The idea of “Blackdom” was refined within Black institutions as part of the perpetual movement of Black Colonization. In 1903, thirteen Black men formed the Blackdom Townsite Company, and were encouraged by the 1896 Plessy decision. According to the “law of the land”; “Black” people were equally human and lawfully allowed to be seperate from others. Considering New Mexico was a territory where fed
eral laws applied; Black people recognized opportunity between New Mexican Racism and no Jim Crow laws. Blackdomites were “industrious negroes” who set out to build an exclusive all-Black municipality and succeeded in less than 20 years. Nelson has uncovered new primary source materials that shapes Blackdom’s newly discovered 3rd decade while challenging New Mexico’s tricultural narrative. Many believed that Blackdom was simply abandoned. However, new evidence shows that the scheme to build generational wealth, “Blackdom,” continued to exist throughout the 20th century in other forms. During Blackdom’s Boomtimes, in December of 1919, Blackdom Oil Company shifted town business from a regenerative agricultural community to a more extractive model. The appearance of abandonment was deliberate because of the scheme's success and the rise of Pioneer Klan Chapter no. 19, c.1924. Most notably, historical agents such as Blackdom’s 13 co-founders have replaced the old narrative of a singular Moses-like figure. Francis “Frank” Boyer, for example, was understood as the only founder. In this book, Frank is an important part of an intersectional blackness that solidified into various Chaves County, New Mexico institutions. Blackdom was home to a school, church, office building, a pumping plant, and the home of New Mexico’s only Black oil company. Protecting their success meant dissipating as a physical town, but continuing to exist behind a corporate veil. This story has never been fully told or contextualized until now. In Blackdom, New Mexico, Timothy E. Nelson situates the story where it belongs, along the continuum of settlement in Mexico’s Northern Frontier. Dr. Nelson illuminates a set of conscious efforts that helped develop Blackdom Township into a frontier boom town. Reoriented to Mexico’s “northern frontier,” one observes Black ministers, Black military personnel, and Black freemasons who colonized as part of the transmogrification Indigenous of spaces into the American West. Nelson’s concept of the Afro-Frontier evokes a “Turnerian West,” but it is also fruitfully understood as a Weberian “Borderland.” Its history also highlights a brief period that allowed one to study a space that nurtured Black cowboy culture. While Blackdom’s civic presence was not lengthy, its significance, and that of the Afro-Frontier, is an important window in the history of Afrotopias, Black Consciousness and the notion of an American West.
