Eric Mosley was at church Sunday when a man — a stranger — sat next to him. The two struck up a conversation and found out the they had been pilots in the service.
The two exchanged names. “You’re not related to Edna Mosley, the city councilwoman, are you?” the man asked Mosley.
Mosley was blown away.
“So important was her contribution and so pronounced her legacy, that this gentleman, a perfect stranger at a chance meeting, remembered she was Edna Mosley,” her son, Eric, said Wednesday. “Wow.”
Edna Mosley, the first African-American ever to serve on the Aurora City Council, passed away Tuesday night of natural causes. She was 89.
Mosley served three four-year terms on the City Council, beginning in 1992, and was a pioneer, along with her husband, John, in the civil rights movement throughout their lives, in Colorado and elsewhere.
Current Aurora City Councilwoman Barb Cleland served with Mosley in the 1990s. Cleland recalled a woman who taught her great life lessons through the many stories she told.
“It’s so hard to say enough about Edna,” Cleland said Wednesday. “We used to have long talks about race issues, and I truly appreciated her perspective.
“The city of Aurora is much better off because she was a council member. I’m going to miss her.”
During Mosley’s tenure on the council, she helped shape the redevelopment of the former Fitzsimons Army base into what is now the Anschutz Medical Campus, one of the premier medical campuses in the West. She also worked on the transformation of the former Lowry Air Force Base into a community where hundreds of people live, work and shop.
Mosley was a trailblazer in many arenas, her son said. She worked for many years with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and was director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with the University of Denver.
She graduated from Metro State College in the late 1970s, and in 2004 she received an honorary doctorate from Colorado State University.
Also, she was a founder of the Women’s Bank, created at a time when women did not have equal access to financial services.
“She invested her personal money to back a community dream,” Eric Mosley said of the bank.
Barbara Shannon-Banister, head of community relations for the city of Aurora, said Mosley was a “peacemaker” who specialized in diffusing confrontation.
“She certainly wanted to make sure we could arrive at consensus on issues in a peaceful manner,” Shannon-Banister said.
Funeral services have not yet been scheduled. In addition to her husband and son Eric, Mosley is survived by another son, Brian Mosley, and daughter, Edna Futrell. She is preceded in death by her son John Mosley.
Carlos Illescas: 303-954-1175, cillescas@denverpost.com or twitter.com/cillescasdp
