On September 1, 1920, the Roswell Daily Record reported, “Blackdom Location Made”:
The location for the deep test well at Blackdom south of this city has just been made. This well will be drilled a quarter of a mile west of Blackdom and the derrick is now under construction. The well will be put down by a California syndicate represented here by Verne Lincoln. A Rotary rig will be used to go the first 1,000 feet and excellent progress is expected.1
Blackdom, Blackdomites, and Afro-Frontierism
Blackdom
My mother, Veretha, and I started out in Los Angeles, California, during the late 1970s. Around the age of five, I went to live with my grandparents in Compton, California. My grandfather, Glenorce, as well as my father, Timothy, were born in Lott, Texas. Daddy Glen found the rural railroad town lacking, compared to his dreams. Like many Black cowboys, he used the military to escape; he served in the Navy during the Korean conflict, although he never saw war up close. Daddy Glen traded (in) his rural life for the big cities on the West Coast of America. After three years, he went back to Lott and reunited with his young family before they headed to San Pedro, California. Daddy Glen’s appreciation for the ocean view was, in part, why he chose Harbor City to start a new life.
Mary Elizabeth (Gilmore) Nelson of Lott, Daddy Glen’s wife, was ready to leave her rustic beginnings behind, and they focused on a more metropolitan future together. After a short time renting in West Coast port cities, the Nelson family bought a house in Compton, California. During the 1970s, the Nelson family ballooned to eight kids (five sons, three daughters). Today, the two are still married, living in the same family home. While they traded in their rural life for the inner city, they continued to return to Texas for annual family reunions and owned property in Lott, and my granddad never stopped wearing his Black Boots.
During the uprising of 2020, the mainstream of America was illuminated by the existence of “Black cowboys” who resided in cities across the United States. In a summer of protest, the New York Times took note of Black people on horseback in support of anti-racist protesters with the headline, “Evoking History, Black Cowboys Take to the Streets.”2 For many people, Compton was known to have a “cowboy” culture, but rarely was popular culture exposed to Black “Urban” Cowboys and Cowgirls on horses from the hub city. Once popular culture has caught up, soon there will be a crowd to follow those who perform as if in a minstrel show. This book serves to preserve a less performative notion of “Black cowboying.”
The offspring of people who developed Blackdom, Black Towns, and Black enclaves took root in inner cities at the beginning of the twentieth century and bore fruit in the twenty-first. Black folks from Black enclaves, colonies, and incorporated all-Black towns increased their concentration in American cities during World War I, and populations accelerated into the World War II era. Rural and small-town Black folks filtered into urban areas with formal training and income and began to build families. Inner-city population growth correlated with the depopulation of autonomous Black spaces. The influx of “Black cowboys” and rural people enforced the transition of urban life through the development of micro socioeconomic markets. Echoed in popular culture, Black bodies and talents were a source of generational wealth creation, if exploited.
Notions of Blackness have rarely included the dynamism of Black cowboy culture. Although now evident in the paper of record, Black cowboys exist in inner cities across the United States. Within the hidden history of “freedom colonies,” Black Towns, and other Black community intersections, we explore a history of Black ambitions. As they transported themselves into the Borderlands, they developed in a “cowboy culture.” However, few might see themselves through the popular notion of “cowboy.” “Cowboying” was only part of Black folks’ alchemical process in frontier spaces as they quickly adjusted and adapted, a signature of their culture of thriving.
Black cowboy culture was much more than that which one could see, and the brilliance was often buried in the mundanity of documents. Black people on horseback who were cowboys and cowgirls show the clear connection between Black cowboys and the standard “cowboy” narrative. This study extends beyond the perfunctory and descends into the conscience of Black folks who engaged in Afrotopia. Part of Black cowboy culture was the dignity of understated elegance. For example, Daddy Glen wore a Jheri curl (when it was stylish) and never stopped wearing his Black cowboy boots. Arguably, processed hair was far from an understatement. However, the shine of his hair mirrored the shine on his boots in recognition of his feet, grounded in his (Nelsonian) cowboy culture.
This book begins a new dialectic to better explore and understand Black cowboy culture. In a 2018 recorded interview with Albuquerque, New Mexico, KOAT 7 Action News’s Kay Dimanche, the latter asked, “So, what is Blackdom?” I replied, “It was an investment vehicle.” Consistently, my responses in the interview did not easily translate into “action” or “news,” and the interview did not air. “Blackdomites struck oil!” I should have exclaimed when I realized how poorly the interview was going.
I knew that “Blackdom” was understood as a “Negro refuge” that started around 1900, and that term was what one might expect to hear after the question was asked. However, I had recently discovered Blackdom’s lost years as an oil company. My discovery was that of a new Blackdom that changed the course of New Mexico’s history: Black people who had invested in a “township” at the start of the twentieth century entered the Roaring Twenties as part of a solely Black-owned oil company. “Blackdom” allowed people under the conditions of American Blackness (Black people) to fully invest in themselves without the impositions of others. Blackdom, New Mexico, “was a real place with a little magic,” is what I should have said.
The excavation of “Blackdom” has the ability to help retell Black history in the twentieth century as the multitudes grapple with hidden histories and their fruits: specifically, Black cowboys. So little has been done on the topic that the term suggests Black people are a part of the American Cowboy culture. As the history of Black cowboy culture filters into the popular imagination, one must wrestle with notions of westward expansion, the West, and other articulations that describe confiscated Indigenous lands that help promote the notions of White supremacy and Manifest Destiny.3 A vast majority of popular culture cowboys are shown as White people on horseback. The current revelation of Black cowboys in American cities does not negate that they were there the whole time. Instead, their presence reflects a need for new history and understanding to fully grasp their significance.
After Blackdom’s demise during the Dust Bowl (1930s), a host of incorporated Black towns fell victim to the era of dryness. Blackdomites, and Black rural folks in frontier spaces did not wither with the crops; they continued to migrate. More importantly, the ideas of “Blackdom” traveled with them. In Chaves County, the people who fully invested in Blackdom were in a fairer economic condition than most due to capital appreciation and the oil company. Most Blackdomites, because of royalties from leased Blackdom land, were well positioned to weather the famine that came. Migration out of “Blackdom” was expected and planned. Many children of Blackdom matured and resumed the ancestral search for opportunity and generational wealth or looked to preserve capital. In the inner cities of Seattle, Compton, Oakland, Detroit, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, and across what became the United States of America, Black cowboy children became inhabitants.
Blackdomites
“Blackdomites Struck Oil!” On September 1, 1920, a California-based oil exploration syndicate contracted with Blackdom Oil Company and “made location.” Similar to the town, the oil company was owned entirely by Black folks. “Blackdom” transitioned into a place where investors in the township received royalty payments for leasing land to oil extraction companies. The new orientation of Blackdomite society shifted town business from a regenerative homesteader agricultural context to a more extractive-oriented concept. Previous historians of Blackdom’s history misunderstood the societal shift. In early narratives about Blackdom, the 1920s was a time of abandonment. This history of “Blackdom” narrates a time of documented abundance.
Blackdomites were believers and doers in “Blackdom.” Landholding Blackdomites received royalty payments into the post–WWII period, decades after the town became uninhabited.4 This Blackdom narrative includes a lost history of generational wealth and Afrotopia as well as Blackdomite possession of “Promised [government] Land.” Presumably, the people of “Blackdom” did not refer to themselves as “Blackdomites.” The term therefore describes the conscious intersection of people engaging in “Blackdom.” Confirmation of royalty payments from the Blackdom scheme suggests forethought. Analysis of Blackdomite society begins to reconcile the old Blackdom narrative with the new.
The Roswell Correctional Center, which currently sits on Blackdom land, is a visual reminder that helps to conceal the dynamism of the all-Black town. Arguably, inmates who inhabit what was Blackdom might be considered Blackdomites because of their current location. However, Blackdomite implies a conscious engagement of “Blackdom.” Over time, Blackdom methods of expression and tactics changed. Most vivid was the decreased physical occupation of Blackdom during the 1920s juxtaposed with the exponential growth in land mass after Blackdomites “struck oil.” No previous Blackdom narrative has explored the implications of Blackdom Oil Company and the impact on Blackdom and “Blackdomites.”
Afro-Frontierism
Reconstructing Blackdom’s newly discovered history required a wider view and a new lens to fully see significance in the mundanity of documents. Development of the Afro-Frontier notion was a way to define this intersection of Black people in the Borderlands. Dr. Kenneth Hamilton, best known for his work Black Towns and Profit, might argue that one was “making things up.”5 Dr. Hamilton made a similar remark in reference to the “new” ways of doing history using theory and frameworks to “re-imagine.” Between sessions at the 2019 Western History Association conference, I asked Dr. Hamilton how he saw the “profit motive” in the development of Black Towns when others couldn’t. He said, “It was in the documents.” Blackdom Oil Company was in the documents.
Intentionally or unintentionally, popular historical frameworks, theories, and narratives purport that Black people in general, and the town of Blackdom, specifically, had little capacity or ability to construct an oil-producing town during the Roaring Twenties. To augment the lack of imagination about Black folks in general, and Black towns specifically, this study adopts the Black colonization continuum framework to highlight the long-held impulse of African descendants to migrate and colonize, as part of their “hustle.”6
Blackdomites Struck Oil! The establishment of Blackdom Oil Company was in the documents. However, the State of New Mexico’s Centennial-approved account of the Blackdom narrative mentions nothing about Blackdom Oil or Blackdomites during the 1920s. A popular representation of Blackdom continues to suggests the town was abandoned in the mid-1920s. Blackdom Oil Company was far from a mundane discovery in the documents, but the new information was hard to reconcile with Blackdom’s public standard narrative trajectory that implied fecklessness and failure rather than forethought.
Chapter Breakdown
Epistemologically, this book supports the idea that captured in the subaltern histories of African descendants, although often untold, there existed an omnipresent collective consciousness to “colonize.” Transfixed on the history of early Black “American” institutional intersections of African descendant ministers, military personnel, and Freemasons, one identifies a pattern of autonomy projects as a throughline in US history. Informed by the Blackdom thesis, colonization was a product of “Black” consciousness: intersectional Blackness. Black colonization was proactive, and over time Black folks perfected migration and colonization by building Black institutions over hundreds of years.
The anecdotal narrative throughout this book invites readers to find themselves in Blackdom’s history. Modeled in microcosmic moments, my life growing up in Compton illustrated the continuum. Informed by my life story and recognition of Black cowboy culture, readers have the option to reimagine notions of “inner city” Blackness. As the twenty-first century begins similarly to the twentieth century, it is important to reexamine historical analyses of the past. For example, I found Blackdom Oil Company due to the power of this digitized age of historical research. However, I had few modern ways to analyze the new data.
Tonally, this work amplifies skepticism about what consumers of this work were taught about “Blackness.” In chapter 1, “Boyer, Blackdom Colonization, and Continuum,” Frank Boyer’s life trajectory as a Buffalo Soldier (military), minister, and Freemason underscores the Blackdomite institutional intersection with Mexico’s northern frontier. Frank was Blackdom Townsite Company’s first president and was one major figure among thirteen Black men who signed the articles of incorporation. Evident in townsite company documents, early Blackdomites shared influences. Significant to Boyer and Blackdom’s history, African descendant communities of people who nurtured ministers, military personnel, and Freemasons agitated autonomy projects with colonization outcomes starting in the late 1700s and into Blackdom (1903–1930).
Intentionally, Blackdomites benefited from an early cohort of Black folks who engaged a Spanish-speaking Borderland in the pursuit of Afrotopia as the space transitioned into a US western territory.7 Ambitious Black folks sought opportunity in Chaves County in the US territory of New Mexico. Chapter 2, “Preconditions,” describes the major economic drivers of regional markets that encouraged Black colonization. Frank Boyer’s life functions as a testament to the legacy of Black intersectional institutions that protected Black folks from hegemonic societal damnation. Blackdom in the Borderlands was a bold regional phenomenon, where Black people veiled their ambitions in barren Indigenous blood-soaked lands and “Blackness.”8
The narrative impulse to mythologize a unique figure competes with the inclusion of the thirteen co-founders of Blackdom Townsite Company and asks that one explore “Blackdom.” A broader understanding of the collective toil allows one to visualize a community in motion, rather than see a single Moses-like figure directing Blackdom’s narrative. Behind the corporate veil of Blackdom Townsite Company, Black folks engaged the world as frontier sovereigns. The Blackdom Thirteen were all influenced by Black institutions that helped them consciously commune with one another.
In “Prophets, Profits, and the Proffit Family” (chapter 3), the reader is introduced individually to the Blackdom Thirteen in the order of official dates on their homestead patent as well as to those who didn’t homestead. Blackdomites sought Afrotopia and achieved it within a twenty-year period, appearing as though Blackdom was prophetic of an arrival into a “promised land.” Blackdom existed as a townsite frontier scheme; however, the lives of Blackdomites do not reflect the dynamism of their strivings. The seemingly simple lives of Black folks in Chaves County produced profits. Encapsulated in the brief synopsis of the Proffit family legacy, one begins to witness the power of “Blackdom” worthy of illumination.
The public documentation of Blackdom revealed elements of the prophetic, humble lives of prophets, and tangible profits. At a simple intersection they began a conversation about utopia. The first of a three-part series on Afrotopia in Chaves County, chapter 4 discloses a biblical consciousness that existed in Blackdomites. Their faith was on display. For three decades, Blackdom was a purpose-driven space that provided Black folks the environment to thrive. In every decade following the incorporation of the Blackdom Townsite Company there was a consistent renewal of faith. Although 1903 to 1909 were considered Blackdom’s “lost years,” faith surmounted failure as Black homesteaders endured drought and social transition. Survival into a time of revival was a measure of “success.”
Chapter 5 consists of two parts and continues a theme of duality in the lives of Black women. Conscious of not “speaking for” Black women, I lend my privilege to highlight a silent space often overlooked. Silent spaces, 100 years ago in Blackdom, remain silent; however, Black women’s public record informs the trajectory of the two-part series. The first half explores Ella Boyer’s public record and the archetypal life of Blackdomite women of faith as well as their affinity to institutionalize. The public and infamous life of Mattie (Mittie) Moore Wilson shapes the second half of the chapter to highlight her conscious intersections with institutions. Black women built power and fueled Revival Times into Boom Times. This new Blackdom narrative suggests that women were significant and fortified both the township and the oil company.
Chapter 6 introduces new Black history discovered over the course of conducting research into Blackdom’s public record. Frequent references are made to articles published during the time, supporting this new Black history. The unearthing of the Blackdom Oil Company suggests a greater importance of Black bodies as well as Black consciousness in the “development” of the southeastern section of the US territory of New Mexico. The popular history of New Mexico—a region organized as a tricultural society—suggests Black people were insignificant. Blackdom was a microcosm of hegemonic society that supports a more complicated narrative. Further Chapter 7 is a postscript and a veiled call to action.