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Frontier Alchemy To Blackdom. “Blackdom” started as an inherited idea of 19th Century Afrotopia. Timothy E. Blackdom, New Mexico was a township scheme that lasted about 30 years.

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 federal 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.

10/18/2026

Theater can benefit attendees in unexpected ways, longtime Santa Fe actor Danielle Louise Reddick writes.

09/06/2026

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09/02/2026

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Good morning from Egypt

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09/02/2026

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The similarities are strong. 💕

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09/01/2026

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Recent expressions of regret by top Biden administration officials who vehemently defended the United States' billions of dollars in military aid to Israel as it was bombarding Gaza have not gone far with former diplomat Hala Rharrit, who was retaliated against for speaking out about the US policy before she ultimately resigned, and who condemned her former colleagues recent "PR game" this week.

In an interview with Middle East Eye, Rharrit said the former officials who have mused that they would now support withholding weapons from Israel, or that they should have backed such a move while serving under President Joe Biden, are "just so despicable."

"They're so disgusting," Rharrit said. "Those individuals, particularly [National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan and a handful of others, actually had the power to save human lives. They actually had the power to stop unconditional arms assistance to Israel, right? The Israelis were not killing the Palestinians by themselves. The Israelis were killing the Palestinians with American bombs, with American jets, with American everything. We enabled it 100%. They enabled it 100%."

Rharrit, who resigned as the Arabic language spokesperson for the US State Department in April 2024, six months into Israel's US-backed assault—which has been called a genocide by leading human rights organizations and Holocaust experts—spoke to MEE months after former Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US should have called for a ceasefire earlier than it did, "such that the suffering the people endured, the loss of the children, so many others, could have been averted.”

Sullivan last year said—weeks before a ceasefire was finally agreed to—that he'd had a change of heart regarding providing Israel with weapons, and that he would no longer support the policy.

In November, Sullivan added in an interview with The Dartmouth that "it’s fair to say that there were a lot of objections from a lot of parts of the international community about the US continuing to support Israel over the course of last year—2024—and over the course of this year in 2025. I think a lot about what we could have done differently."

Rharrit told MEE that "it's despicable that now they're trying to make themselves look like, 'Oh we should have done better and we're so sorry.'"

The former diplomat emphasized that the apology tour has taken place as it's become increasingly clear that "America has changed" in terms of its views on Israel, Palestine, and the United States' decadeslong, unconditional support for the Israeli military—despite US statutes like the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and Leahy Laws, which bar the government from providing military aid to countries that block humanitarian assistance and that are accused of human rights abuses.

A poll released this week showed that large majorities of Democratic voters in the first six states that will vote in the 2028 presidential primaries support cutting off weapons aid to Israel, and another survey by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies in March found that just 32% of Americans viewed Israel positively, compared with 47% in 2023.

"America is forever changed," said Rharrit. "Americans no longer support these forever wars, they no longer support unconditional arms assistance to Israel. They no longer agree with US policy in the Middle East. And so now... they're doing a PR game. This is just pure PR."

Rharrit and other officials who resigned over the US policy on Israel and Gaza "were vindicated," she said. "Of course we were right the whole time, because it's international law. It's US law. I abided by my oath to the Constitution... That is exactly what I did. That is exactly why I resigned."

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said Rharrit is one of "a rare breed" of diplomats.

"During this genocide I've met courageous diplomats and officials who denounced it at real personal cost," said Albanese, whom the Trump administration targeted with sanctions earlier this year. "Imagine foreign policy built by more of them. Because the problem is never one unfit minister/head of state: It's whole spineless cohorts around them."

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Julia Conley is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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