'Black in the Flathead': The evolution of a DIL news project

One year ago in January, I was a guest in the Museum at Central School’s John White Speakers Series, where I participated in a panel discussion on “Flathead News.”

That heady topic could lead any number of directions, but one of the most interesting paths that led from that day was my interest in the historic black population of Kalispell and vicinity.

That’s because I discovered that John White, the Central School bell ringer, whom the series was named after, was the son of another black man named John White, an early settler of Demersville and Kalispell, who had been born into slavery in North Carolina in 1855. I researched the archives of the Daily Inter Lake for references to both men, and did a column on Jan. 17 last year sharing some of what I had found.

I discovered that both men were beloved members of the community. At the time of his death, the elder White was lauded by no less than Sidney M. Logan, the former mayor of Kalispell, who wrote a column praising White that appeared in the Inter Lake the same day as White’s obituary on March 31, 1934.

As I wrote last year, Logan noted that White “had been honored and beloved by generations of boys and girls, by faculty, by trustees, by the whole Kalispell community and by all who knew him….”

Logan continued: “There was about John White a dignity that commanded the respect of everyone. Unobtrusively but loyally, perseveringly and industriously, he went about his work during the 33 years he lived in Kalispell as an employee of the school board. He asked no favors or advantage except the right to labor. He intruded nowhere. His intimates were few, his friends legion. He had his own race pride, as genuine as that of the purest Caucasian. He reared his family with the tenderest care and transmitted to them much of his own fine character... He was always ready to meet friendship with friendship, courtesy with courtesy, dignity with dignity.”

Obviously, reading this just a year-and-a-half after the Ferguson riots, I was struck by the tone of mutual respect between the races that had been present 80 years ago in Kalispell and wanted to know more.

When I received a phone call from Kimberly Pinter, the office manager for the Museum at Central School, informing me that she had been researching local black history as well and wondering if the Inter Lake would be interested in doing a story.

Of course, I said yes, and put Kim in touch with Lynnette Hintze, the features editor at the Inter Lake. Lynnette jumped on the possibility of a series, but we all realized that the best way to approach the project was slowly so that we could develop as much information as possible.

Kim was poring over the resources at the museum, and I started looking through the Inter Lake’s archival material for anything I could find on well-known black figures from Kalispell’s history. Kim, with help from former Kalispell resident and history buff Graeme Baker, provided Lynnette a list of names to focus on, and I used that to narrow my search.

In the last two months, the project has jelled and Lynnette began to put her reporting skills to work finding the right people to interview to make long-ago history come alive. Fortunately, with the aid of the internet, we were able to open doors to the past that would have been impossible a few years ago and we located three former residents who shared their memories about “growing up black” in Kalispell.

You can read their stories in today’s Inter Lake on both the front page and the Montana Life page, and more Monday on the front page and the NW Montana page. Scattered throughout are examples of original reporting that appeared over the last 100 years about the black community in the Flathead. I think you will find those shed considerable light on race relations in Montana as well.

Our emphasis was on the “living history” that a few of our older citizens can recount, but remember that even with this extensive series, we are still only able to touch on a few representative lives. We didn’t try to tell the stories of our present-day black population. Perhaps that will be a future effort, and of course if you have story suggestions to supplement what we have done today and tomorrow, I am always eager to hear from our readers with story ideas.

We hope you enjoy this series, which we are calling “Black in the Flathead: A Living History.”

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana.