Bozeman women advanced standing of Black people in Montana

BOZEMAN, Mont. (AP) — Bozeman was a scrappy upstart wild West town in the fall of 1864 when Richard and Mary McDonald, a Black couple, arrived and decided to set down roots here.

They had somehow left slavery in Missouri in 1863, whether by being freed after the Emancipation Proclamation or simply escaping, no one knows.

Out West, Richard could make good money driving freight wagons all around Montana and up from Utah, and do odd jobs like digging graves. The McDonalds built a home just south of Main Street — a log cabin, later expanded into a two-story house at 308 S. Tracy Ave. It’s one of the oldest houses still standing in Bozeman.

They had four sons, who all died young. Their three daughters — Mollie, Belle and Melissa — all born in the 1870s, survived and grew up in Bozeman.

One hundred years ago, the McDonald sisters would do their part to advance the standing of Black people in Montana.

Crystal Alegria, director and co-founder of the Extreme History Project, recently gave an online lecture on what she’d discovered about the McDonald sisters in a talk entitled, “Lives of Quiet Resilience.”

“Black men and women couldn’t be vocal about civil rights,” Alegria said. Still, “they were always moving themselves forward, educating themselves, pushing for civil rights and better lives for their children, doing it quietly, behind the scenes. But doing it.”

In 1921 the sisters founded a local chapter of the Montana Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, which they called the Sweet Pea Study Group.

Black women formed their own social clubs because they couldn’t join the white women’s clubs popular in that era, Alegria said.

The Montana Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs provided books important to the Black community to local libraries,...