RUN

Smith tells the story of an African refugee’s journey to America and his later participation in Montana state politics.

Wilmot Collins was born in 1963 in Liberia and was in high school when the nation’s president, William Tolbert Jr., was overthrown in a violent coup. By 1986, the college graduate had witnessed brutal treatment of campus protesters and had “come to realize that Liberia was not a safe place to live.” By the 1990s, it was time for Collins and his wife, Maddie, to find a way out. The two eventually made their way to Ghana, but their ultimate destination was Montana, where Maddie had attended high school as an exchange student while staying with a host family. She appealed to that family for help, and she was able to enter the United States first, in 1991, with Collins joining her in Helena, Montana, three years later. Although Wilmot initially faced bigotry from some locals (including “KKK go back to Africa!” graffiti on his garage), he and his family began “to develop a growing base of support in Helena.” In the 2010s, he became involved in local politics, despite the fact that some in the political world viewed him with “disdain and suspicion.” Collins went on to be twice elected mayor of Helena, in 2017 and 2021—the first person of color to be elected mayor of a Montana city—and he once ran for a U.S. Senate seat. Over the course of this book, Smith effectively details Collins’ extraordinary journey by providing plenty of welcome historical context, particularly when describing the “barbarity unleashed by the Liberian Civil War.” Collins’ survival of such conditions, and his accomplished later life as a progressive politician, together make for a compelling story. Some passages have a lightweight style that brings to mind a magazine profile, rather than a full-length, exploratory biography, such as “Paying it forward was much more than a feel-good catch phrase for Wilmot.” The book as a whole, though, does justice to a distinctive personal story.

A memorable, historically grounded look at a unique tale in American politics.