Posted by (+10255) 16 years ago
Recognizing Montana's African-Americans
I'm going to post the entire article. Sorry about that . . . I know it's long. But sometimes the Tribune restricts access to it's archives.
Larry, if you feel this is violates "fair use" practices and will result in copyright problems for you, by all means delete it.
--Hal
"Projects Work To Record, Recognize History Of State's African-Americans"
By Karen Ogden
GREAT FALLS TRIBUNE
February 5, 2006 http://www.greatfallstrib...50302/1002
Blind at age 51, Edward Simms used his ears to enjoy his favorite sport.
In the crack of a bat and the roar of the crowd he could hear a high fly, a bunt, a foul.
Give him "a nice warm day, a seat in the bleachers and a fast team to oppose our boys and I'd rather attend a ball game than eat," Simms told a Great Falls Tribune reporter in 1911. One of Great Falls' early black entrepreneurs, he first came to Montana with a steamboat crew in 1873.
Remarkable as Simms' story was, it faded when he died, as did those of scores of other African-Americans who shaped Montana's history.
Now, as the nation observes Black History Month, the state is launching its first coordinated effort to collect their stories and preserve them for future generations.
"Our history, not only in this state, but in most places, was not captured," said Bob Harris, a Great Falls Air Force retiree who, along with local historian Ken Robison, is a driving force behind the project. "It's something that's rather late, but we need to do it."
Aided by a $14,000 legislative appropriation, the Montana Historical Society is kicking off a two-year project to gather and catalogue all of its resources linked to African-American history - now uncatalogued and scattered throughout its collections - in a searchable computer database.
The project will fill a gaping void of information about a people who, although they remain a small minority, made a lasting impression on Montana.
"We haven't done justice to our own history here," Robison said.
Uncharted territory
Harris got to know Robison while working on the Vinegar Jones cabin restoration project at Gibson Park.
A Chouteau County farm boy turned Navy captain, Robison pursued a master's degree in history from George Mason University in Washington D.C. after he retired.
He now applies his information-gathering skills - he worked for more than 25 years in Navy intelligence - to the history of Chouteau County, where he is a volunteer for Fort Benton's Overholser Historical Research Center.
As Robison dug into the lives of Chouteau County's pioneers, he ran across references to African-Americans at every turn.
Blacks, such as freed slave James Beckwourth, were among the early mountain men to explore Montana. Later, many African-Americans steamed up the Missouri as crewmen on riverboats.
The staff of Fort Benton's famous Grand Union hotel was black when it opened in November 1882, with the exception of three white supervisors, according to Robison.
The peak of Fort Benton's black community was in 1880, when more than 80 African-Americans lived there. Only three people identified themselves as black in the 2,000 census.
"Whether it was the fur trade or the Cow Island fight or the whiskey trade - any part of Fort Benton history - there were blacks participating," Robison said. "And yet I found almost nothing that had been written about those participants."
It was uncharted territory on Montana's frontier - a historian's dream.
So he and Harris put their heads together and brought the concept of a large-scale black history research project to the Montana Historical Society, which embraced the idea.
Joining Harris and Robison as citizen members of a project advisory committee is Alan Thompson, nephew of the late Alma Jacobs. She was the driving force behind the construction of the current Great Falls Public Library building, where she was head librarian. One of Montana's most prominent black leaders, she later served as the state librarian.
The legislative grant, from the Montana Cultural Trust, is only half of the $28,000 the Historical Society asked for.
But Kate Hampton, who is heading up the effort with the State Historic Preservation Office, said it's a good start "to really understand and put African-American history where it belongs in the pantheon of great Montana stories."
History at your fingertips
No one knows how many artifacts or how much information pertaining to black history the Montana Historical Society has in its archives.
Much of it is contained in books and state records that aren't coded to show that they're relevant.
The goal is to catalogue it in a searchable database.
"One day we hope to have a Web site dedicated to it through the Historical Society so people could put in key words and pull up images," Hampton said.
For example, a student could type in the keyword "women" to view a collection of ribbons given to members of the "Colored Women's Society."
Or they could search for "politics" and bring up a biographical sketch of William M. Morgan, who in 1894 was elected as a constable in Great Falls.
Robison's research shows Morgan to be the first African-American elected to public office in Montana.
He and Harris want the stories of local black leaders like Morgan and Simms to be taught in Great Falls classrooms, along with the likes of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.
Robison's independent research is available in a computer database at the Overholser Research Center in Fort Benton, although he hopes to one day link up to the historical society's Web site.
Harris hopes information or collections gleaned from the project can be shared with the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
The Smithsonian announced Tuesday that it had chosen a site to build the museum.
The state plans to hire a project coordinator this month who will finish a basic annotated bibliography of the state's materials by summer.
The bibliography will bolster grant applications to expand the project to libraries and historical society archives statewide.
"I'm hoping this will begin to reach out to other towns in Montana that had substantial early black communities like Helena, Butte, Miles City ... and have others do something there," Robison said.
Materials scarce
As the Historical Society project gets under way, Robison is combing newspaper archives, cemetery records and other documents in a similar effort for Cascade and Chouteau counties.
In cooperation with the Great Falls Genealogy Society, he is writing biographical sketches of African-Americans who lived in the Great Falls area up through 1920.
So far he's finished roughly 300 sketches and expects to submit 200 more in the next few weeks.
People tracing their family tree can access the list at the Genealogy Society office in Great Falls. The African-American sketches are part of a 20,000-name "Early Settlers of Great Falls"database for all early residents of Great Falls.
The work, at least for Montana, is pioneering.
To be sure, black history is not in the forefront of Montana's social consciousness.
In fact, Montana was among the last states to make Martin Luther King Day an official holiday in 1992, six years after it was declared a federal holiday.
Until now, one of the biggest efforts to catalogue and compile black history resources was by Alma Jacobs, the Great Falls Public Library founder.
Jacobs and her sister, Lucille Smith Thompson, created a bibliography of newspaper articles called "The Negro in Montana: 1800-1945."
Though the 23-page document is invaluable for researchers, it is only a start.
To this day it is the state Historical Society's only bibliography of black history resources.
"It was pretty devastating to find o
I'm going to post the entire article. Sorry about that . . . I know it's long. But sometimes the Tribune restricts access to it's archives.
Larry, if you feel this is violates "fair use" practices and will result in copyright problems for you, by all means delete it.
--Hal
"Projects Work To Record, Recognize History Of State's African-Americans"
By Karen Ogden
GREAT FALLS TRIBUNE
February 5, 2006 http://www.greatfallstrib...50302/1002
Blind at age 51, Edward Simms used his ears to enjoy his favorite sport.
In the crack of a bat and the roar of the crowd he could hear a high fly, a bunt, a foul.
Give him "a nice warm day, a seat in the bleachers and a fast team to oppose our boys and I'd rather attend a ball game than eat," Simms told a Great Falls Tribune reporter in 1911. One of Great Falls' early black entrepreneurs, he first came to Montana with a steamboat crew in 1873.
Remarkable as Simms' story was, it faded when he died, as did those of scores of other African-Americans who shaped Montana's history.
Now, as the nation observes Black History Month, the state is launching its first coordinated effort to collect their stories and preserve them for future generations.
"Our history, not only in this state, but in most places, was not captured," said Bob Harris, a Great Falls Air Force retiree who, along with local historian Ken Robison, is a driving force behind the project. "It's something that's rather late, but we need to do it."
Aided by a $14,000 legislative appropriation, the Montana Historical Society is kicking off a two-year project to gather and catalogue all of its resources linked to African-American history - now uncatalogued and scattered throughout its collections - in a searchable computer database.
The project will fill a gaping void of information about a people who, although they remain a small minority, made a lasting impression on Montana.
"We haven't done justice to our own history here," Robison said.
Uncharted territory
Harris got to know Robison while working on the Vinegar Jones cabin restoration project at Gibson Park.
A Chouteau County farm boy turned Navy captain, Robison pursued a master's degree in history from George Mason University in Washington D.C. after he retired.
He now applies his information-gathering skills - he worked for more than 25 years in Navy intelligence - to the history of Chouteau County, where he is a volunteer for Fort Benton's Overholser Historical Research Center.
As Robison dug into the lives of Chouteau County's pioneers, he ran across references to African-Americans at every turn.
Blacks, such as freed slave James Beckwourth, were among the early mountain men to explore Montana. Later, many African-Americans steamed up the Missouri as crewmen on riverboats.
The staff of Fort Benton's famous Grand Union hotel was black when it opened in November 1882, with the exception of three white supervisors, according to Robison.
The peak of Fort Benton's black community was in 1880, when more than 80 African-Americans lived there. Only three people identified themselves as black in the 2,000 census.
"Whether it was the fur trade or the Cow Island fight or the whiskey trade - any part of Fort Benton history - there were blacks participating," Robison said. "And yet I found almost nothing that had been written about those participants."
It was uncharted territory on Montana's frontier - a historian's dream.
So he and Harris put their heads together and brought the concept of a large-scale black history research project to the Montana Historical Society, which embraced the idea.
Joining Harris and Robison as citizen members of a project advisory committee is Alan Thompson, nephew of the late Alma Jacobs. She was the driving force behind the construction of the current Great Falls Public Library building, where she was head librarian. One of Montana's most prominent black leaders, she later served as the state librarian.
The legislative grant, from the Montana Cultural Trust, is only half of the $28,000 the Historical Society asked for.
But Kate Hampton, who is heading up the effort with the State Historic Preservation Office, said it's a good start "to really understand and put African-American history where it belongs in the pantheon of great Montana stories."
History at your fingertips
No one knows how many artifacts or how much information pertaining to black history the Montana Historical Society has in its archives.
Much of it is contained in books and state records that aren't coded to show that they're relevant.
The goal is to catalogue it in a searchable database.
"One day we hope to have a Web site dedicated to it through the Historical Society so people could put in key words and pull up images," Hampton said.
For example, a student could type in the keyword "women" to view a collection of ribbons given to members of the "Colored Women's Society."
Or they could search for "politics" and bring up a biographical sketch of William M. Morgan, who in 1894 was elected as a constable in Great Falls.
Robison's research shows Morgan to be the first African-American elected to public office in Montana.
He and Harris want the stories of local black leaders like Morgan and Simms to be taught in Great Falls classrooms, along with the likes of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.
Robison's independent research is available in a computer database at the Overholser Research Center in Fort Benton, although he hopes to one day link up to the historical society's Web site.
Harris hopes information or collections gleaned from the project can be shared with the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
The Smithsonian announced Tuesday that it had chosen a site to build the museum.
The state plans to hire a project coordinator this month who will finish a basic annotated bibliography of the state's materials by summer.
The bibliography will bolster grant applications to expand the project to libraries and historical society archives statewide.
"I'm hoping this will begin to reach out to other towns in Montana that had substantial early black communities like Helena, Butte, Miles City ... and have others do something there," Robison said.
Materials scarce
As the Historical Society project gets under way, Robison is combing newspaper archives, cemetery records and other documents in a similar effort for Cascade and Chouteau counties.
In cooperation with the Great Falls Genealogy Society, he is writing biographical sketches of African-Americans who lived in the Great Falls area up through 1920.
So far he's finished roughly 300 sketches and expects to submit 200 more in the next few weeks.
People tracing their family tree can access the list at the Genealogy Society office in Great Falls. The African-American sketches are part of a 20,000-name "Early Settlers of Great Falls"database for all early residents of Great Falls.
The work, at least for Montana, is pioneering.
To be sure, black history is not in the forefront of Montana's social consciousness.
In fact, Montana was among the last states to make Martin Luther King Day an official holiday in 1992, six years after it was declared a federal holiday.
Until now, one of the biggest efforts to catalogue and compile black history resources was by Alma Jacobs, the Great Falls Public Library founder.
Jacobs and her sister, Lucille Smith Thompson, created a bibliography of newspaper articles called "The Negro in Montana: 1800-1945."
Though the 23-page document is invaluable for researchers, it is only a start.
To this day it is the state Historical Society's only bibliography of black history resources.
"It was pretty devastating to find o
