Success story: 'Blackdom, New Mexico' sheds new light on the frontier townsite

The New Mexico town of Blackdom may be today a little remembered, short-lived dot on the map. But to Timothy E. Nelson, it is a Black success story.

Nelson is the author of the recent book “Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930.” The book is an extension of Nelson’s doctoral dissertation that discusses the complex meshing of notions of Black pioneering homesteaders, of Afrotopia (Black utopia) with sociological and theoretical perspectives of the colony of Blackdom.

Blackdom was founded by 13 Black men and incorporated as an all-Black townsite community in 1903 when it was part of the New Mexico Territory.

Blackdom was located in the borderlands, 20 miles south of Roswell and 20 miles north of Artesia.

In an email, Nelson wrote that his book “is important as an academic phenomenological study because it proves that Black folks, equal under the law, were self-sustaining peoples, even under the harshest conditions in America.”

Harsh, indeed. They struggled mightily as dry land farmers. “Survival depended on rain that often didn’t come,” Nelson wrote in the book’s introduction. But during a stretch of seven years, from 1909 and 1916, rain did fall and Blackdom farmers prospered, Nelson wrote.

By 1917 many of its men were drafted in the Army when the United States entered World War I.

Success story: 'Blackdom, New Mexico' sheds new light on the frontier townsite

Another sign of Blackdom’s economic success, for Nelson, was with the discovery of oil in the townsite in 1919 and with it was the establishment of the Blackdom Oil Company. It contracted with a New York-based exploration company to drill wells in the area, he wrote.

Frank Boyer, one of the 13 black men who signed Blackdom’s articles of incorporation, is quoted in a 1947 interview as having said that some of its residents continued to receive royalties from Gulf Oil for producing oil wells on their property, according to Nelson’s book.

Oil drilling at Blackdom continued into the 1920s, even as the town’s population diminished. By 1930, the year after the devastating stock market crash, and the start of the Great Depression, Blackdom apparently was no more.

The back cover of “Blackdom, New Mexico” says this is the first time that a book fully tells or contextualizes the story of the townsite.

Nelson believes his doctoral research found sufficient reasons to reject “the old story, the old narrative myth,” that decreed Blackdom failed.

“I say the complete opposite,” he stated in a phone interview, that Blackdom was a success story.

Among those reasons that Nelson cited are:

• The creation of the Blackdom Oil Company. Nelson says he was the first to bring the company to light.
• Black women played a critical role in the development of Blackdom and in the creation of Blackdom Oil. Among them were Boyer’s wife, Ella, and Mattie “Mittie” Moore, a Blackdom landowner.
• Based on his study of Black institutions, Blackdom exhibits the value of roles played by ministers, military, including former Buffalo Soldiers, and Freemasons that embodied the idea of Afro-Frontierism.
• Blackdom’s homesteaders demonstrated that they could find opportunity within the racial boundaries imposed by the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized “separate but equal” segregation.
• Parallel to that ruling, Blackdom was proof of the concept that Black people could thrive without white people.
• Blackdom’s existence weakened the “tricultural” narrative, which has given prominence to Anglos, Hispanics and Native Americans in New Mexico’s history. Blacks and other ethnicities have been placed on the sidelines in that narrative.

Nelson, who lives near Santa Fe, was born in South Central Los Angeles and was raised in Compton, California. He received his doctorate in borderlands at the University of Texas at El Paso.

He acknowledged his business partner, Marissa Renee Roybal, for her multiple contributions, including those as editor, to the book.