This story was originally published by Daily Montanan: URL: https://dailymontanan.com This story has not been altered or edited. (C) Daily Montanan. Licensed for re-distribution through Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. ------------ 'Black Montana': The forgotten history of the state's families, settlers of color – Daily Montanan ['Darrell Ehrlick', 'More From Author', '- February'] Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00 The fact many people are surprised that Anthony Wood could write an entire book about the Black experience in Montana underscores the reason he did it. A doctoral history student at the University of Michigan and an Anaconda native, Wood wrote the 322-page academic study, “Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930,” as a way of demonstrating the depth of diversity and the troubling politics of race in Montana. In many ways, the response that Wood often gets illustrates the crux of the problem: Predominantly White Montanans are surprised at the depth of racial diversity and involvement of Black Montanans during the early days of the state and territory. However, Wood’s book shows significant Black communities spread throughout Montana, contributing in meaningful ways, and having a shared experience that was similar to those of White settlers. For example, many Black settlers came to Montana for the same reason as Whites: To escape the aftermath of the Civil War and to find a better economic situation. And, like the White community, Black residents experienced the same Montana, establishing a newspaper, taking part in the labor strife between mine workers and management, and also developing a deep love for the natural wonders of the state’s outdoors. However, the same pressures that the entire country experienced, including the Great Depression, the development of the industrialized Western coast, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, drove many Black residents who had been in Montana for generations out of the state, a forgotten but critical part of Montana’s history that Wood hopes to correct through his book. About this book Title: Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930 Author: Anthony W. Wood Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2021 “There’s much more than a single book. There are many, many books,” said Wood, who is White. Wood’s interest in the Black experience in Montana was accidental. After finishing his undergraduate work at Carroll College in Helena, he was an intern for the Montana Historical Society. There he worked on a project that was collecting information about Black heritage and places in Montana. And what he found amazed him because it was a story with plenty of information, yet no one seemed to have recorded it. “I was coming across so much history, so much more than I expected to find,” he said. “ There were thousands of houses and individuals who lived here.” The more he researched, the more it proved that Montana wasn’t just a place for a few cases of isolated diversity. In its earlier days, Montana had a robust Black community that was mostly ignored by other groups, but who experienced the same issues as the other groups, like labor strife, but also having business areas and social clubs. It was this abundance of information that actually propelled him into graduate school. “I had all these experiences, notes and stories and I need to know how to put them together,” Wood said. “It was so much fun to take the primary sources and secondary sources and put them together.” The creation is a book that is a careful study of the Black community throughout Montana, with many interesting surprises, including a newspaper in Butte, and a distinct, large group on the south side of Billings. “The New Age,” a newspaper published for the Black community in the state, based in Butte, Wood said was an unexpected discovery. The New Age’s pages show the Black Montana experience through a contemporary lens, with commentary on race relations throughout the country, but also observations about Montana. “It fills out, but it also complicates and adds insight,” Wood said. For example, the topics in the newspaper give contemporary accounts of mining and labor strife that were found in other papers, but told through the eyes of the Black journalists. Meanwhile, the paper also carried news about social clubs or even outdoors experiences that were nearly identical to those items in papers written by White journalists. “It’s clear that they love Montana for the same reasons as others do. There is a deep sense of belonging to this place, and it’s home. It’s an identity,” Wood said. And it’s that identity that helps reshape the narrative that Montana may have been a transitional or transitory space for Black settlers. Instead, he said it’s clear that Montana was a place they intended to settle, live and be permanently. “It was so much more complex and their own writing and portraits that I was expecting to find,” Wood said. “These were opinions coming straight from the Black community and their sources weren’t institutional voices.” And those experiences would be as familiar as the experiences in other Black communities throughout the United States. For example, the Black community in Billings would all exist in a 10-block triangle in the city’s south side. Even before the legal concept of “redlining,” where property owners would not sell to people of color, it was easy to see evidence of the practice. And yet, Wood also noted that Billings’ south side neighborhoods were far more diverse than many other larger cities, with Black, Latino and German-Russian settlers living together, all of those groups marginalized. As Wood dug deeper, he even found evidence of a strong Black community in his hometown of Anaconda — an enclave that had disappeared long before his birth. “I found these homes and people through the Census. And I said, ‘I’ve been inside these houses. I have friends who grew up in these houses’ and yet, I never knew,” Wood said. “There’s a hidden racial geography of Montana.” Industrialization and the rise of racial tensions through groups like the KKK pushed many out of Montana. Some populations also shifted. For example, Great Falls never lost its Black community, largely because of the establishment of Malmstrom Air Force Base, which helped bring a wider variety of people to the state. Wood also said that his work isn’t meant to reach into current time, and much scholarship is needed to understand the Black Montana experience after the Great Depression. And that experience was tied to a rise in racial tensions, but also economic disaster. Between the two World Wars, Montana was the only state to lose population, something that affected many groups. “You have to understand the bar of entry to Montana. You have to count up all the barriers created in the process (of establishing a state) against non-White people,” Wood said. “Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles — these were where people were converging as places for jobs. At the same time, the population of Black Montanans: What happened to their vision of home? They saw it as a place where they could build a place and have a family. We do ourselves a disservice if we think they wanted to leave.” [END] [1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2022/02/22/black-montana-the-forgotten-history-of-the-states-families-settlers-of-color/ Content is licensed through Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/