Sanderlin fought for voting rights for African American males by lobbying at the local, territorial, and federal levels.

[7] His British father was Wilson Sanderlin who immigrated to the United States and lived in North Carolina before settling in Tennessee.

[9] It provided secondary education for African Americans in Cincinnati, other places in Ohio,[10] and across the country, including biracial children of Southern planters.

[1][3] The South Platte River separated an encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho Native Americans from the young frontier town of Denver.

Denver served Gold Rush miners by providing restaurants, saloons, gambling, and stores.

He paid premium prices for good food, like having oysters transported from the Missouri River or purchasing high quality dairy products locally.

That was in Colorado’s early day, when the pioneer spirit gave room for little inclination to make race distinctions or draw any other kind of social line… In those days, men like B. L. Ford, H. O. Wagoner and E. J. Sanderlin of Denver, put up buildings and conducted enterprises which were counted among the leading business efforts.

Lewis Henry Douglass, William Jefferson Hardin, and Sanderlin fought for equal educational opportunities.

[15] African Americans lost their voting rights the following year when the territorial legislature amended its laws.

[16] Sanderlin, William Jefferson Hardin, Henry O. Wagoner and Barney Ford lobbied to Congress, the territorial legislature, and residents to only accept statehood until all males could vote in the state.

[15] After a number of years, Colorado achieved statehood on August 1, 1876, and the constitution did not restrict voting rights.

At the end of his life, he was "comparatively a poor man,"[4] but he still had four contiguous lots in Denver worth $500 (equivalent to $16,956 in 2023).