A proposal to add a labor acknowledgment to Denver City Council proceedings returned Tuesday to the Finance and Business Committee only to be postponed for a second time.

Council committee members wanted more time to engage with other members of City Council, as well as “stakeholders” and community members, about specific language and intentions.

The measure, if approved, would require the council to read a labor acknowledgment in addition to the traditional Pledge of Allegiance and the city’s current land acknowledgment, which was adopted in 2020.

District 8 City Councilmember Shontel Lewis, who brought forth the proposal, said she understood that “there are some councilmembers on this body who need a little bit more time to grapple with the language within this resolution.”

“While I acknowledge those concerns around the other communities whose labor was exploited, I understand the desire to make this more inclusive,” Lewis said. “I also think we have to ask ourselves why does making something more inclusive require us to blur the history we are already acknowledging?”

Lewis, who is Black, aims to have the Denver City Council acknowledge that “our country’s economy, infrastructure and resulting generational wealth would not exist as they do today without the stolen and forced labor of enslaved Africans and the visitants who suffered the horror of the trans-Atlantic trafficking and shadow slavery.”

The full text of Lewis’ proposed acknowledgment includes naming the actions of the Ku Klux Klan in Denver and Colorado, among other “uncomfortable” incidents.

While committee members remain receptive to the idea, questions still swirl around crafting “inclusive” language for the acknowledgment.

Denver City Council Pro Tem Serena Gonzales- Gutierrez, who supports Lewis’ proposal, said she had some additional concerns with some of the revised language she was forwarded, noting that additional stakeholder engagement would be required with each of the added communities.

“Just because there are six Latinas on Denver City Council, we do not represent the entire Latino community,” Gonzales- Gutierrez said. “And I know, like in one of the versions, it mentions Latino and so there’s work that would need to be done.”

Lewis argued that inclusivity should not come at the expense of historical clarity.

“We can acknowledge the exploitation of immigrant labor,” Lewis said. “We can acknowledge migrant workers; we can acknowledge the Chinese Exclusion Act; we can acknowledge the exploitation and displacement of Japanese and other communities, and we absolutely should. We don’t have to pretend that all of the histories were the same.”

Lewis added: “And I think that’s really important because slavery was not simply exploited labor. People were stolen from Africa, transported across an ocean, bought and sold as property and forced to labor without compensation or freedom.”

The committee voted to delay the proposal until Sept. 29, when further discussion and revision may be made.

The state of Colorado never had legal slavery. It became a state after the American Civil War and the ratification of the 13th Amendment.