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.
“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.”
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 here – 11,000 is Moore’s estimate, less than 1 percent of Idaho’s 1.4 million population.
But black people have a history in Idaho. It starts with York, the slave of William Clark who traveled through Idaho 200 years ago with explorers Clark and Meriwether Lewis.
The Idaho Black History Museum tells the story of York and of the black explorers, fur traders, gold prospectors, miners, ranchers and others who came after him. Some traveled to Idaho for the same reasons as other newcomers – for work in the mines or on the railroad, for religious freedom, or simply as settlers needing land.
And others came to escape oppression in the post-Civil War south.
The museum is set in a tiny former black Baptist church – a space that Moore hopes to quadruple in size. Exhibits introduce characters like Gobo Fango, a West African who was born in 1855 and adopted by white Mormons. He started a sheep ranch near Oakley.
There’s a piece on Les Purce, the first black city councilman in Idaho (in Pocatello, in 1973) who went on to become Idaho’s first black mayor.
Another covers the visit of famed singer Marian Anderson in 1940. Anderson was snubbed because of her color in other cities during her opera career, and Boise was no different: She stayed at the Hotel Boise, but only on the condition that she enter and exit by 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.
Idaho’s black history in that respect is no different from that of other states. What sets it apart is the stain left by the infamous Aryan Nations.
That anti-Semitic, white supremacist group was founded by neo-Nazi Richard Butler, who bought 20 acres near Hayden, in north Idaho, in the mid-1970s. Six years ago Butler declared bankruptcy and gave up his land. He died in 2004 at the age of 86, and the grounds of his compound were turned into a park dedicated to peace.
Even though Butler is associated with Idaho, he wasn’t from the state, noted Janet French, who is on the museum’s board.
“He was basically real estate shopping for some remote place where the federal government would leave him alone,” said French. “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. It’s a quiet, rural state that still produces one-third of the nation’s potatoes, and it has a huge swath of national forest in the middle of it.
But people around the country heard about Butler and Idaho, and they remembered. Moore said friends and relatives in Detroit were alarmed that she was considering a job here; her 87-year-old grandfather warned her about Boise skinheads.
Moore 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, Moore said.
“These were just regular everyday folk, not singers, who love gospel music,” Moore 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 eight-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 the doors. She wants them to learn about the contributions that black people have made to Idaho and to the world.
“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.”
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