Montana Digital Newspaper Project

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Montana Historical Society is announcing the digitization of two African American newspapers. In this week's Big Sky Chronicles, Beartooth NBC looks at the Montana Digital Newspaper Project.

The Montana Historical Society received a grant from the National Endowment of Humanities to digitize 150,000 pages of the state's most historic papers. Two of those papers are complete runs of African American papers published in Helena and Butte.

“The Colored Citizen was published in Helena in 1894 for several months and The Butte New Age was published in Butte in 1902 and 1903. These were papers with African American publishers and editors who were trying to give a voice to that population,” says MT Digital Newspaper Project, Christine Kirkham.

Montana Digital Newspaper Project Coordinator Christine Kirkham says at one time there was a prominent African American presence around the state. 

“It's not widely know that there was an African American population here quite early and that they had a very distinct point of view and were very aware of themselves as a political minority and wanted to be sure that their voices were heard,” says Kirkham.

Kirkham says the papers provided that platform on some important political issues.

“During the fight for the capital, The Colored Citizen in Helena advocated very heavily for Helena to be the capital city. They had a dispute with the Anaconda company about whether they would hire African Americans to work in mines and the smelters down there, so they published ads against Anaconda being the capital,” says Kirkham. 

She says although many papers are available through print and microfilm, digitization brings a new level of historic research that wasn't possible before.

“They're searchable so you can type in your family name, your hometown, the name of a business and retrieve any of the newspaper pages that mention that term,” says Kirkham. 

Kirkham says with the next round of funding will add a third African American paper.

Although the papers are digitized, they won't be posted on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America website until the end of March. 

Story by Kristin Price, Beartooth NBC.
Sponsored by Big Sky Plumbing & Heating of Helena.
Copyright ©2012 Beartooth Communications Company. All Rights Reserved.