In the early 1990s, Wilmot Collins and his wife, Maddie, escaped the Liberian Civil War. Broke and starving, they ended up in Helena, Mont.
“Why do you think we fled?” Collins asked. “We fled because we wanted a second chance.”
Soon after moving to their first home, a neighbor knocked on their door and alerted Collins to hateful graffiti outside his house.
“On my wall was ‘KKK, Go back to Africa,’ ” Collins said.
This wasn’t the first racist threat he had received since his resettlement in the U.S. and Montana. But ironically this moment, nearly 25 years ago, was when he knew Montana would be his home. That’s because that same morning, a brigade of neighbors showed up to help them clean the graffiti.