Benjamin Franklin Stapleton (November 12, 1869 – May 23, 1950) was the mayor of Denver, Colorado, for two periods (comprising five terms), the first from 1923 to 1931 and the second from 1935 to 1947.

[1] At the conclusion of his war-time service, Stapleton returned to Denver to practice law and first became actively interested in politics, helping found the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

[2] Stapleton's political career began in 1904 as police magistrate, where he remained until 1915, when President Woodrow Wilson appointed him postmaster.

On the night of the election, Denver Klansmen burned crosses on South Table Mountain to signify their victory.

Stapleton ordered the Good Friday vice raids on April 10, 1925, bypassing the Klan police chief he had appointed under pressure from KKK leaders.

The raid rounded up over 200 bootleggers, prostitutes, and gamblers and exposed a dozen Klan members who had been serving in the police force, who were ultimately dismissed.

On June 30, 1925, Colorado Klansmen voted to banish Stapleton, Senator Rice Means, Secretary of State Carl S. Milliken and six other members of the mayor's city hall faction from the Klan in a statement of loyalty to Grand Dragon Locke, who was under fire from national Klan forces.

The close relationship Stapleton seemed to have with land-owning political backers who stood to benefit, conspicuous among them H. Brown Canon of Windsor Farm Dairy, were a factor in his loss in the 1931 mayoral election to George D. Begole.

After two previous attempts, the name of the neighborhood was changed to Central Park amid increasing political and racial pressure on August 1, 2020,[5][6] due to Stapleton's adherence to white supremacy and controversial membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

[4] Some time before his appointment, while Cranmer pondered a boulder field that was surmounted by large projecting rocks on either side, his thoughts drifted to a memory of something he had once seen while on tour in Sicily: an ancient Greek open-air theater with stone seating.

[4] Whereas Cranmer dreamed of clearing a starry-skied stage, Stapleton saw the boulders strewn there as the members of a naturally formed, one-of-a-kind 'rock garden', and wanted them preserved.

[4] Unbeknown to Stapleton, Cranmer was attempting to persuade the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to quietly go ahead with plans to demolish the rocks with dynamite.

In early 2018, Stapleton's great-grandson, Walker Stapleton, a candidate for governor of Colorado, was accused of paying off the History Colorado Center to remove mention of the family's ties with the white supremacy movement and the beginnings of the Ku Klux Klan in America from their exhibitions.