Black history museum surprises folks in Idaho

Anne Wallace Allen

BOISE, Idaho — As the new director of the Idaho Black History Museum, Kimberly Moore’s job starts with convincing people that such history actually exists.

Ask most people in or out of Idaho about the state’s black history, and you’re likely to get a blank look. There just aren’t many black people around — 11,000 is Moore’s estimate, less than 1 percent of Idaho’s 1.4 million population.

“It’s interesting, when you talk to people, what they know or they think they know,” said Moore, who left Detroit’s Motown Historical Museum to take the position in Boise this month. “African Americans have made a significant contribution to this state.”

Black history in Idaho starts with York, the slave of William Clark who traveled through what is now northern Idaho 200 years ago with explorers Clark and Meriwether Lewis.

The museum tells the story of York and the black explorers, fur traders, gold prospectors, miners, ranchers and others who came after him. Some traveled to Idaho to find work, land or religious freedom. Others came to escape oppression in the post-Civil War South.

The museum is set in a tiny former black Baptist church. Exhibits introduce people such as Gobo Fango, a West African who was born in 1855 and adopted by white Mormons. He started a sheep ranch near Oakley.

There’s also a piece on Les Purce, the first black city councilman in Idaho (in Pocatello, in 1973), who went on to become the state’s first black mayor.

Another covers the 1940 visit of famed opera singer Marian Anderson. Anderson was snubbed in other cities because of her skin color, and Boise was no different: She stayed at the Hotel Boise but had to enter and exit through the back door.

The black history in the exhibits is bittersweet, mixing triumphs on the frontier and during World War II with the oppression that was a fact of life.

What sets Idaho’s black history apart from other states’ is the stain left by the Aryan Nations.

The white supremacist group was founded in the mid-1970s by Richard Butler, who bought 20 acres near Hayden in northern Idaho. Butler declared bankruptcy in 2000 and gave up the land. After his death in 2004, the compound’s grounds were turned into a park dedicated to peace.

Even though Butler is associated with Idaho, he wasn’t from the state, noted Janet French, a member of the museum’s board.

“He was basically real estate shopping for some remote place where the federal government would leave him alone,” French said. “My understanding is the locals up in northern Idaho were incensed their character was being tarnished by a bunch of people who weren’t from Idaho in the first place.”

Idaho isn’t used to the kind of national attention generated by the Aryan Nations. The quiet, rural state still produces one-third of the nation’s potatoes, and it has a huge strip of national forest in the middle of it.

But people around the country still link Butler and the group. Moore said friends and relatives were alarmed that she was considering a job here. Her grandfather warned her about Boise skinheads.

Moore said she hasn’t seen any skinheads, and she loved Idaho right away. The museum held a gospel music workshop earlier this month, and she was surprised and moved when 90 percent of the people who turned up were white. That doesn’t happen in places with a large, established black population, said Moore.

“These were just regular everyday folk, not singers, who love gospel music,” she said. “People think it’s so backward here. To me, it’s far more progressive here than a big city like Detroit.”

Moore hopes to rehabilitate Idaho’s reputation through her work at the 8-year-old museum. She’s putting on several events in honor of Black History Month, and she’s increasing educational and community programs to get more schoolchildren through its doors.

“African American Idahoans had to fight a little harder and they had to be a little better,” Moore said. “It’s easier when you have a million black folks in a city to make sure they are represented, that there are programs, and there are opportunities in every sector. These people had to shine a little brighter, work a little harder, just to get an equal place at the table.”

(Associated Press)