself in the legal system. The verdict was not in her favor.

Almena returned to Colorado Springs in 1953 to live with Gretchen and the two continued their already exceptionally close sisterhood. They lived poorly, supported on Gretchen?s endeavors as a writer. On December 16, 1978, after the postman discovered that the McRae sisters had not picked up their mail in several days, Gretchen?s body was found, dead of a heart attack. It was determined that she died three days earlier. Along with her body, in the same room, wrapped in paper towels and propped in a chair was the body of her sister Almena. Almena had died three years earlier of natural causes. The media immediately jumped on the bizarre story, but there lies a deeper love here that was unexplored. Gretchen was a loyal and close sister to Almena, and to her entire family, as well as the entire black community. For her, she was unable to accept the fact that Almena had passed on before her. She was undoubtedly lonely. For her, the struggles of her life as a black woman had given her belief that black women and black people in general should stick together.

Gretchen?s body was buried in the Evergreen Cemetery after a funeral at the Angelus Funeral Chapel on January 3, 1979.

The family bought a house at 822 South Weber Street, in the new, primarily black, neighborhood directly south of the downtown business district. The family also purchased the home at 805 S. Weber. Both houses no longer stand due to a redevelopment of that area.

Carye attended Lowell Elementary School and later graduated in 1916 from the Colorado Springs High School at the corner of Nevada and Platte. Following graduation she attended Wilberforce University in Ohio. Carye was the only McRae sister to marry, although she also did not have any children. She married Andrew Cunningham in the mid-1920s and they lived in Cleveland, Ohio where Andrew practiced law. Carye kept in contact with the family through letters. She died in June 1972 after returning to Colorado Springs with a liver ailment two years earlier.