Jill Schramm/MDN Rev. Bob Polk, right, is joined by Minot native Mike Wold, left, now of California and Minnesota, who was in Minot Friday to help the community pay tribute to Polk’s ministry in the Minot area decades ago. Polk had directed a YMCA youth program in which Wold had participated.

Although it has been decades since The Rev. Robert Polk ministered in North Dakota, the people whose lives he touched have not forgotten him. Nor has he forgotten them.

His four-day visit to the Minot area concludes today with his presentation to a joint service club meeting at noon. Polk, who was a pioneer as a Black pastor in North Dakota in the 1950s, came by the invitation of those whose lives were so impacted by relationships formed 65-70 years ago that friendships remain today. Polk, 97, has been back to Minot several times over the years, but this time he was honored for his groundbreaking work in ministry and social justice during tributes held at the Congregational churches in Minot and Garrison.

Described as a trailblazer, Polk said that wasn’t the way he felt about his career.

“In seminary, everybody wanted a successful job. It’s not success. It’s being faithful to what you’re called to do. And so, I felt that what my work was about had to do with social justice and multiculturalism and race relations and pastoring,” he said.

That calling brought him to Garrison in 1953.

After completing his first year of seminary in Connecticut, Polk needed to complete an internship but couldn’t find one due to his race. The seminary suggested talking to the North Dakota Bishop. The bishop said North Dakota doesn’t have Black folks but offered to look for a placement if he was interested. Polk took an internship in Garrison, working with the Congregational Church pastor and living with the pastor and his wife and their 5-year-old daughter for two months.

“The congregation was split on whether they wanted me to come or not, because of color. One woman broke the tie because she’d been engaged with a pen pal in Europe who said how wonderful the Black troops were. They came and freed their community from the Germans. Therefore, she could vote yes for my coming,” he said.

Polk said he had no misgivings about coming to North Dakota.

He previously had passed through North Dakota in 1947 as a college student hitchhiking with a friend from Chicago to Saskatchewan because of an interest in the province’s socialist government. Later that year, Polk came to Lake Metigoshe with a team from the Congregational Church to work with young campers.

“I’ve always been a risk taker, and I’ve always felt that something has enabled me to break away from my home and culture – not literally, but figuratively – in terms of working with white people. That was sort of the beginning of that process,” he said. “Coming here was so enlightening, because most people had never seen a Black person before. That’s how it began to really gel, and we got along. It wasn’t easy sometimes, but we got along.”

After finishing his final two years of seminary, Polk again struggled to find a position with a Congregational church. He went back to the North Dakota Bishop, who steered him to the Berthold Congregational Church.

“They hadn’t had a minister in 15 years. They thought, ‘We’ll try it one more time. We don’t care what color he is,” Polk said. In 1955, he signed a two-year contract, earning $2,700 a year, in a town with no running water, no paved streets, no street lights and quarters that consisted of four rooms and a path to the outhouse.

“My folks, my friends, they thought I was out of my mind,” Polk said. “Minus 38 degrees below zero while I was there. Snow banks as high as the ceiling.”

He left Berthold because the small church no longer could afford his salary. The minister of the Congregational Church in Minot was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Minot YMCA, and he and the executive director of the YMCA recognized that multiculturalism was on the horizon with the air base under construction. They persuaded the board to hire Polk as youth minister, which Polk called a shocking turn of events for the community. He had been told by someone who checked state census records that he was only the 48th Black resident to live in North Dakota.

The YMCA provided dormitories for the first Black airmen who needed a place to live.

“Some of them would find segregation, racism in Minot. I would always try to get to know who they were and help them to understand what Minot was all about and try to break through some of that,” said Polk, who himself had been turned away from some Minot establishments.

Part of his job was to help the community understand racial issues, and to do that, he spoke to churches and other groups, along with his regular job in working with youth.

“I enjoyed that work very much,” Polk said. “Those three years were very impactful in my life in terms of what I was able to do after that. I took 22 junior high school kids to New York City. They raised their money, wanted to go to New York, and we ended up at Riverside Church as the place of worship that week.”

Upon returning to Minot, Polk received a letter with a job offer to work with the ethnically diverse youth at Riverside.

“If it hadn’t been for my five years in North Dakota, Riverside Church would never have accepted me,” Polk said. “Here was a Black man who knew white people, worked with them, dealt with them, yet he had a sense of his own being as an African American.”

During his years in New York, Polk had a front row seat to the civil rights movement.

“I always had an instinct for social action and social justice, and I found that I could do it in the confines of the church,” Polk said.

Polk, currently living in the Philadelphia area, went on to serve in various urban communities. He has written three books about his experiences, and his latest, “Fly in the Buttermilk,” tells of his time in North Dakota.

“I think this thing is a historical event now – what we did 70 years ago,” he said. “It’s not my tribute. It’s our tribute. We did this together.”