Black history project underway at Central School museum

Kimberly Pinter, office manager at the Museum at Central School in Kalispell, has embarked on a project to document the history of the Flathead Valley’s early black families.

It’s a “labor of love,” she said, and an effort that will be underway well beyond the end of March when she and her husband, Museum Executive Director Gil Jordan, retire.

“I have five weeks left at the museum and then I can really work on this,” Pinter said.

She has been intrigued by Kalispell history since arriving here in the late 1970s.

“Coming from Southern California, I couldn’t believe how white this area was,” she remembers.

When she learned how integrated the John White family and other early-day Kalispell black families were in their community, it became even more compelling to tell their stories.

Pinter has enlisted help from Graeme Baker, a 1941 Flathead graduate and local history enthusiast. Baker, who now lives in Libby, has been tracking U.S. Census data and poring over newspaper archives and other documentation to piece together the history of local black families.

Baker grew up next door to the John White family on Seventh Avenue West in Kalispell.

“One of my earliest childhood memories was visiting with John White Sr. on the front porch of that house,” he recalled. “His references to the fact he was born into slavery was my introduction into what slavery was. I was maybe 5 years old. He was very kind to me.”

Baker is still trying to nail down the specific reasons why Kalispell became an early enclave for a small black community.

“What prompted black communities to move to different spots? I don’t know,” he said. “A black person in that day and age (late1800s/early 1900s) didn’t want to go into a vacuum. If one person established themselves, then others would follow.

“I would like to know how John White Sr. made his presence known in Demersville and Kalispell, and he did it in a positive way,” Baker said.

ELLEN BAUMLER, an interpretive historian with the Montana Historical Society, recently told an audience gathered for the John White Lecture Series at the Museum at Central School that her research indicates nearly every Montana community had black residents in the state’s early years. Sometimes it was just a single black family; other times a small number of black residents.

The railroad brought some blacks to Montana. Steamboat travel may have been another avenue for blacks to arrive in the state, she said. Montana’s gold-rush era of the 1860s and 1870s could have attracted some blacks, too, Baumler said.

Buffalo soldiers, the nickname given to the U.S. Army’s “Negro Cavalry,” brought blacks to Demersville, the frontier town that preceded Kalispell, in the late 1800s.

Early-day black residents often led a transient life.

“That’s part of the problem in trying to trace these folks,” she said.

Baumler shared information about a number of black people who left their mark on Montana starting in the 1800s.

“African-Americans have made an indelible mark” on Montana, she said, but added it’s largely an unwritten history. “Historians haven’t sought those stories out.”

There was an undercurrent of prejudice as blacks moved to Montana in the early 1900s, she pointed out.

“Whites and blacks simply didn’t mix socially in Montana. They were more sprinkled in,” Baumler said about the African-American population.

The 1870 U.S. Census showed 183 African-Americans in Montana. By 1900 the number of black Montanans had grown to 1,523, a seemingly large number when compared to North Dakota’s 286 black residents the same year.

For whatever reasons, Montana offered a more compatible environment for the state’s earliest black residents.

More than a century later, the last official census in 2010 showed 4,027 blacks in Montana, just 0.41 percent of the state’s population.

Pinter hopes the work she and Baker are doing to document black history in the Flathead Valley will provide lasting insight into the contributions of a small but notable community that is part of this area’s historic tapestry.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.