Blackdom, Du Bois, and Descent into Afrotopia
The Afrotopia referred to in this chapter (the first of three parts) begins in a “state” of surrealism influenced by the omnipresence of W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 The Souls of Black Folk and a July 1920 letter written to him from Ruth Loomis Skeen, a White woman.1 She happened to live twenty miles south of Blackdom at the start of Blackdom’s transition during the Harlem Renaissance. At the time, Du Bois was editor of The Crisis magazine, aimed at the betterment of Black folks as well as an outlet for the NAACP. Blackdom (an Afrotopic paradigm) was officially platted as a town in May 1920 and further matured as an investment that included oil royalties. Blackdom was a real place with a tangible means of expression that expounded on personally held notions of Afrotopia. Ontologically, Blackdomites exceeded the goals of Black liberation theology as well as Ethiopianism between 1903 and 1920. On the precipice of boom times during an age often referred to as the Roaring Twenties, Ruth Loomis Skeen’s letter to Du Bois therefore functions as a testimonial of Blackdomites’ successful articulation of Afrotopia, a tangible means of Black expression, during a period of Black Renaissance.
Employing Du Bois’s work, in a surrealistic conversation with Skeen’s observation, this chapter details Blackdom’s first decade while maintaining Blackdom’s full trajectory expressed in Skeen’s letter. Blackdomites could not predict the weather or the events of the next day; it was inconceivable that they could foresee what would happen over the course of the first two decades. In part due to the miseducation of Black folks, we must enter Blackdom’s Afrotopia behind the Du Boisian “veil of Blackness” knowing that Blackdomites had a belief that a good man’s steps were ordered by God. In short, according to their belief system, provided one was willing to apply Christian as well as Masonic ideals and concepts to the collective experience of Blackdom, God would bless them for their faithful endurance. Without knowing the future, Blackdomites assumed success was inevitable after the trials and tragedy of desert homesteading guaranteed by God’s promise. In the Borderlands, Blackdomites had faith in divine sovereignty that was sure to come.
Blackdomites believed in a collective spiritual and daily toil. Ruth Skeen wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois in 1920:
I have greatly enjoyed the sample copies of “The Crisis” and if you will send me two or three copies of the Brownie Book [The Brownies’ Book, a literary magazine aimed at African American children]. I will take them, with the samples of the Crisis and visit a colored settlement near here and endeavour to secure subscriptions for your good magazine.
There are not many colored people in this part of our state although we have many Mexicans and the race feeling against them is quite bitter. They are not allowed to enter a white barber shop nor to eat in a white man’s eating place.
However, in the northern part of the state they own a good deal of property and are well educated and hold positions of trust and honor. Our Governor is a Spanish-American born in old Mexico. Of course, historically, the Spanish people have a perfect right here and there are persons in the state possessing a fair attitude toward them—but they are only what [English writer John] Ruskin calls “a little group of wise hearts in a wilderness of fools.”
Near here is a settlement of Negroes, a little town called “Blackdom,” consisting of farmers who have wrenched every bit of good out of our bitter soil. They are quiet, good citizens and molest nobody. They have had little chance for the cultural things of life and I believe they would welcome an opportunity to take your papers and magazines. Of course, they may already know about them. They have a little school and a Church.
At any rate, I will be glad to go over in my car and take them the books. I have lived among Negroes all of my life, have had them in my home as helpers, and known them very well, but I had never, until going to California, lived where they were not segregated.2
Thus, according to Ruth Loomis Skeen, Blackdomites appeared in full expression of Afrotopia in 1920.
Unbound by the geography of the New York–based Black Renaissance movement and her ethnic background, Ruth Skeen was a poet of Irish heritage who also went by the pen name Rheba Cain. She lived in places from California to New York and, although she was a “White woman,” per her understanding, Black folks maintained their souls and knew how to express themselves. In an apparent attempt to “negro-tize” her name as an author, in a 1929 issue of The Crisis magazine, located in New York on Fifth Avenue, she published “Dark Lover.”3 Cognizant of the time in which she existed, Skeen’s minstrel expression of her soul in poems from a position on the Black side of town highlights a slightly veiled Black space difficult to experience on the other side of the proverbial veil. The two-ness was used for all who engage in the practice.
Blackdom was an “in-between” (frontier) space in the Mexican–US Borderlands where Black people quarantined to engage their duality to achieve Afrotopia. Wilson Moses’s notion of Afrotopia informs how one might imagine a society built from a singular Black intersectional messianic consciousness and helps interpret the documented activities of Blackdomites in the midst of a dual reality.4 Moses tracked Afrocentrism as well as anti-modernism and notions of utopia from the 1700s through the nineteenth century. Also important to this study, Moses’s work The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 helped contextualize postbellum Blackness in early twentieth century America.5 Moses’s works illuminate the centrality of back-to-Africa schemes and bring into focus the new Blackdom narrative trajectory, shifting from a freedom model to a sovereignty model. Mostly untold, the history of Blackdom disrupts the tricultural narrative.
Blackdom’s Intersection and the “Ole” Tricultural Narrative
The Albuquerque Journal published a February 14, 1965, segment whose headline read “50 Years Ago.” One must take into account the Pecos Valley region’s Confederate past and White supremist–led efforts as well as the article’s being written in the 1960s during significant politicization of human rights. It depicted a traveler to Artesia, twenty miles south of Blackdom and the same place from which Ruth Loomis Skeen wrote her letter:
Artesia —A short time ago the Negro preacher from Blackdom, a Negro settlement in Chaves County, came to Artesia to solicit funds for a new church. He received a liberal response to his plea for donations and went home well pleased with the consideration given him, but there are no Negroes residing in this town. Artesia is the only town of any size in New Mexico where colored race is absolutely barred out.6
The piece written in 1965 was meant to reflect Blackdom fifty years prior, around 1915. How does one reconcile Blackdom’s reality for some and not others?
As we focus on significance, success or failure hinges on one’s perception. Newly discovered documentation challenges a pedestrian view of New Mexicanity as a triad of Indigenous, Spanish, and White people. The tricultural narrative germinated in a unique space colonized by people of a White consciousness that helped erase histories. New Mexicanity bent toward White supremacy, over time. Evident of the complicated space, however, White colonizers were not the unique source of hegemonic power. The newest wave of colonization at the turn of the twentieth century, in the so-called “North American” continental interior, collided with inhabitants conditioned to resist. Indigenous and Native peoples resisted long enough that White colonizers relented to racialization and creation of more White-ish people.7
In September 1903, Chaves County’s economic surge had undergone a wave of business incorporations after regional large infrastructure projects (described in chapter 2). Thirteen Black men signed the Blackdom Townsite Company’s articles of incorporation and were able to function as businessmen. In so doing, Blackdomites veiled themselves from the vagaries of a society beholden to White supremacy as well as physicality. At the turn of the twentieth century, what had become the US territory of New Mexico was in transition to statehood and a final annexation of Indigenous lands. The White supremacist violence extended beyond bloody battles and massacre; systematic corporatocracy within the homestead processes shifted borders and people as a perpetual reminder of the ongoing horrors in reservation life.
Hosting the prior Spanish colonizer, Indigenous and Native peoples had to endure a new wave of English-speaking colonizers and a new colonization system that had to expand to include their bodies in the underclasses.8 Specifically, the US racialization process to create new levels of Whiteness from Indigenous and Native bodies provided social space for Black ambitions to fully mature: separate-but-equal.9 African descendants as they were, Blackdomites colonized in the midst of a collision at the intersection of Mexico’s northern frontier and the United States’ western frontier. Black and other colonizer groups used homesteading to benefit from the displacement and dismantling of Indigenous and Native communities.
In the case of Black folks, New Mexico’s statehood ensured increased impositions at the hands of people in Chaves County dominated by the “White” consciousness. The shift of power, from federal to local jurisdictions in New Mexico, was important in the Blackdom narrative as a Black homesteader motivator. White people were occupied with transforming Indigenous and Native People into a racialized something (close to Whiteness), allowing Black folks to exist as separate-and-equal under the law.
The Lost Years, 1903–1909
Consider this section’s title “The Lost Years” as ambiguous because of our shift in focus to highlight significance on the “Black side of town.” Depending on one’s perspective, the early struggle of Blackdomites was both lost and found: lost in the notion of the old world that Black folks understood, and found because the town proceeded to grow through the Great Depression. Lost was the Black poverty in a White-dominated society. Through the lens of the standard Black narrative, freedom to exist as the permanent underclass was lost in the Blackdomite quest for frontier sovereignty. Early Blackdomites fell short of “large” land acquisitions to build a town, and few were able to prove up a homestead so that many were lost to “the struggle.” Blackdom, however, endured as a desirable idea long enough to function as insurance against New Mexico’s imminent statehood.
In September 1903, the Kokomo, Indiana, Daily Tribune (on page 7) reported, “Organization of Blackdom.”10 Black folks who had recently migrated to the incorporated state of Indiana endured a summer of White violence. Blackdomites focused on Indiana as the entire US was exposed to the creation of Blackdom Townsite Company. Blackdom was an autonomy project specifically designed by people in Chaves County, who had the privilege of little to no Jim Crow law enforcement in the US Territory. Folklore about Blackdom emphasizes the importance of White violence but, facing little to no White violence, Blackdom was built by people who reached a place of relative sovereignty and invited others to join. Blackdom’s early years appeared lost as Black homesteaders attempted to adjust to the steep learning curve of desert farming. Blackdomites maximized individual capacity with community support, apprenticeships, and host families for better integration of new immigrants over time.
The Eubank family’s initial exposure to the Afro-Frontier town Blackdom scheme is unclear, but homestead records document their journey in Afrotopia. Nurtured in messianic colonization ideals, Black folks building a town on hard-to-irrigate Mescalero Apache Reservation desert land required a significant amount of imagination and faith. Significant in the story of Blackdomites, the homestead process functioned as a day-by-day and year-by-year standardized process to measure one’s progress. Advantageous to the Blackdom scheme, homesteading ensured there were actions to take, planning to manage, and a clear phase of execution uniformly understood by all of the illuminated observers.
In 1903, Blackdom’s incorporation was advertised throughout the United States. Associated Press outlets echoed from the Santa Fe New Mexican. More than likely, Crutcher Eubank (the family patriarch) harbored colonization intentions as part of his training in Liberation Theology as a minister from Kentucky, and was exposed through his network of ministers, many of whom were Freemasons. In 1904, the lack of a “massive” influx of immigrants and migrants signaled Blackdomites’ slow ascension into Afrotopia. Credible in the minds of those with a similar consciousness, Blackdom maintained a dual reality and often contracted to only exist in the tangible world, on paper, in signed notarized incorporation documents. On an archetypical Afrotopic trajectory, the Eubank family narrative reveals profound significance in understanding Blackdom better. After a century has passed, descendants continue to own land in what was Blackdom.
1904 May: Blackdom’s Reception
The Eubank family endured slavery and the failure of Reconstruction and found opportunity in the 1896 US Supreme Court decision in Plessy. Black people were granted lawful separation from White people. In 1904, Crutcher Eubank’s Afrotopic vision of separate and equal under the law was realized when the family immigrated across the Pecos River and into Chaves County. The Eubank family’s Black nationalism was born on a slave plantation. Over time the Black church defined a sovereignty provision in frontier territorial space.
Blackdom’s grand opening in May 1904 fell short of physical expectations. However, the significance of “Blackdom” (the idea) increased as a counter hegemonic balance to ensure their future sovereignty. According to the Texas Hereford Reporter, under the headline “New Mexico to Have a Nigger Town,” Blackdom was set to “open May 1, 1904, at which time the promoters propose to locate 10,000 negroes.”11
The Eubank family was a part of the first wave of Black migrants to arrive in Chaves County for the purpose of building an all-Black municipality. Frank, Ella, and the Boyer family became intimately acquainted with the Eubank family when the Boyers hosted them for a year. The Boyers homesteaded in Dexter near the train station where the Eubank family would have arrived. Significantly, they were all on the west side of the Pecos River, which signaled the end of Jim Crow laws in the region.
1905 Eubank Family
Mostly influenced by the desire to engage the more popular notion of Blackdom, I wrote a 3,000-word essay that highlighted Blackdom’s “lost years” featuring the Eubank Family. Accurate in my assessment of the family’s first year as homesteaders and second year in Chaves County, I wrote, “The Eubank family was faithful, consistent, and hard-working, but they sowed seeds in the right place at the wrong time and reaped little harvest for their toil.”12 In the spring 2021 issue of New Mexico State Department of Cultural Affairs’ 107-year-old El Palacio magazine, I was preoccupied with establishing a basic narrative trajectory for people who were new to the idea of Afrotopia. The Eubank family had an appreciation for education, as shown by the accomplishments of granddaughter Grace, who earned a degree from Lincoln University in Missouri.13
According to my original interpretations, the Eubank family embodied the era of loss. After further excavation, what appeared as failure may have been an experimental plan unique to the region, time, and space. Blackdom was located 200 miles west of Lubbock, Texas. There, William Curry Holden published his study, “Agriculture on the Spur Ranch,” at Texas Technological College in 1932. Holden examined the experimental ranch “located in Garza, Kent, Crosby, and Dickens counties, [that] was owned and operated from 1885 to 1907 by a British syndicate with a home office in London.”14 Holden’s 1932 study focused on Northwest Texas. Holden’s work reaffirmed the region’s global agricultural economic potential as early as 1879. Removing the illusion of borders, Northwest Texas included “Eastern New Mexico” or “Little Texas.” During the Eubank family’s experiment with Afrotopia, they also participated in regional experimental agricultural techniques.
Only recently had I become aware of Blackdom’s significance in the region’s agricultural trajectory at the turn of the twentieth century. I participated in an online discussion panel with Janice Dunahoo, archivist and community columnist; Geni Flores, coordinator of bilingual and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) education at Eastern New Mexico University; and Maya Allen, a PhD student in biology at the University of New Mexico who focuses on how plants cope with environmental heterogeneity and a particular underlying mechanism, phenotypic plasticity—the ability for a single genotype to differentially express alternative phenotypes based on the environment. For the New Mexico Humanities Council public humanities program “Starting Conversations: we all presented our perspective on Blackdom’s significance.15 Maya Allen’s work suggests my initial conclusion about whether or not the Eubank family was short-sighted. My simplistic notions of the Eubank family, and specifically Crutcher’s faith, colored my perspective when I wrote, “He misread the warm-weather plant that early growth was steady, but his leap of faith was inefficient.”16
An elementary survey of regional botanical history reveals a legacy of experiment in the region. In a humble attempt to reintroduce the Eubank family in this Afrotopic narrative, I return to their use of kaffir corn. By most measurements of successful farming on desert prairies, the Eubank family’s first year of homesteading appeared disastrous as they planted kaffir corn, a warm-weather crop, in a winter ground. Belonging to the sorghum family, the plant grows to between five to seven feet and was a native crop from Southern Africa.17 Kaffir corn was an experimental foreign crop for the region. The Eubank family therefore was a part of the region’s period of agricultural experimentation.
In migrating from Kentucky into the Afro-Frontier space of Blackdom, the Eubank family joined other Blackdomites in an unincorporated agricultural community. Inspired by the notion of Blackdom articulated in the Blackdom Townsite Company’s Articles of Incorporation, Crutcher Eubank began the family homestead patent on October 9, 1906.18 The Eubank family was hardworking and in their first year focused on producing seeds of the experimental kaffir corn. In all likelihood, the Eubank family harvested an exponential number of seeds relative to what they planted.19 The value created by seed production had the potential to reap enormous reward for the start-up homestead.
Experiments proved that if a sufficient stand was secured in the first planting in a cold-winter ground, significantly more cultivation was needed than if sown in a warm ground. The Eubank family was keenly aware of the socioeconomics in Chaves County and could live relatively free in Roswell as part of the Southern-style servant class. Instead, they chose the struggle for sovereignty that rested on seed production in their first year as homesteaders. Crutcher systematically submitted to the Blackdomite pattern of leaving one’s family to raise capital working as a laborer on nearby homesteads or in nearby cities to subsist during the time of the agricultural experiments. Possibly in the bartering economy that developed, Blackdomites were eager to help the Eubank family through their early years in New Mexico’s southern frontier.
1906 The Boyer, Eubank, Ragsdale, and Hagerman Families
In 1906, the Boyer and Eubank families homesteaded in Chaves County. At the time, Frank Boyer was Blackdom Townsite Company’s president. Legitimizing further investment in New Mexico’s southern region, in 1906, Herbert J. Hagerman, James Hagerman’s son, was federally appointed to the seventeenth territorial governorship of New Mexico out of the capital Santa Fe 200 miles north on highway 285. James and Herbert used their tremendous influence to solidify Chaves County’s place as a regional economic driver of exponential growth in southeastern New Mexico.
Blackdom had a slow progression, and the new settler families brought with them talent and fresh understanding of the potential for generational wealth creation. From Mississippi in 1906, and hosted by the Boyer family, the Ragsdale family settled as homesteaders. Blackdom’s emergence as an oil-producing town during the Harlem Renaissance was enhanced by Clinton Ragsdale’s engineering background specialty in pumping.20 In his mid-30s when he began a life in Chaves County, Clinton arrived from Mississippi in 1906 and began his homestead in 1907, living in a tent.21 Frank Boyer’s development as a minister, a former Buffalo Soldier, and a Freemason served Blackdomite society. Frank functioned as a foundational intersection for ministers such as Crutcher Eubank and Freemasons like Clinton Ragsdale whose engineering expertise became a vital resource when Blackdomite society shifted in 1920 to drilling for oil instead of water.
Little coordination took place after 1903 in Blackdom’s progression except within small units and families. For example, Frank Boyer and his brother-in-law Daniel Keys began homestead patents near the town of Dexter, New Mexico (five miles west of Blackdom) on the same day in 1906. Contributing to the confusion of when Blackdom began, Frank, who was often considered the single most important leader, spent his first three years building capital and renting land. As the system developed, homesteading in Blackdom became more systematic and predictive. However, lost in the process were early-wave Blackdomite children such as James Eubank, who was one of the first teachers in Blackdom school with little to no desire to homestead.
1907 John Boyer Homestead
Boyer family allies, specifically Judge Freeman, started migrating out of New Mexico. The judge retired to British Columbia, where he had invested in the lumber industry.22 Judge Freeman fully withdrew from the New Mexico bar in early 1908, when Frank Boyer completed his first homestead patent. Formally, Frank Boyer had declared his sovereignty from jobs outside of Blackdom and focused more on the development of Blackdom’s town square.
Although John Boyer, Frank’s brother, completed the first family homestead in 1907, collectively, Blackdomites had no land directly anchoring the existence of the town. Instead, Blackdomites operated as townspeople without a town. Many Blackdomites began individual homesteads before 1909. Blackdomites had an insatiable appetite for land and absorbed what they were legally allowed.
On the Eve of New Mexico’s statehood, John Boyer homesteaded for a second time under the Enlargement Act and grew his landholding by 320 acres. John had endured life as a child on a slave plantation in Georgia, and at the age of 54 in 1910, he had reached sovereignty and was in the midst of growing generational wealth. His first land patent was granted on August 16, 1907, and set the frantic pace of the Boyers’ land grab in Blackdom’s commons. When New Mexico became a state, John had a homestead patent in a municipality he helped build, called Blackdom. He also owned a home in the city on South Main.
Meanwhile, in 1907, Crutcher Eubank broke ground on two acres of his land, which yielded little. In the 1908 growing season, Crutcher planted more kaffir corn for a total of four acres. By 1909, he broke ground on another two acres, planting corn, beans, potatoes, and other garden products over the six acres. In 1910, Crutcher replanted on the acreage of previous years. In 1911, Crutcher prayed, and the rains came to relieve the region of droughts.
A growing hostility towards non-White people was reflected in headlines and articles devoted to perpetual racialization in Borderlands regions. As noted in a Las Vegas (New Mexico) Daily Optic 1907 article entitled “Negro Shot at the Castaneda,” the “third cook attempts to kill colored bartender” Will Henderson in Las Vegas. According to the article, the “injured man receives bullet in left thigh—both placed in jail—coon trouble and fired first.”23 The colloquialism “coon,” short for zip coon, derived from a minstrel caricature of Black people, common in popular media, meant to dehumanize.24
1908 Homesteads
No single moment sparked Blackdom’s revival and Afro-Frontier town. More than likely, the level of Black land ownership and the ability to own a whole square mile of land after 1909 contributed to propel Blackdom forward when racial tensions increased over the course of the first decade of the twentieth century. The Blackdom Townsite Company became increasingly important to keep the vision of Black prosperity alive in the county.
Tallmadge Affair
The indictment of the Tallmadge brothers during the early period of Blackdom’s history may also have played a role in Blackdom’s early stunted beginning. The “Tallmadge affair” was a peripheral incident worth mentioning for the sake of inclusion. A national story, the wealthy industrialists had millions of dollars—as well as their sovereignty—to lose. Isaac Jones and the greater Jones family disappeared from public record along with Mack Taylor, who homesteaded adjacent to highway 285 east and directly across from the Jones homestead. Dramatically, violence broke out on the streets of Roswell as the federal government authorities added co-conspirators to the allegations against the Tallmadge brothers. Written about in the region’s newspaper of record, the Tallmadge affair was notable for a few reasons. It is also likely that many of the events that occurred had no relation to one another.
The Tallmadge brothers (Chester and Benjamin), railroad tycoons from Chicago, Illinois, made a series of land deals that sparked the attention of authorities, and on June 24, 1905, the Los Angeles Herald reported the arrest of the brothers on federal land fraud charges. According to the article, “Revelations expected to fully equal those made in Oregon and Montana.”25 United States Commissioner Karl Snyder required Benjamin Tallmadge to post a $5,000 bond for his appearance. Commissioner Snyder issued a warrant because of the complaint of Interior Department Agent Grosvenor Clarkson (a government investigator). According to charges against the Tallmadge brothers, they procured some of New Mexico’s most valuable land with fraudulent homestead entries. “This land, unimproved, sells from $20 to $30 an acre. All these cases are under investigation. Mr. Tallmadge declares that all of his dealings have been according to law and that it will be so proven.”26
Carl C. Young and John McGintry, business associates of the Tallmadge brothers, were charged with perjury and subornation of perjury in the Tallmadge affair.27 William Overstreet, another business acquaintance of the Tallmadge brothers, swung on Agent Clarkson after the news of his indictment. The government alleged land fraud and Overstreet claimed Clarkson engaged in extrajudicial persecution.28 Overstreet beat Clarkson “like he stole something” in front of Main Street’s onlookers. In July 1905, the Tallmadge brothers’ land fraud cases were dismissed, except for the associated perjury charges, which remained until 1907.29 Wealthy and well connected, the Tallmadge brothers in August 1907 received a favorable ruling from the Territorial Supreme Court.30
In the midst of New Mexico’s transition into statehood, Blackdom’s ascendance appeared blunted at the beginning. Possibly, Blackdomite leaders feared implication in a regional land fraud case a few months before it was set to open in 1904. The first president and vice president of the Blackdom Townsite Company, Frank Boyer and Isaac Jones may have felt a heavy responsibility as heads of a company. Blackdom Townsite Company wasn’t implicated in any known documents; however, land fraud and shell companies were common. Coincidentally, a year after incorporation, Blackdom had no address and appeared in full decline by the summer of 1904.
In addition to a steep learning curve and a lack of full engagement in Blackdom, Chaves County was steeped in legal fights over land that may explain Blackdom’s precarious start. Chester and Benjamin Tallmadge were loosely connected to Blackdom in their frontier scheme of buying failed desert homesteads for purposes against federal law. Third-party purchases of homestead land were a violation of federal law. In an example of shifty dealings, Mack Taylor sold a homestead with a warranty deed on April 9, 1904, to Charles Tannehill, a wealthy California businessman living in Roswell.31 Only a month earlier, Taylor successfully completed his homestead and was granted his patent by the Land Office in Roswell. In June 1905, Tannehill sold the land to the Tallmadge brothers.