Helena Montana is a town of about 30,000 people in the widest state in this country.

It's covered in snow throughout much of the year and its full of Caucasians.

African Americans represent less than half of 1% of the population in the state,

and in Helena the total number of African Americans is 159 people.

One of them is the mayor. He hails from West Africa and he belongs to the

last 2% of the people in Helena who were born outside this country.

Two years ago this week I went to visit Wilmot Collins.

Very nice to meet you. Getting home is snow off my ear.

Ah, thank you.

I wanted to know more about his story.

I grew up in Liberia and my parents worked for Firestone, Firestone Plantation Company.

I'm sure you've seen the Firestone Tires and BF Goodrich Tires. Those

material come from Liberia. We have the rubber trees, we tap the rubber and then we ship

the raw material here and you make the tie. So my parents work for the company.

We didn't have to struggle for anything. On the weekends we traveled different cities,

playing baseball because I was on the our baseball team, me and my brothers.

And weekends we weren't playing baseball. My parents had a portrait farm, we went selling chickens

and we'll go from town to town. So yeah, things were great.

In the sixth grade Wilmot went off to a Catholic boarding school where he stayed through high school.

During his senior year there was a coup in Liberia. The president was killed and the military

took over. Wilmot eventually became a political science major at the University of Liberia

in the capital city of Montrouvea where he became politically active and joined the student

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