Home on the Range--Where Blacks Are Finding a Haven

Decades of racial isolation are ending in the rural West, where growing numbers of black professionals are staking out new lives far from the tensions that have come to characterize many of the nation’s cities.

What they find for the most part in this open, sparsely populated land is that prejudice, when it does exist, is based on ignorance, not hatred. Most blacks and whites have no personal reference point for mistrust, no reason to fear a community that is generally free of crime, drugs, poverty.

The common enemy that unites people here is not the apprehension of others; it is the weather and the natural forces that threaten survival.

Only 8,000 African-Americans live in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, an area that, along with northern New England, has the smallest percentage of black population in the United States. But social mobility, the recruitment of out-of-state black athletes by Western universities and interracial births in towns near military bases are changing the mix.

Whether the African-Americans arrived by plane and car or are descended from families that came by wagon train more than a century ago, a common thread runs through their conversations about life in the mountain states--relief. The relief of not having to deal with urban violence. The relief of being in a place where a person is more apt to be judged by what he brings to the community than by the color of his skin.

“Attitudes are clearly different here,” said Dr. Taylor Haynes, a Louisiana-born urologist who moved to Cheyenne nine years ago. “People are judged on merit. The sense of community is stronger than any place I’ve lived. As far as being black is concerned, it’s never been an issue, in my personal or professional life.”

Haynes slipped out of his operating gown in the hospital’s locker room and put on his jeans, bandanna and boots. It was 5 p.m. and Haynes--chairman of the Pole Mountain Cattlemen’s Assn., part of the old-family network that used to run Wyoming--was headed for his 20,000-acre ranch outside town.

“Can you imagine me being chairman of a cattlemen’s association in Louisiana?” he laughed. “Why, they’d sooner take back my leased land.”

Said Oliver Wilson, an admissions counselor at the University of Wyoming in Laramie: “Here I’m so much more relaxed, not having to deal with those things I grew up with in Chicago.

“If someone tried to sell me drugs on the street here, I feel that I could grab the guy by the shirt and pour the stuff into the gutter. In the city that could cost you your life.”

Wilson shudders remembering Chicago’s streets: threats against his life because he refused to join a gang; fear that the city would ensnare him before he could escape; the death of his best friend, shot three times in the head last October.

“It was just my mom being a tough, positive influence that got me through that time,” he said. Wilson came to Laramie in 1983, as a freshman at the university, and when he talks to high school classes around the state these days he reminds students not to take their lifestyle for granted. “I’d have given anything to grow up in Wyoming like you,” he tells them.

“On the East Coast people are ignorant about minorities, and that ignorance is combined with an arrogance about being white,” said Adeniyi Coker, a Nigerian-born professor of theater at the University of Wyoming who has also lived in New York City and Denver. “Here, there’s ignorance--and whether the people realize they’re ignorant or not, I don’t know--but there’s not arrogance.”

When Coker walked into a barber shop after first arriving in Laramie, the barber eyed him uncertainly, then admitted, “I’ve never cut black hair before. I don’t know how.” Coker thanked him and drove two hours to Denver to get his hair cut. “At least he was honest,” Coker said. “I appreciated that.”

Although Coker now gets his hair cut in Laramie, the incident underscores the cultural singularity of a place where you don’t hear rap music on the radio or find restaurants featuring ethnic food. It is a place where newcomers--black or white--are expected to fit in, be good neighbors and not feel superior because of who they are or what they do or how much they earn.

“Any time you deride someone--by telling a Polish joke or a North Dakota joke or whatever--it builds the feeling that it’s an allowable excuse to dislike people, and that’s offensive,” said Phillip Callister, a white Montana rancher whose 15 children include two adopted black sons.

Sociologists say that racial barriers traditionally are fewer in rural regions, at least outside the South, than in metropolitan areas. There is less economic competition and more shared appreciation for the land. The differences that separate people, in terms of income, education levels and lifestyles, are often less significant. In Montana, the average black household income is 87% of what whites earn, compared to a national figure of 58%.

In Laramie and Cheyenne, where 95% of Wyoming’s 4,000 blacks live, there are no real lines that racially separate communities.

“In many areas of the isolated West, minorities don’t pose a threat,” said Cruz Torres, a sociologist at the University of Denver. “But as social mobility increases for all ethnic groups, some people will suddenly find themselves competing for limited resources. It’s just a gut reaction, but I think you find that as resources become scarce, prejudice is apt to increase. We’re very generous when there’s enough to go around.”

No one contends that the rural West--where Native Americans have long complained of their treatment--was or is unblemished by racism and racial stereotyping. A white-supremacist movement, the Aryan Nation, that established itself in northern Idaho in the 1970s has been all but driven out of business because of a lack of public support and law enforcement vigilance. But racism survives in subtle ways, said Patrick Jobes, a Montana State University sociologist.

It exists, he says, not because of personal experience but through a “ubiquitous national prejudice that is circulating” as a result of negative images of minorities in the media, particularly television.

One black professional renting a home in Laramie, for instance, received a lengthy lecture from the landlord about the danger of drugs. Whites often automatically assume all blacks at the University of Wyoming are athletes with scholarships. About half are.

Black social worker Deborah McGriff tells of a cafe in Casper, Wyo., falling silent when she walked in for breakfast. She sensed curiosity, not hostility, in the reaction; some of the patrons apparently had never seen a black person in town before.

“My experience in Atlanta was that racism was treacherous and covert,” said Carl Hart, who is studying neuroscience at the University of Wyoming. “In the West it’s more overt and I find I’m happier dealing with it on that level. But you have to ask yourself, if people don’t perceive racism to be a problem, why should they work to eliminate it?”

The history of the early Western days passed to us through popular literature and Hollywood movies ignores almost entirely the important contributions that blacks made in settling a frontier. As far back as the 1850s, U.S. soldiers penetrating the Southwest found, to their amazement, black Indians--the result of interracial marriages in tribes that had welcomed runaway slaves from the South.

Two of the 10 U.S. cavalry units that served on the Indian frontier were black (their re-enlistment rate was higher and their desertion rate lower than in the white units) and one in four of the cowboys who made the post-Civil War cattle drives out of Texas on the Chisholm, Kansas and Goodnight-Loving trails were black.

The cowboy who invented rodeo bulldogging, Bill Pickett, was black, as was Ben Hodge, one of Sheriff Wyatt Earp’s deputies.

Now this forgotten history is receiving some attention. The first chapter of Time-Life’s forthcoming three-book series on African-Americans is about blacks in the Old West. Many Western universities dealt with the subject in seminars during Black History Month in February. Grammercy Pictures in May will release “Posse,” one of the few black Westerns ever made, written by Sy Richardson, whose grandfather was a black Texas wrangler.

And in Denver, several thousand visitors a year use the Black American West Museum as a source for serious research and casual learning. Geraldine Stepp, the museum’s director who left Boston in 1949 to marry a Wyoming rancher, paused on the stairwell. There is a sign on the wall there that she seldom passes without stopping to contemplate.

“If a race has no history,” it says, “if a race has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thoughts of the world and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”