On October 16, 1903, the Hereford Reporter noted, “New Mexico to Have Nigger Town”: “The Blackdom Townsite Company with F. M. Bayer [sic, Boyer], A. M. President proposes to establish a town exclusively for negroes in Chaves County, near the line of the Pecos Valley railroad. The opening will occur May 1, 1904, at which time the promoters propose to locate 10,000 negroes.”1
Blackdom Ontology and the Niagara Movement (1905–1909)
In the early 1900s, Black activists/intellectuals envisioned greater progress for people under the conditions of American Blackness. Wealthy White elites often funded and encouraged mutual aid projects that made a few Black folks wealthy in the process. Most notably, Booker T. Washington and his leadership at the Tuskegee Institute found fame and fortune as wealthy White elites helped him promote Black progress—through labor, for the most part.
Other less well-funded Black intellectuals devised alternative articulations to problematize Washington’s perceived limited view. In 1905, out of an intellectual activism grew the Niagara Movement, led by activist scholars such as Mary Burnett Talbert, William Monroe Trotter, Gertrude Morgan, and W. E. B. Du Bois. As a group, they organized an intellectual defense for the value of the ontology of Black folks. Grappling with the trappings of integration and the burdens of segregation, the Niagara Movement grew to over 170 members in thirty-four states of the Union.2 Part of the mystique of the short-lived movement was in the name that captured the struggle. In the US northern borderland, unable to book a meeting in Buffalo, New York, the group crossed into Canada. In America’s northern borderland, the Niagara Movement developed to shape notions of an intellectual Blackness. Many of the movement’s leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois, would later apply their Niagara Movement experience to helping create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).3
New Mexico Borderlands and the Birth of Blackdom
At the turn of the twentieth century, Black folks’ excogitation of a Black domain in frontier space evolved from an adequate set of circumstances to produce Afrotopia in Chaves County. Blackdomites believed that God, citizen conditions, collective knowledge, land, and labor were enough to start their autonomy project. New Mexico was a US territory and local jurisdictions were restricted from full enforcement of Jim Crow laws. Also, while the Black population was minuscule, their occupation of Indigenous lands was useful to colonization efforts in the Borderlands. Black folks understood the American Blackness condition in the territory was enhanced by self-segregation. The Blackdom Townsite Company was part of the scheme to harness Black power at the intersection of Black ministers, Black military personnel, and Black Freemasons. Moreover, incorporation helped erect a corporate virtual veil—separating Blackdomites from the unique conditions of American Blackness in New Mexico—to participate unencumbered in generational wealth creation during boom times.
Blackdomites expected to take full advantage of citizenship without the impositions of a “White-dominated” society. Black folks became landlords and matured their investment while exploiting the race/citizenship loophole in the territory. The Blackdom Townsite Company was a physical manifestation of their most noble Afrocentric ideals. In 1903, Frank Boyer was intimately familiar with colonization of Mexico’s northern frontier when he became one of thirteen Blackdom co-founders. Frank had trained as a minister/soldier and brought with him Prince Hall Freemasonry. Stories about Frank Boyer and his relationship to Blackdom often offer to audiences myths of both. Instead, this narrative begins during the Civil War, before Frank was born, when the Boyer family was enslaved on the Elias Boyer plantation in Georgia. In this chapter we explore the infancy of Blackdomites’ Afro-Frontier to further reconcile the relationship between Black towns and prophets.
Confederates established themselves in the West, particularly in Oklahoma, Texas, and Arizona. Homesteading allowed tens of thousands to become first-time landowners in New Mexico as well. Lack of water access, however, made desert land hard to prove up and led to only a small land occupation compared to their claims of Manifest Destiny. Black people found opportunity as federal authorities loosened restrictions to land “ownership.” As frontier sovereigns and landlords in the US–Mexico Borderlands, Black people transitioned from colonized people to colonizers. The chaos of westward expansion and discombobulation of Native and Indigenous communities tremendously benefited Black folks even as second-class citizens.
The southeastern section of the New Mexico Territory was sparsely populated due in part to lack of access to water. Genocidal military campaigns against the Mescalero Apaches had resolved into a reservation condition as newly drawn county borders began to reinforce their incarceration. In 1877, as American Reconstruction came to a close, Confederate Army Captain Joseph Lea moved to the village of Roswell, in Lincoln County. Captain Lea was one of the earliest influencers in the development of Chaves County (part of what was Lincoln County). By 1885, he helped the village transition Roswell into a platted city.
The region had been in chaos after the trials of the Lincoln County War. Myths developed within the framework of the “Lincoln County Wars” are beyond the scope of this study. However, “Lincoln County” was a regional phenomenon that shaped the course of New Mexico’s history during the late nineteenth century. Essentially, “White” colonizers converged on stolen Indigenous land. Most notably, the trial of Billy the Kid occupied the imagination of the era’s end. Significant to this study, Southern New Mexico developed into a Confederate sympathizer–inspired stable space to build a Southern-styled oasis.
Captain Lea helped bring stability and Confederate sentiments to Roswell. He co-founded the Goss Military Institute (now the New Mexico Military Institute), named for Confederate Colonel Robert Goss. In 1895, James J. Hagerman, a tycoon who made a fortune in Colorado, bought forty acres in Roswell, and donated the land to grow the size of the campus. James Hagerman’s investment in the New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI) ensured federal investment in the region as part of a network of military outposts in Mexico’s northern frontier.
After 1890, James Hagerman became a chief investor in Charles B. Eddy Pecos Irrigation and Investment Company to further help develop the region. In the newly created Pecos Irrigation and Improvement Company, James Hagerman negotiated the largest irrigation project in the United States at the time. Hagerman led the efforts to engineer a sustainable water supply for two irrigation systems. The first was a forty-mile long, thirty-five feet wide system that carried seven feet of water. The second was forty-five miles south of the first irrigation project and was forty miles long and forty-five feet wide at the bottom, and also carried seven feet of water. The Pecos River fed both projects and flowed at 1,000 cubic feet per second. Three reservoirs supplying the intervening space were under construction. The massive undertaking by Hagerman required an investment of more than a million dollars (about $26,000,000 today). The United States congressional report on this project ended with the prospect that, “No one can even imagine what New Mexico will produce when her immense acreage of fertile soil is brought under cultivation through enterprises of this kind.”4
Stability encouraged the emigration of tycoons such as John Chisum, a cattle rancher who dominated the market at the time. Chisum lobbied for specific railroad paths and station locations advantageous to his empire in the last quarter of the 1800s. When railways were established in the Pecos Valley Region, Chisum’s fortune grew exponentially. Railroads opened new desert frontier spaces for occupation and propelled migration to Southeastern New Mexico.
James Hagerman, who moved to Chaves County in 1892, bought and expanded Chisum’s Roswell ranch and changed the name to Old South Springs Ranch. Hagerman expanded his fortune with investment in the region after finishing Hagerman Pass, a railroad penetrating the Rocky Mountains from Colorado Springs. Hagerman sold his shares of Colorado Midland Railway to the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway and began the Pecos Valley Railroad that was completed in 1894. Hagerman pooled investments from the Pullman Car Company and a group of investors led by Benjamin Cheney of American Express. For $250,000 (about $7,000,000 today) in bonds, Hagerman paid the Santa Fe Railroad Company for construction material.
The Santa Fe Railroad Company controlled a 370-mile-long feeder from Amarillo to Pecos and connected with the company’s Southern Kansas Line. The Pecos Valley Railway and its extension allowed the company to control shipping routes in the New Mexico cattle industry. By 1899, with a 200-mile extension of the Northeastern Railway from Roswell to Amarillo, Roswell sustained a direct connection with Denver, Kansas City, St Louis, and Chicago. Wherever the railroad stopped, populations grew out of necessity and began with machine shops, roundhouses, and railroad offices. Roswell had now developed into a central point of the region’s economic infrastructure, fundamental to the supply chain of the Pecos Valley Region. Moreover, Chaves County became the conduit for community growth from mass migration by train.
A diversity of companies, from the Tallmadge Immigration Company to the Aztec Cattle Company, established offices in Roswell as it became the most economically dominant place in all of New Mexico at the time. By 1900, Chaves County exported close to a million pounds of wool per year. The region was also abundant in farms harvesting alfalfa, fruits, and vegetables. Even more lucrative was the city’s position linking silver and gold mines as well as coalfields with the junction of the El Paso and Northeastern Railway. Water was a challenge for communities outside the range of the water network for the Pecos River that flowed southeasterly through the region. James Hagerman’s investment in water irrigation projects was the undercurrent responsible for the explosion of land occupation and sustained migration.5
The Hagerman family wealth grew along with their political influence. James’s son Herbert graduated from Cornell University in 1890 and moved to the Hagerman ranch in Chaves County. From 1898 to 1901, Herbert was the secretary at the US Embassy to Russia where Nikolai II Alexandrovich Romanov (Czar Nicholas II) presented him with the coveted Russian Order of Saint Anna. In 1906, James and Herbert used their influence to get Herbert appointed as seventeenth governor of New Mexico Territory, which guaranteed growth in southeastern New Mexico.6 Frank Boyer had returned to the Borderlands and took a job as a cook in the Hagerman household sometime between 1900 and 1903.
Chaves County was in the midst of boom times, and ambitious people went there in hopes of growing their wealth. Roswell’s wealthy families were as cosmopolitan and consumer driven as people in major cities. Often, they were transplants from the cities, coming west in search of new opportunities and/or to preserve old fortunes. Elite Roswellians bought luxury items from England, France, and various parts of Asia. Some Roswellians were among the first in the country to use electricity, have the latest in technological advancements, and travel paved roads. In 1901, Dr. W. E. Parkhurst from Lansing, Michigan, was the first person to pull up in a car: an Oldsmobile.
Racial strife in Texas pushed a few groups of Black migrants into the New Mexico Territory in the late nineteenth century. The motivation for the migration to Eastern New Mexico was mostly proximity and a keen sense of opportunity specific to citizenship laws and borders in the Pecos Valley Region. For example, cattle baron John Chisum moved his family to Roswell to raise children with his wife Jensie, who was Black. This Chisum family started with John as an inheritor of slaves. John Chisum exploited New Mexico’s lack of Jim Crow laws to occupy space between New Mexican racism and the law of the land to raise a family in sovereignty.
Frank Chisum, John’s son, was a part of early Blackdomite colonization efforts as witness on Isaac Jones’ homestead proving-up papers.7 Although Chaves County was an ex-Confederate stronghold, New Mexicanity and federal law made it difficult for White supremacy to flourish in the territory unimpeded. Southern culture that produced the vilest and most depraved atrocities against Black bodies was rare in Eastern New Mexico during America’s racial nadir. Black people had the authority to pursue their striving in ways other parts of the United States could not accommodate.
New Mexico’s total population, as recorded from the census of 1900 to the census of 1910, increased 68 percent (195,310 to 327,301). During the same time, the Black population rose from 1,610 to 1,628. Even though the Black population seemed to have plateaued in growth, there was a demographic shift from rural to urban areas. In 1890, Black people in urban areas totaled 274. In 1900, the Black population in urban areas increased to 581, and by 1910, the population had increased to 795. Between 1900 and 1910, Chaves County’s population went from 4,773 to 16,850. The Black population of Chaves County in 1900 was 66 and grew to 233 by 1910 (52 mulattos and 181 negroes). By 1910, the male to female ratio was almost even, 125 males and 108 females. After 1900, growth in the county allowed for sustainable family units.
Blackdom History and Frank Boyer
Popular myths and stories about Frank Boyer project a mishmash of tropes wrapped in competing agendas. The Boyer/Blackdom myths borrow from the Exoduster paradigm to reconstruct the narrative trajectory of a hero’s journey.8 Written through the lens of Exodusterism, chronicles have prioritized the role of Moses-like figures and incorporated small parts of Frank’s real life. Blackdom’s common narratives start with Frank, in a trajectory to suggest that New Mexico was the gateway to his “promised land,” Blackdom. The Old South functioned as the backdrop and motivating force to push him westward.
Mythologizing Frank Boyer has value beyond the scope of this study. A newly discovered interview with Frank Boyer in 1947 guides this Afro-Frontier narrative to separate Frank’s life and Blackdom’s full trajectory. Functioning as a first draft of history, Frank’s last interview strung together key points in his life, including Blackdom Townsite Company and Blackdom Oil Company (newly discovered). Stories about Blackdom have a wide range of start dates. How the author understood Frank Boyer’s story often dictated most of their speculations. For this study, Blackdom, New Mexico, was an all-Black frontier town that began in 1903, on September 5, with the incorporation of the Blackdom Townsite Company.
In 1986, Daniel Gibson wrote “Blackdom,” an essay that began the story of Blackdom in 1896. Supposedly, Frank Boyer was forced to flee his home state of Georgia. According to Gibson, Frank’s involuntary migration began as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) threatened his life. With brother-in-law Daniel Keys, husband to Francis M. Boyer’s (Frank Boyer’s) sister, the two men journeyed out of the South. Gibson’s narrative concoctions indulge in the myth for a few reasons. Most significantly, in the New Mexico statehood grand narrative, the Boyer/Blackdom myth helps project “the Land of Enchantment” marketing scheme. According to Frank in 1947, he was “proud of the fact that relationship between the White and Negro residents of that section of Georgia always has been good. There has never been a lynching within the borders of the county.”9 The myth of Boyer’s KKK encounter began a narrative trajectory that had little to do with Frank’s story and by extension Blackdom’s history. Convenient in the Boyer/Blackdom myth was also an appearance of fecklessness and failure when Boyer left Chaves County in the second decade of the experiment.
By 2000, a survey of early stories about Blackdom collectively described an epic heroes’ journey, on the part of Boyer and a few others. Problematically, scholars began to echo the Boyer/Blackdom myth that grew to include a 2,000-plus-mile walk from Pelham, Georgia, to Roswell, New Mexico. Boyer’s motivation to build Blackdom was implied as a byproduct of Frank’s need for refuge from White supremacy. The conflation of the Boyer/Blackdom myth lends itself to telling a story that ends in the early 1920s. Around 1922, Frank left Chaves County to build in Vado, New Mexico (Doña Ana County). Many authors assumed his departure was in the wake of Blackdom’s collapse. My research suggests that Frank left the Afro-Frontier town in the hands of the next generation of Boyers, and a host of new Black folks who stayed in Chaves County and entered the homestead class.
A History of Blackdom, N.M. in the Context of the African American Post Civil War Colonization Movement was published by the Historic Preservation Division of the Office of Cultural Affairs in Santa Fe, as the State of New Mexico commissioned histories for an upcoming centennial celebration of statehood in 2012.10 Maisha Baton and Native American historian Henry J. Walt dominated the footnotes of Blackdom’s historiography. Purportedly, droughts were the impetus of Frank’s departure and the decline of Blackdom. Early stories about Blackdom end with Frank in Vado around 1922. Boyer/Blackdom stories superimpose the real drought conditions after 1916 in Chaves County to push Frank’s migration once more. His departure marked Blackdom’s decline and defined the final chapter. The Boyer/Blackdom narrative perpetuates a simple telling of both stories and was written to serve a narrow agenda of promoting New Mexico as modern while keeping intact the tricultural approach.
The Boyer/Blackdom narrative fit into the account New Mexico wanted to tell. In December 1996, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in New Mexico sponsored a documentary for the ¡Colores! segment to tell the story of Blackdom.11 Billed as the chronicle of Frank and Ella Boyer’s dream, it plotted the moments of the all-Black town in relationship with Boyer’s fictitious life. The tagline attributed to Frank: “There was no one to help us and no one to hinder.” In February 2013 (Black History Month), Smithsonian magazine (online) echoed the Boyer/Blackdom myth. Following a series of Boyer/Blackdom retellings, Frank’s mythology produced ascribed quotes such as, “Here the black man has an equal chance with the White man. Here you are reckoned at the value which you place upon yourself. Your future is in your own hands.” Whether these were Frank’s words or not, the sentiment was useful in marketing New Mexico as a somewhat inclusive brand.
Frank
Anchored in the written record of Frank Boyer’s life, his story begins with Aggie Boyer (Frank’s grandmother), who was born sovereign in Africa and forced into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In Milledgeville, Georgia, Aggie begot Henry Boyer (Frank’s father). The youngest of seventeen children, Frank was the firstborn free. At the age of 77, Frank sat in 1947 with Kathryn Henry, a reporter for the Clovis News-Journal. Frank’s interview appeared in that periodical and was reprinted in the Doña Ana County newspaper of record, Las Cruces Sun-News.12 Frank bragged about his grandchildren, who numbered one for every year Frank spent on Earth. Through his refinement of formal knowledge as a minister, soldier, and Freemason, Frank became a colonizer. In his fifty years in the Borderlands, Frank helped plat Fort Huachuca in his youth, Blackdom in his prime years, and the city of Clovis during his later years.
Archetypical of Black colonizers, Frank Boyer had prior military service before helping to build Blackdom. Frank boasted about his time rounding up “Indian insurrectionists” of the “famous ‘Crazy Snake Rebellion’ in the Creek Nation of Indian Territory,” currently Henryetta, Oklahoma. Frank left the Borderlands and returned to Georgia where he attended Atlanta Baptist College, now Morehouse College—a historically black college/university (HBCU)—sponsored by Superior Court Judge Logan Bleckley. During college, Frank worked as a proofreader at the old Atlanta Constitution. Ella McGruder, three years younger than Frank, graduated from the Haines Institute. The couple married and began a family in Georgia. Frank’s pre-Blackdom period was formulaic in how Black colonizers emerged from Black communities with White people in their periphery. Frank was a product of intersectional Blackness.
Some myths were created by happenstance. Kathryn Henry of the Clovis News-Journal interviewed Frank in Vado, New Mexico, two years before his passing. According to Frank, he and Daniel Keys traveled back to New Mexico together. Kathryn wrote, “[Frank] and a companion [Daniel Keys] walked from Southwestern Georgia to Abilene, Texas, a distance of 2,178 miles.” Kathryn was of a younger generation and may have misunderstood Frank’s explanation of his trek from Georgia. Her next sentence read, “They ‘beat the freights’ from Abilene, Texas, and then walked from Pecos to Eddy [County], now Carlsbad in the New Mexico Territory.” The phrase “beat the freights” identified the cheap way in Frank’s day to travel by train. Perhaps the story reflected the sentiment of traveling from Georgia to the Pecos Valley Region, but Frank had more means, motive, and manner than to walk the whole 2,000-plus-mile distance.
Among Frank Boyer’s first jobs were as cook for James Hagerman and buggy driver for US District Judge Alfred Freeman. Frank was thus consciously in the presence of power brokers. Judge Freeman held court in Lincoln and Socorro Counties as well as Las Cruces. In 1877, Judge Freeman was the US consul in Prague, Bohemia. He was also appointed assistant US attorney general. After the US Congress created a new associate justice position for New Mexico, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Judge Freeman to the bench in October 1890 where he served a four-year term. Judge Freeman and his son-in-law, James Cameron, started a law practice in Eddy County (Carlsbad after 1899). Judge Freeman and Frank Boyer traveled by buggy and camped in the mountains when night overtook them en route from one place to another. Freeman’s long career afforded Boyer some access to knowledge in how to effectively colonize the Borderlands through corporatocracy and navigation through bureaucracy.
Judge Freeman had become one of the most powerful men in New Mexico when he became a fixture in Chaves County. The sixteenth governor of New Mexico Territory, Miguel Antonio Otero, chose Judge Freeman to lobby in Washington, DC, against the building of a dam on the Rio Grande River. In 1904, a group of lawyers in Chaves County sponsored Judge Freeman’s nomination to the position of associate justice in the newly created congressionally mandated judicial district headquartered in Roswell. Frank’s work for Judge Freeman was a side hustle as he began his journey towards sovereignty.
In September 1903, Blackdomites incorporated the Blackdom Townsite Company, and a month later, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported, “The Son of Judge Freeman Sends a Bullet Through His Heart at His Home in Carlsbad.” Hugh Freeman—Judge Freeman’s son—was thirty years of age. A few years after the tragedy, the Freeman family moved away from New Mexico. As Frank neared the end of his first homestead process, in 1907, Judge Freeman retired to British Columbia where he had invested in the lumber industry. When Judge Freeman withdrew from the New Mexico bar in early 1908, Frank completed his final homestead proving-up papers.
In Blackdom’s infancy, Frank Boyer employed the power of position as president of “the Only Exclusive Negro Settlement in New Mexico.” Frank maintained a handpump surface well that provided a sufficient amount of water for the land he rented while working for the Hagerman enterprise and Judge Freeman. However, the opportunity of Blackdom required Frank to homestead and not simply rent land. Inability to reach a significant water source separated him from Afrotopia on his homestead land. The land was at a higher elevation than the canal built to sustain the farms in the area.
Behind the corporate veil of Blackdom Townsite Company, Frank procured a more powerful pump to go deeper and access water needed to grow a surplus of crops. In 1904, he wrote to Leary, Gill, and Marrow in Roswell, a water pump supplier, from his position as president of the only exclusive Negro settlement in the US territory of New Mexico.13 Frank’s letter helped him leverage the idea of Blackdom and the town’s expected May 1904 opening to procure an engine for a more powerful well pump. His hand pump went twelve feet deep and needed to go twenty-five feet deep. Frank Boyer did not have the money for the “Jack of all trades” pump, quoted at a price of $160. In the letter, Frank asserted, “You have the engine, I have the water, farm, and skill and labor.” Frank was conscious of his new credibility underwritten by the newly created position of President in the Blackdom Townsite Company. As a successful farmer and businessman, Frank raised $12,000 to help establish the Afro-Frontier town of Blackdom.
“New Mexico to Have Nigger Town”
Weaving the lives of Blackdomites together presents a mosaic that helps to interpret common activities. Frank Boyer’s emphatic use of the phrase “the only exclusive Negro settlement in New Mexico” affirms an Afrocentricity in the Blackdomite movement. On September 5, 1903, Francis M. Boyer, Isaac W. Jones, Daniel G. Keys, Burrel Dickerson, Charles C. Childress, John A. Boyer, James Jackson, Charles W. Clifton, Charles Thompson, Albert Hubert, Benjamin Harrison, George White, and Joseph Cook were signers to the Blackdom Townsite Company’s Articles of Incorporation. They bought stock as part of their membership in the company.
Blackdomites bought into a common cause and were expected to help plat a town square “with additions into blocks, lots, streets, alleys, avenues, commons, parks, and public grounds and to own, hold, sell, and convey said lots and blocks and improve the same.” Blackdomites sought to “purchase, sell, improve, cultivate and colonize lands” to underwrite their economy. Blackdomites planned for vast irrigation projects to take advantage of the system of artesian wells along with the construction of reservoirs, canals, and ditches for the sale of water rights. Blackdomites also saved space for education through the college level “to improve the health, welfare, and prosperity of such inhabitants.”14 Blackdom was an organized business to meet the needs of a Black colonizer community.
After the incorporation of the Blackdom Townsite Company, Blackdomites publicized advertisements that traveled from the State of Washington to South Carolina. By September 11, 1903, a few days after incorporation, all of Indiana was flooded with advertisements promoting the Afro-Frontier town. In July 1903, Evansville had descended into war drawn along racial lines. White violence exploded as the recently settled Black migrants continued to build their community. Whitelash resulted in the death of both Black and White people as Black folks fought violence with violence. While Blackdomites blanketed all of Indiana with a sea of advertisements, Isaac Jones began the first homestead connected to Blackdom.
To clarify a significant detail about Blackdom’s early years, according to homestead final proofing documents, none of the early homesteaders connected their land to the municipality called Blackdom. For example, Isaac Jones completed his homestead patent in 1905. Under threat of federal perjury charges and possibly land fraud, on question 8 of his testimony to the land office in Chaves County (“Is your present claim within the limits of an incorporated town or selected site of a city or town or used in any way for trade and business?”), Isaac responded, “No, Sir.”15 The inconsistencies in Blackdom’s early years (loosely referred to as the lost years) are complicated as more Blackdomites completed homestead patents that, technically, had nothing to do with Blackdom.
For Frank Boyer, who first rented land before proving up, the transition to homesteader was much smoother than that of Isaac Jones, who had to move his young family from Roswell to participate in the Blackdom colonization scheme. A Blackdomites’ advertisement echoed an announcement from New Mexico’s Office of the Territorial Secretary on September 9, 1903:
The following articles of incorporation have been filed in the office of the Territorial secretary: The Blackdom Townsite company with a capital stock of $10,000 which is divided into 50,000 [5,000] shares of $2 each. The incorporators and directors are Francis M. Boyer, Isaac. W. Jones, Daniel G. Keys, Burrel Dickerson, Charles C. Childress, John A. Boyer, Charles Thompson, James Jackson, Charles Clifton, Albert Hubert, George White, Benjamin Harrison, and Joseph Cook. The objects of the company are to establish and operate the town of Blackdom in Chaves County, and to conduct a negro colony in that section. The term of the incorporation is fifty years and the principal place of business will be in the town of Blackdom when it is established. For the present, the offices will be located in Roswell.
Behind the corporate veil of the Blackdom Townsite Company, people under the conditions of American Blackness were recognized as sovereigns in the New Mexico Territory. The territorial secretary’s official announcement about Blackdom’s organization printed in the Santa Fe New Mexican was a synopsis of the announcement standardized into words copied by local newspapers. Blackdomites had their interpretation of the colonization scheme. The advertisements were filtered through various hegemonic institutions before local newspaper offices interpreted the Afrotopic information into headlines. At the Logansport Pharos-Tribune in Indiana on September 10, 1903, the headline read, “Here’s Youre [sic] Segregation, Mr Graves”:
Santa Fe., N.M., Sept. 10. —The Blackdom Townsite company was incorporated with a capital stock of $10,000. The purpose is to establish a colony of negroes from the southern states in Chavez [sic] County, the name of town to be Blackdom.
No information as to who Mr. Graves might have been or the name of the headline writer was obtained, despite many attempts to identify them. On the same day, September 10, 1903, the Latrobe (Pennsylvania) Bulletin headline read, “Colony for Negroes,” followed by the Blackdom Townsite blurb. As compared to the Indiana headline, Black colonization appeared less contentious in Pennsylvania.
On September 11, 1903, the Sterling (Illinois) Gazette reprinted reports from Santa Fe of the exclusive “Negro Colony,” while in Decatur, Indiana, Blackdom was referred to as a “Negro Colonization Scheme.” In Elkhart, Indiana, the headline read, “Refuge for Negroes”; in Silver Lake, Indiana, “Blackdom, a Negro Refuge,” a consistent headline reprinted in Washington (Indiana), Connersville, New Albany, Knox, Logansport, Middlebury, and Flora. The US Midwest region was inundated with news about Blackdom Townsite Company’s inception, but no state was more saturated than Indiana. Blackdomites appear to have found opportunity in the aftermath of the Evansville riot as they promoted a sovereign space as an alternative. Blackdomites nurtured a Black consciousness at the intersection of American Blackness and the New Mexico Territory, a borderland influenced by ministers, military men, and Black Freemasons.