Researching Race and Region in the North American West

Cover image: Jim Jackson sits in front of his handyman shop at the top of Reeder’s Alley, Helena, Montana, circa 1930. Courtesy of Montana Historical Society Photo Archives

Cover image: Jim Jackson sits in front of his handyman shop at the top of Reeder’s Alley, Helena, Montana, circa 1930. Courtesy of Montana Historical Society Photo Archives

“Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to the ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of the settler states in the American West.”

In Black Montana, readers of all different backgrounds and levels of historical education can engage a period of Montana’s past that, most likely, has not yet informed the way you think about the history of the Big Sky. This book moves through the important moments and themes in Montana’s Black history from the territorial days into the twentieth century. Along the way I hope to show that not only is this history essential to our understanding of the “Last Best Place,” but also that the world of the first Black Montanans shaped all others that it came into contact with, ultimately, challenging what we might still mean when we call this place “home.”

If, like myself, you are a lifelong student of Montana and Western history, I invite you to also contemplate the central argument of this book: Black history in Montana cannot be viewed apart from its wider settler colonial context. The U.S. expansion and invasion into lands that European maps called Montana Territory after 1864 was only the beginning of an ongoing struggle between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region. The various justifications and “logics” of this social structure leaned heavily on nineteenth century ideas about “race.” Black Montanans were as conspicuously racialized as any other group, and we should not neglect their voices which tell a story of dissent, paradox, participation, and complexity, woven together to offer radical ideas of home and belonging.

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  • Praise for Black Montana

    “In addition to excavating an often erased social history of Black Montanans—itself an important contribution—Anthony Wood's sophisticated use of settler colonial theories provides a powerful analysis of racial formation, exclusion, and elimination. A work of cutting-edge scholarship, Black Montana is essential reading for those seeking a deeper understanding of the structures of race in the American West.”

    —JEFFERY OSTLER, University of Oregon, author of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas

  • Praise for Black Montana

    “Through meticulous research, Anthony Wood has crafted a fascinating and nuanced account of the rise and fall of Montana’s Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black Montana explores how the small Black population navigated both opportunities and discrimination while straddling roles as both colonizers and outsiders…This is a must read for anyone interested in the Black West.”

    — LAURIE MERCIER, University of Washington, Vancouver, author of Anaconda: Labor, Community, and Culture in Montana’s Smelter City

  • Praise for Black Montana

    “The history of African Americans in the Rocky Mountains is still underdeveloped. Black Montana is important both for its work on bringing attention to the experience of Black Montanans and as a case study in the epistemology of settler colonialism. This is a very cutting edge book.”

    —JASON E. PIERCE, Angelo State University, author of Making the White Man’s West

  • Praise for Black Montana

    “This is a compelling book worth of attention not only by scholars of Western and Black histories but by any reader looking for thorough, honest analysis of the contradictions of race and nation building in U.S. history.”

    -Tobin Miller Shearer, University of Montana

  • Praise for Black Montana

    “This work rests on a firm scholarly foundation and should be the standard-bearer for this far-too-neglegted subject for some time.”

    -The Journal of American History