Education and action: How Idaho Black History Museum reflects past, works for future
Tucked away at the edge of Boise’s Julia Davis Park at the end of South 5th Street stands a small, inconspicuous-looking church that’s situated between the Idaho State Museum and Zoo Boise.
The structure has everything that you’d expect in a church: a wood-paneled exterior with large, carved wooden doors, stained-glass windows down either side and a spacious main chapel.
The building was Idaho’s first Black church. Except the building is no longer a church.
A collection of artifacts and a treasure trove of information on the history of Black culture in Idaho now sit inside the building, which was first built as St. Paul Baptist Church in 1921, before its eventual closure and reopening as the Idaho Black History Museum in 1999.
Located at 508 Julia Davis Drive, the museum is open on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Step inside the building today and you’ll find a book from American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” that was sent from Douglass to Abraham Lincoln.
Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818 and remained a slave until 1838, when he escaped from Maryland before taking a train to New York City and declaring himself a free man.
Douglass was a dedicated abolitionist, working globally as a speaker and advocate for the anti-slavery movement. Douglass met with Lincoln on three occasions, and ultimately helped to end slavery in the United States both before and after Lincoln’s assassination.
Just below the book sits an original copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, just one of 27 surviving copies. One copy was sold by broker Sotheby’s in 2016 for over $2 million.
On the other side of the room, erected in a large display case, stands a full set of Ku Klux Klan robes found in the attic of a hotel in Silver City, Idaho. It’s accompanied by other Klan memorabilia, including a small pocket knife that was discovered in Idaho in 2017.
The two collections of items, on opposite sides of the small chapel, seem like they shouldn’t exist in the same room together.
But the mission of the museum goes beyond preserving history. While educating individuals about the past, the museum also pushes people to consider how they can find solutions for the future.
“We do a lot of things that a museum typically doesn’t do,” the museum’s executive director and board president, Phillip Thompson, told the Idaho Statesman in a recent interview and tour. “But because we’re taking the model from the older Black church ... your institution, it’s there to help remedy the ills that afflict your congregation, right?
“It may not be your religious congregation, but those who come in are members of the Boise community.”
Black history in Idaho to the 1800s
In 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, a Black man named Lewis Walker left his home in Maryland and settled in Silver City, a small town in the Owhyee Mountains, roughly 50 miles miles southwest of Boise as the crow flies.
Between his arrival in 1864 and his death in 1916, Walker went on to own 12 businesses in Silver City, including five houses, a saloon, a barber shop and a shoe shop, according to displays in the museum.
While Walker was busy becoming a successful businessman in Silver City, a Black woman by the name of Jennie Hughes became the first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Idaho, in 1899. This was possible only because Idaho integrated schools in 1871, more than 80 years before the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ruled racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
In earlier years, Black miner George Washington Blackmon arrived in Idaho in the 1870s by way of Iowa. Blackmon soon became a pioneer of mining in the state and now has several landmarks named after him, including Blackmon Peak and Washington Basin in Central Idaho.
“As it pertains to Black people in the history of America, Idaho afforded an opportunity that was not afforded to us elsewhere,” Thompson said.
That sentence is a large point of emphasis for Thompson: He feels that Idaho gets a bad reputation, when historically it was one of the more progressive states in the nation.
“The notion that a Black man in America can come to a place and be a productive member of society, and honored by that society, is entirely contrary to what everybody assumes to be true about Idaho,” Thompson said.
Idaho is just one of seven states to not have a recorded lynching of a Black person, according to the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, which has long tracked such statistics.
“I’m not saying we were some bastion of some racial panacea for everybody,” Thompson said, referring to Chinese persecution in the state in the late 1800s.
Exhibit featured Martin Luther King Jr.
Although small, the museum is well-spaced to guide visitors through a tour of Black history in Idaho via the museum’s permanent exhibit, “The Invisible Idahoan,” which splits the history and stories of Black people into three eras: “Black Pioneers,” from 1805 to 1919; “The Black Idahoan in Transition,” which covers 1920 to 1968; and “The Enduring Presence and Contributions of Black Idahoans,” which oversees 1969 to the present day.
The museum also has at least four temporary exhibits that change approximately every two months, Thompson said.
One of the current temporary exhibits is dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. and was created for MLK Day in mid-January. It has remained in place for Black History Month, running all through February.
The exhibit is meant to remove the “romanticism” from King’s story, as Thompson describes it, and focus on his nonviolent attempt at creating legislation and legal change to protect Blacks in America.
The exhibit includes a bust of King, a copy of King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech, and an enlarged version of an anonymous letter, reportedly delivered by the FBI, that King received in 1964 encouraging him to commit suicide.
There are also several handouts for children, including rulers that list Black leaders in American history and educational comic strips created by Thompson’s daughter.
“Making these comics is an easy way to reach the kids,” Thompson said. “They get their little one-on-one, and more importantly, we have something for them. Meet them where they are.”
Learning from a painful past
Thompson recalls a recent encounter when a man in his mid-20s complained about the KKK memorabilia displayed in the museum. The individual went as far as writing a letter to the museum and demanding it be removed, Thompson said.
His response?
“I just chuckled,” Thompson said.
“I put it right here because it just makes it so much more realistic,” he continued. “That especially up here (in Idaho), we’re so insulated from all this. No, that was here in Idaho, people. I didn’t get this shipped in from, you know, Memphis. It was here.”
The museum isn’t there to just display one side of the story, Thompson said. His goal isn’t to “vilify” one side or the other, he said, but to tell a story and educate people on the history of the state.
Thompson is working on exhibiting the stained-glass window of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that was recently removed from the Boise First United Methodist Church (Cathedral of the Rockies).
But the museum’s work goes beyond just education, Thompson said. A large part of the mission is to create real change in the community — his congregation.
The museum is working with the Red Cross to help with local blood drives, specifically within Black communities, but also with the Red Cross’ home fire campaign.
The campaign aims to install free smoke alarms in homes that don’t have them and educate people about fire safety. Thompson said he sees the program as a socioeconomic issue that especially affects the African-American community in Idaho.
Earlier this month, the Black History Museum crowdsourced money to build a grave marker for John West, the first Black voter in the state of Idaho.
“We can fix these things, but me talking about that to death ... just saying, ‘Hey, there’s a disproportionate number of fires in lower income facilities,’ but not coupling that with, ‘This is what we’re gonna do to fix it … ’ ” Thompson said, “I’m sorry. It makes you look good, it makes you feel good, which is not my thing.”
Thompson said he looks to King’s mission. People should never forget what he did, Thompson said, but at the same time, they need to look forward rather than backward.
“We’re still talking about King and civil rights movements. Listen, guys. I mean, we’ve done that,” Thompson said. “We’ve achieved what he’d hoped to achieve from a legal standpoint.
“Talking about it, and educating, that is nice. But if you’re not doing the latter part, the actual solution and implementing and working with people who can help you do so, it’s pointless.”
This story was originally published February 23, 2022 at 12:00 PM with the headline "Education and action: How Idaho Black History Museum reflects past, works for future."
