FARGO - Thomas Jefferson said he has found friends here, along with good work and a safe place for his daughter to get an education. But he still would like to see a few more black faces.

"It's been an easy place to live, that's why I stayed," the Fargo insurance agent said. "I usually tell people it's the best kept secret in black America."

For black people used to a large black community, North Dakota or northwestern Minnesota can be a difficult place to live, Jefferson said.

"It's like being a fly in buttermilk," he said.

Jefferson and others say stronger efforts to recruit minorities for jobs could bring more diversity, and help change the way black people perceive the region.

The 2000 U.S. Census found few blacks in North Dakota. Outside of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, the same is true in Minnesota.

Cass, Ward and Grand Forks counties accounted for nearly 82 percent of North Dakota's 3,916 black residents. The state ranks 47th in the nation for black population.

Minnesota ranked 28th in the nation in 2000, with 171,731 black residents.

Minnesota State University Moorhead's incoming athletic director, Alfonso Scandrett Jr., who is black, currently lives in Greensboro, S.C. He said blacks in other parts of the country see the Upper Midwest as unfamiliar territory.

"It's unknown to them. If you talk to the average black person where I am, or in New York, the first thing they ask is 'Are there any blacks up there?' People don't go to the unknown," Scandrett said.

Several large employers in the Fargo area report mixed success in hiring minorities.

MeritCare Health System has 6,200 employees, with just under 2 percent of them racial minorities, Employee Relations Manager Mavis Havig said.

Recruiting through the company's Web site has added to diversity, Havig said, but hiring generally occurs within the region, which is mostly white.

At Innovis Hospital, Human Resources administrator Shelly Gompf said just a handful of the company's 750 employees are minorities.

Bolstering diversity is goal at Innovis, but minority hiring is "Not as good as I like it," Gompf said.

Sandra Holbrook, equal employment opportunity officer at North Dakota State University, said the school has made strides in recruiting minority faculty in the past decade.

"We've made progress, but we're not there yet," she said.

Much of the increase is due to recruiting targeted at minorities, Holbrook said.

"Are we always successful? Uh-uh," she said.

Sticking to mostly local hiring will continue to make creating diversity difficult, Scandrett said.

"I think if they (the region's businesses) reached out, I think blacks would come there. I'm coming to Fargo-Moorhead for my profession," he said.

Building a stronger community is a challenge for blacks in the area, said Ferman Woodberry, director of security at Minnesota State University, Moorhead.

"I think that's the challenge for minorities. There's not always a lot socially, culturally, for us to fall back on. We sometimes have to make those type of environments ourselves," he said.

Woodberry said as people are exposed to diversity, prejudices fade and barriers are broken down.

"That's just one more way to make the Fargo-Moorhead area a little better. Just having people experience me, in the way I live, in the way I do my job," he said.

"The color of our skin shouldn't matter much. Like Martin Luther King said, it's the content of my character, not the color of my skin" that matters most, he said.

Peter Limvere, business sales manager at Fargo's Sprint office, sees opportunity in the growing minority population. Limvere said he has seen more black professionals like himself, but many of them do not know each other.

A networking group of professionals would nurture that growth, he said.

Vernon Tate, owner of Fargo's Rib-West Bar-B-Q, agreed.

"I would love to see that (a black business group). Because you can learn from the mistakes, you can learn what works - and doesn't work," Tate said.

"That would be great," said Dr. Marie MBouni, an anesthesiologist at MeritCare Hospital in Fargo. "Although, I think at the university or college level, you might have that happening, in the business world, there's nothing of that nature."

Finding qualified black teachers, professors, engineers, doctors and lawyers shouldn't be difficult for companies willing to look outside their immediate areas, Scandrett said. Colleges do not have problems recruiting black athletes, he said.

"We have no problems hiring blacks for our sports teams. But, we tend to have problems in finding blacks for executive positions," Scandrett said. "Blacks are looked at as being athletic, but not as professionals."