Montana still struggles to bridge the gap between its white majority and American Indian communities. But Monday honors King, and - 40 years after his death - blacks remain rare here.
Montana is not the most white state. It is the least black. According to the latest U.S. Census population estimates, 0.43 percent of Montana's 944,632 residents are black. There are only 4,094 black people here, which is also numerically the smallest black community of any state in the nation.
That can make being black in Montana a solitary experience.
“I remember my first roommate in college,” said Acen Chiles, a former University of Montana football player who's lived in Missoula since 1993. “In the middle of the night, he was peeking out from under the covers to look at me. I finally asked him what's up. And he said, ‘I've never been around a black person in my life. The only thing I know about black people is what I see on TV.' ”
Then there's what we don't see. We don't see billboards or commercials of black families skiing, or buying hunting gear, or hiking mountains. Those are bedrock elements of Montana's social attractions. Is there something about Montana's welcome mat that discourages people of color from crossing the border?
Christine Kaufmann, a state representative and member of the Governor's Advisory Council on Civil Rights, said the Pacific Northwest has suffered from an outlaw reputation.
“There's a reason why the Aryan Nations tried to organize in the five Northwestern states in the 1980s,” Kaufmann said. “They called it ‘The Northwest Imperative.' Their idea was: If you stay east of the Cascades, you don't have many people of color to get rid of.”
That wave of high-profile racism has receded, but Missoula's had its share of flashpoint incidents lately. Two high school students were sent home on Halloween for showing up in KKK robes. Four black UM students were arrested in a botched drug robbery in November, along with one white and one Asian accomplice. Chiles said that incident has been hard to get past.
“Anybody can commit a crime - it doesn't matter what color you are,” he said. “But after those guys, in most of the stores I went to around Missoula, I got that look: Was I the guy wearing a ski mask, Tasering people?”
Joyce Mphande-Finn came to Montana in 1993 after immigrating from Malawi. She said many friends wondered why she wanted to come to a state known for its “whiteness.” Unpacking that word, Mphande-Finn said it implied “no crime, no bad things, a safe place to be.” But “whiteness” also included an assumption that things nonwhite were trouble.
“When those boys did that crime, what was written in the editorial pages?” Mphande-Finn asked. “It was, ‘You should not be hiring these kids from out of state. We should be hiring our own Montana kids - not these boys from California that commit crimes.'
“It's like, if you are not white, you are bringing bad stuff here. It's so generalized. But when I heard about that crime, the first thing that went through my mind was, ‘I hope they're not black kids.' They're feeding into the stereotype. It validates the people who think that way.”
On the other hand, Mphande-Finn has had to confront her own presumptions. One fall day she was driving just as a Grizzly football game was letting out, and her car ran out of gas. In her rearview mirror, she saw a pickup with two white men in baseball caps pull up behind.
“I thought: ‘Oh, my God - cowboy rednecks - what will they do to me?' And one ran up to me and said, ‘Ma'am, can we help you?' And they pushed my car into a church parking lot. They totally broke my stereotypes.”
Missoula's YWCA is organizing a rally in memory of Martin Luther King on Monday. But even among its own staff, director Cindy Weese said trying to relate to the black experience feels off-balance.
Weese described a recent effort putting together the Missoula version of a national YWCA ad campaign. A draft version included a photo of a black family, and it triggered an uncomfortable moment around the table.
“We were looking at each other and saying, ‘People will know it's not Missoula,' ” Weese said. “Missoula doesn't look like that.”
Weese speculated that white Montanans may be so afraid of making a social blunder, they don't reach out to racial strangers.
“We shun them because we feel we're going to screw up somehow,” she said. “My guess is we aren't more prejudiced than anywhere else. But when you have a lack of diversity, you don't get to practice - you don't get to deal with your own internalized prejudices and biases. Because of that, I'd assume it would make someplace like Montana and Missoula less welcoming to people of color.”
Missoula County's black population has grown almost
53 percent since 2000, to about 450 residents. It's still small enough that Mphande-Finn said she feels compelled to greet any black person she sees on the street.
“It's hard for us to understand how that is - we aren't people of color,” said UM Grizzly men's basketball coach Wayne Tinkle. “It's things like having a place to go get your hair cut. It's tough.”
Tinkle said he gets questions from prospective student-athletes about the size of the black population in Missoula.
“I don't think we've lost any recruits because there's such a small population of African-Americans here,” Tinkle said. “Once they come up and visit and see the type of people that surround the university, it's not a negative. It's known as a college town.”
Chiles said he stayed for the open spaces and outdoor opportunities. He likes to snowboard, although none of his black friends understand why.
“Not that they were walking on pins and needles, but they wondered how come I didn't come back to California,” Chiles said. “There are the stereotypes out there for people of color, that Montana's too cold, or this or that. But it comes down to the jobs.”
Finding work in Montana has never been easy. That may explain not only why we're the least black state in the nation, but almost the smallest.
Building relationships is hard work. One thing Mphande-Finn said she liked best about the YWCA's Martin Luther King Day events was the opportunity to meet a wider community and practice breaking down those social blunders.
“When do we stop being afraid of offending and making a mistake?” Mphande-Finn asked. “So when do we learn? We need to take those baby steps, make those connections, so we can really say we are equal.”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com
Montana passed its share of Jim Crow laws
The residue of Montana's black history has faded like the newspapers on which it was printed.
The Colored Citizen didn't last a year when it started publishing in Helena in 1894. The New Age made it about a year in Butte between 1902 and 1903. The Montana Plaindealer did best, coming out weekly in Helena from March 16, 1906 to Sept. 8, 1911.
Back then, the U.S. Census registered black residents in every county of Montana (there were 28 counties at the time). The Montana Federation of Colored Women's Clubs was a network that included Great Falls, Billings, Butte and Helena. It lasted from 1921 to 1978. The black-owned Hawthorne Club on West Front Street in Missoula is now an architect's office.
Between 1870 and 1930, Montana was more attractive to black people than any neighboring state. African-American Heritage Resource Project historian Patty Dean cites census reports showing that Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming all trailed Montana for most of that period. Today, those states all outrank us both numerically and as a percentage of population.
“Like a lot of people, they were trying to find economic stability,” Dean said of black migration after the Civil War. “They went where earnings were best.”
At first, it was the transportation business. A few blacks tried their luck in the early days of Montana's gold rush, but more came with the steamboats during Fort Benton's commercial heyday. Others helped build the railroads that crossed the state.
When mining became more industrialized, large numbers of blacks moved to Butte, Helena and Anaconda for jobs. Dean said she's found records of three black-owned mining companies around Butte, including one financed by East Coast black businessmen.
The cattle industry attracted its share of black cowboys. But as the 20th century closed the open range, Montana towns began to turn against their non-white neighbors.
In his book “Sundown Towns,” University of Vermont researcher Jim Loewen tracked a widespread practice of legally excluding or discouraging blacks from living in northern states.
“Like Wyoming (which invented the practice), several Montana towns passed ‘Green River Ordinances,' ” Loewen said of rules ordering undesirable people out of the city limits by sundown. His records indicate Roundup adopted such a rule “formally directed against vagrants,” although Loewen cited one person who grew up in Roundup and was told by his father that the law was directed at blacks.
University of Montana graduate student Glenda Eruteya researched the state's racial laws in 1981. She documented the state's formative tug-o-war between territorial “Gov. Sidney Edgerton, a radical abolitionist Republican from Ohio recently appointed by President Lincoln, and a legislature with a narrow balance of power between Republicans and Democrats Š representing a voting populace that contained substantial numbers of Southern sympathizers.”
Montana's Jim Crow laws fell into three main categories. Blacks, American Indians and Asians were initially excluded from voting or participating in court cases until the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution overturned that barrier in 1870.
The Legislature also expended considerable energy on the question of school segregation, passing several laws insisting on separate schools for “children of African descent.” Ironically, it was the taxpaying citizens who turned back that tide. It cost too much to maintain separate schools, and voters passed levies in several cities to better fund inclusive school systems. The Montana Legislature abandoned its attempt at school segregation in 1883.
Efforts to prohibit interracial marriage produced some of the longest-lasting Montana laws. Those legal battles continued from 1909 to 1951. Ultimately, attempts to build a wall down the marriage aisle were thwarted by Montana legislators' tendency to marry for love rather than race.
“Attempts to enact such legislation failed at least twice in the Montana territorial legislature,” Eruteya wrote, “apparently in reference to the frequency of marriages of white men with Native women during the earlier decades of settlement.”
It wasn't until the Korean War, when American servicemen started returning with Asian brides, that political force was sufficient to repeal Montana's Miscegenation Statute. Only three legislators voted against repeal, and Gov. Aronson signed it on Feb. 2, 1953.
But by then, Montana's black, Chinese, Japanese and similar racial communities had dwindled almost beyond recall. Loewen's census figures for Miles City report 81 black residents in 1910, but just four in 1960. While the African-American population hovered around 1 percent of the state's total at the turn of the 20th century, it was barely half a percent by the 21st.
Elsewhere, the national average black population is 12.81 percent. Mississippi has the greatest concentration of blacks, with 37.13 percent claiming that heritage.
Those figures have shifted over the course of the decade. In Missoula County, the “white alone” slice of the pie has shrunk about 1 percent, while the black share has more than doubled between 2000 and 2006. Numerically, that's a boost from 275 black residents at the start of the decade to 443 in 2006.
Observances planned for Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Sunday
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech “Beyond Vietnam,” 6:15 p.m., Jeannette Rankin Peace Center library, 519 S. Higgins Ave. Call 207-6162.
Monday
Rally, 5:15 p.m., Caras Park, co-sponsored by YWCA Missoula. Speaker: Kao Nou Thao, facilitator with the Missoula chapter of the National Coalition Building Institute. Music by Amy Martin.
Celebration moves to St. Paul Lutheran Church, 202 Brooks St., 5:45 p.m. Keynote address by UM law professor Ray Cross. Church choir performs and youth essayists and poets will be recognized.
AmeriCorps volunteers with WORD's Family Resource Centers and the Western Montana Literacy Support Corps host a luncheon at the Florence Carlton Community Church in Florence at 11:30 a.m. for senior citizens and Florence Carlton Middle School students.
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