Montana’s African American Heritage Resources Project

The Montana African American Resources website was created between 2008 and 2016 with support from Montana Cultural Trust, National Park Service, and the Montana History Foundation. The website offered a gateway to explore the Montana Historical Society's rich collections that document Black history and tell the story of African American heritage in Montana.

Although African American people never comprised more than one percent of the state’s population, they have been in the place that would become Montana since the earliest days of non-Indigenous presence and contribute greatly to Montana’s culture, economy, and religious life. Each corner of the state has significant stories to tell about African American people’s experiences in the West.

Resources include:

• story maps
• property inventories
• lesson plans
• census information
• essays
• first-person narratives
• photographs
• manuscript collections
• artifacts