Blackdom, New Mexico

Blackdom, New Mexico, was a township that lasted about thirty years. In this book, Timothy E. Nelson situates the townships story where it belongs: along the continuum of settlement in Mexicos Northern Frontier. Dr. Nelson illuminates the set of conscious efforts that helped Black pioneers develop Blackdom Township into a frontier boomtown Blackdom started as an inherited idea of a nineteenth-century Afrotopia. The idea of creating a Blackdom was refined within Black institutions as part of the perpetual movement of Black Colonization. In 1903, thirteen Black men, encouraged by the 1896 Plessy decision, formed the Blackdom Townsite Company and set out to make Blackdom a real place in New Mexico, where they were outside the reach of Jim Crow laws Many believed that Blackdom was simply abandoned. However, new evidence shows that the scheme to build generational wealth continued to exist throughout the twentieth century in other forms. During Blackdoms boomtimes, in December 1919, Blackdom Oil Company shifted town business from a regenerative agricultural community to a more extractive model. Nelson has uncovered new primary source materials that suggest for Blackdom a newly discovered third decade. This story has never been fully told or contextualized until now. Reoriented to Mexicos northern frontier, one observes Black ministers, Black military personnel, and Black freemasons who colonized as part of the transmogrification of Indigenous spaces into the American West. Nelsons concept of the Afro-Frontier evokes a Turnerian West, but it is also fruitfully understood as a Weberian Borderland. Its history highlights a brief period and space that nurtured Black cowboy culture. While Blackdoms civic presence was not lengthy, its significanceand that of the Afro-Frontieris an important window in the history of Afrotopias, Black Consciousness, and the notion of an American West.