RUN: The Wilmot Collins Story—From Liberian Refugee to the First Black Mayor in Montana

Wilmot Collins tripped over a corpse in Monrovia while hunting for something, anything, to eat. He found a tube of toothpaste instead. That’s how Run: The Wilmot Collins Story opens.

Daniel Blake Smith tells the story of a Liberian refugee who became the first Black mayor in Montana’s history. Wilmot Collins fled Liberia’s civil war in 1994. He landed in Helena, a town that was 95 percent white. He took the oath of office in January 2018, under the state capitol’s 125-foot dome.

Collins ran from soldiers in Monrovia. He ran the length of an airport terminal to reach his daughter Jaymie. She was sixteen months old. He’d only seen her in photographs before. He ran a mayoral campaign in 2017 that flipped assumptions about who wins in Trump country.

Smith builds the family first, then lets politics take over. Jamesetta, Collins’s stepmother, raised nine children on a schoolteacher’s discipline and a conviction that education was the only inheritance worth giving. Maddie, his wife, spent her senior year of high school as an exchange student in Helena. That was a decade before the war reached Monrovia. A scholarship, a host family, and a friendship with Bruce and Joyce Nachtsheim. That one year became the hinge the whole story swings on. Nothing here reads like coincidence once you see how Smith lays the groundwork.

The book doesn’t flinch from what Helena cost the Collinses. Someone spray-painted racist graffiti on their garage. Neighbors scrubbed it off before the family had to look at it. Smith gives both moments equal weight. That’s the honest version of small-town life: bigotry happens, but it doesn’t get the last word.

Collins’s voice carries most of the book, drawn from what Smith calls dozens of interviews with the family. That’s a strength and a soft spot. Reconstructed dialogue from a 1986 bus ride or a decades-old phone call can only be so exact. Smith admits it in the preface.

The book lands in the small civic details. A hundred-year-old church member tells the new mayor his first job is to plow the streets. A third grader named William Collins wants to know how the mayor got his name. He hears the answer and declares them related.

Run: The Wilmot Collins Story reads like a family story that ends at a podium, not a campaign biography dressed up as inspiration. Smith never loses track of that order. For readers who want their politics with a pulse: Run earns a spot next to the biographies that remember a person before they remember an office.