MISSOULA - As the Missoulian news staff gathered to plan coverage of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we bumped into an uncomfortable fact.

Finding someone in western Montana to represent the results of King's fight for civil rights felt like an exercise in tokenism.

Montana still struggles to bridge the gap between its white majority and American Indian communities. But Monday honors King, and 40 years after his death blacks remain rare here.

Montana is not the most white state. It is the least black. According to the latest U.S. Census population estimates, 0.43 percent of Montana's 944,632 residents are black. There are only 4,094 black people here, which is also numerically the smallest black community of any state in the nation.

By contrast, Montana's American Indian population is the fifth-largest by percentage. The census counted 60,725 American Indians, or 6.43 percent of the population. Just over 90 percent of the rest of the state falls into the category "white alone."

That can make being black in Montana a solitary experience.

"I remember my first roommate in college," said Acen Chiles, a former University of Montana football player who's lived in Missoula since 1993. "In the middle of the night, he was peeking out from under the covers to look at me. I finally asked him what's up. And he said, 'I've never been around a black person in my life. The only thing I know about black people is what I see on TV.' "

Then there's what we don't see. We don't see billboards or commercials of black families skiing, or buying hunting gear, or hiking mountains. Those are bedrock elements of Montana's social attractions. Is there something about Montana's welcome mat that discourages people of color from crossing the border?

Christine Kaufmann, a state senator and member of the Governor's Advisory Council on Civil Rights, said the Pacific Northwest has suffered from an outlaw reputation.

"There's a reason why the Aryan Nations tried to organize in the five Northwestern states in the 1980s," Kaufmann said. "They called it 'The Northwest Imperative.' Their idea was: If you stay east of the Cascades, you don't have many people of color to get rid of."

That wave of high-profile racism has receded, but Missoula's had its share of flashpoint incidents lately. Two high school students were sent home on Halloween for showing up in KKK robes. Four black UM students were arrested in a botched drug robbery in November, along with one white and one Asian accomplice. Chiles said that incident has been hard to get past.

"Anybody can commit a crime it doesn't matter what color you are," he said. "But after those guys, in most of the stores I went to around Missoula, I got that look: Was I the guy wearing a ski mask, Tasering people?"

Joyce Mphande-Finn came to Montana in 1993 after immigrating from Malawi. She said many friends wondered why she wanted to come to a state known for its "whiteness." Unpacking that word, Mphande-Finn said it implied "no crime, no bad things, a safe place to be." But "whiteness" also included an assumption that things nonwhite were trouble.

"When those boys did that crime, what was written in the editorial pages?" Mphande-Finn asked. "It was, 'You should not be hiring these kids from out of state. We should be hiring our own Montana kids, not these boys from California that commit crimes.'

"It's like, if you are not white, you are bringing bad stuff here. It's so generalized. But when I heard about that crime, the first thing that went through my mind was, 'I hope they're not black kids.' They're feeding into the stereotype. It validates the people who think that way."

On the other hand, Mphande-Finn has had to confront her own presumptions. One fall day she was driving just as a Grizzly football game was letting out, and her car ran out of gas. In her rearview mirror, she saw a pickup with two white men in baseball caps pull up behind.

"I thought: 'Oh, my God cowboy rednecks what will they do to me?' And one ran up to me and said, 'Ma'am, can we help you?' And they pushed my car into a church parking lot. They totally broke my stereotypes."

Missoula's YWCA is organizing a rally in memory of Martin Luther King on Monday. But even among its own staff, director Cindy Weese said trying to relate to the black experience feels off-balance. Weese described a recent effort putting together the Missoula version of a national YWCA ad campaign. A draft version included a photo of a black family, and it triggered an uncomfortable moment around the table.

"We were looking at each other and saying, 'People will know it's not Missoula,'" Weese said. "Missoula doesn't look like that."

Weese speculated that white Montanans may be so afraid of making a social blunder, they don't reach out to racial strangers.

"We shun them because we feel we're going to screw up somehow," she said. "My guess is we aren't more prejudiced than anywhere else. But when you have a lack of diversity, you don't get to practice you don't get to deal with your own internalized prejudices and biases. Because of that, I'd assume it would make someplace like Montana and Missoula less welcoming to people of color."

Missoula County's black population has grown almost 53 percent since 2000, to about 450 residents. It's still small enough that Mphande-Finn said she feels compelled to greet any black person she sees on the street.

"It's hard for us to understand how that is - we aren't people of color," said UM Grizzly men's basketball coach Wayne Tinkle. "It's things like having a place to go get your hair cut. It's tough."

Tinkle said he gets questions from prospective student athletes about the size of the black population in Missoula.

"I don't think we've lost any recruits because there's such a small population of African-Americans here," Tinkle said. "Once they come up and visit and see the type of people that surround the university, it's not a negative. It's known as a college town."

Chiles said he stayed for the open spaces and outdoor opportunities. He likes to snowboard, although none of his black friends understand why.

"Not that they were walking on pins and needles, but they wondered how come I didn't come back to California," Chiles said. "There are the stereotypes out there for people of color, that Montana's too cold, or this or that. But it comes down to the jobs."

Finding work in Montana has never been easy. That may explain not only why we're the least black state in the nation, but almost the smallest.

Building relationships is hard work. One thing Mphande-Finn said she liked best about the YWCA's Martin Luther King Day events was the opportunity to meet a wider community and practice breaking down those social blunders.

"When do we stop being afraid of offending and making a mistake?" Mphande-Finn asked. "So when do we learn? We need to take those baby steps, make tMLhose connections, so we can really say we are equal."