The current public discourse to emphasize consensual engagement amongst people, including children, requires my acknowledgment of a gendered, masculine, male privilege that handicaps my ability to fully explore the ontology of women, children, and queer folks. The presence of Kahtia, a gendered daughter and teenager in my life, provides an impetus to venture into an unknown private conscious space. At the intersection of Black women, the Borderlands, and a Black masculine male-dominated society, there are no current literary systems to ask permission to peek behind the veil of Black womanhood. Because of my perspective as a “trained” patriarch, all the narrow understandings in this chapter confirm the critiques of a masculine male-dominated society.
Instead of ignoring or engaging in reductionism, the injurious nature of exclusionary as well as binary historical frameworks requires a brief synopsis of where my shortcomings begin. As a child of a poor Black woman living in South Central Los Angeles, I caught glimpses of how dehumanizing a patriarchal society could be for a young (unwed) Black woman. Veretha, my mother, dropped out of Locke High School after birthing me at the age of 15. Veretha was part of a Black migration out of Mississippi, whose father settled on the West Coast after his military service. Unaware of the “dark alliance” that exacerbated traumas in our de-industrialized working-class community (48th and Western), Veretha was poisoned by the patriarchy, and I was sent to live with my grandparents in Compton, California.1
The poisoned patriarchy inspired artists who created poems about my mother’s cohort of Black women and set it to music. Disrespect turned to disregard as Veretha’s body transitioned from a young female body to a middle-aged much deteriorated female body. She was a proud Black woman whose ontology was most vivid to me, as a child, on Sundays. In the back of a triplex next to the alley off 47th, my mom would cook and clean our 900-square-foot pad singing the music of The Dells. Cue the drum roll: “Give your baby a standing ovation.”
In the assailable patriarchy of my grandparents’ house, my grandmother’s power lorded over the private sphere and my grandfather dutifully performed in the public sphere. When Mary Elizabeth Gilmore Nelson (my grandmother) felt her power was insufficient she would say, “Wait ’til daddy gets home.” Within our vulnerable patriarchal family, my grandmother’s matriarchal power included the ability to add capacity to her enforcement. Moreover, Mary E. Nelson was a matriarch within our church community, which further added to her sphere of influence in our urbanized Black Cowboy society. After bearing eight children and raising them and me, in her 50s she started college. In her 60s, she established a business called Grandma’s House, a daycare. In her 70s, her business grew into a school called Trinity Unlimited Outreach - Childcare Center that her daughters and granddaughters now manage. My grandfather, Glenorce, owned and operated a family business (near the beach) with his sons for fifty years; now he helped finance my grandmother’s dream.
This two-part chapter was conceived with my observations engaging a Black “cowboy” society expectant to become a patriarch. Through the narrow windows of my mother and grandmother’s life, I “saw” a mirror image in the public record of Mattie/Mittie Moore (Wilson) and Ella (McGruder) Boyer. Blackdom entered a period of revival after 1909 because of the omnipresent Black matriarchal power. Blackdomite women were Black women in a Victorian-ish society; homesteading was central to Blackdom and women were keenly aware and exploited the opportunity to become public-facing colonizers. Although female in an anemic patriarchal society, women helped double Blackdom’s landholdings by 1919.
Lastly, this chapter assumes my need to do more work to better tell the story of Black women in Blackdom. As a male, masculine, man, coming of age in Compton during the 1990s, I am not the best prepared scholar to write a history of Black women in the Borderlands. From behind the border wall of my poisoned patriarchal understanding, I peer into a neighboring moth-eaten matriarchal space to illuminate what was apparent. Dehumanization of Black women during my training as a patriarch was infused with Black ontology in my songs of youth.
Be forewarned: I mimicked a pattern of dehumanization as I floated down the 91 freeway with my dad in his Cadillac (for the year); at audio decibels far higher than was safe for a child, violins began to play, dramatic drum roll, “This is a man’s world . . . but it wouldn’t be nothing . . . without a woman or a little girl.”2 When I was old enough to drive, I attempted to manifest the ontological space of my father with the new music of the day. My granddad bought me a powder blue 1975 VW bug (fuel injected). I kept my rims clean, with tinted windows and racing tires in the back. One might have seen me floating down Crenshaw; at audio decibels far higher than was safe for a teenager, cue the stripped drum track: “A bitch iz a bitch.”3
Again, cognizant of the varying degrees of disrespect and dehumanization manufactured in a poisoned patriarchy, my understanding of Black women’s ontology began at “dehumanizing” and shifted to dehumanizing. This humble and pedestrian telling of Black women’s stories emanates from a limited feminist “knowledge” (and critique). I have an even more limited set of knowledges (and critique) from the LGBTQIA+/- community perspective. My one or two courses exploring queer theory don’t qualify me to carefully and fully engage the ontology of the communities.
Nevertheless, it is impossible to analyze Blackdom’s revival and only consider the efforts of “masculine” men. This chapter focuses on the ontology of Black women in a borderland that extended beyond their veiled existence within the White hegemonic society, to the best of my ability. Blackdom was a vulnerable patriarchy in both the public and private spheres of influence, and Black women bore the semi-silent burden.4 Blackdomite society was a patriarchy that functioned when matriarchs fully accepted the exchange. In Roswell, however, Black women were more often charged for domestic violence than were men. Publicly in Chaves County, misogyny and misandry circulated on the minstrel theater stage and in newspaper articles, particularly in the post–WWI era.
In Blackdom prior to 1919, evidence suggests the space had a symmetrical power system as more women entered the homestead class. In part due to the triad of ministers, military personnel, and Freemasons, Blackdom was an ordered society where Blackdomite women flourished. Gendered and accepting of assailable patriarchal rule, Blackdomite women possessed public as well as private power on land they owned.
Blackdomite Women and Their History: Introduction
There was a clear outsized influence of women who motivated, moved, and shifted Blackdomite society using the homestead process as leverage in what was a constant set of private negotiations. As Blackdomite children grew into the homestead class, they articulated the striving of feminine, female, matriarchal Blackdom. Black women’s ontology, while a mystery to me, in this chapter engages Blackdom’s feminine, female, women’s Afro-Frontierism as a signifier of the collective conscience. As indicated in homestead records, one might perceive the “virgin/whore” phenomenon represented in the documented history of Ella Boyer and Mittie Moore.5 However, in this narrative about Blackdomite womanhood, I deliberately articulate duality in my presentation of Mattie/Mittie Moore. Welcoming more study and critique, we also explore Blackdomite society through documents that do not lend themselves to critique or analysis of Blackdom’s children as they engaged Afro-Frontierism.
Blackdomites produced a messianic sovereignty. Recent studies suggest patriarchy embodies the “poison” of Black society during the twentieth century. Thoughtfully, yet blindly, we venture to engage the dynamism of women in Blackdomite society through their public records with Black men in their periphery. The Enlargement Act, signed February 19, 1909, began a new era in Blackdom’s homestead-class growth as they positioned themselves to smoothly enter the Roaring Twenties in boom times. In Revival, people who endured harsh dry growing seasons got reprieve and the laws changed to allow for accumulation of thousands of miles of (stolen Indigenous) land. The passage of the Enlargement Act was the first of many new US colonization tactics to encourage homesteader occupation and of confiscated Indigenous desert land in Mexico’s northern frontier, and women led the charge. Most importantly, the rains came.
Mattie
Mattie (or Mittie) Moore enters Blackdom’s narrative with a town in revival as a land donor. The exchange of land was an effort to officially attach the idea of Blackdom to a federal and local registry of homestead land patents. On Indigenous land, partitioned behind the veil of Blackness and Blackdomite society, Black women were landlords. After 1909, Black women thrust themselves into the homestead class—beyond notions of freedom and “promised land”—to solidify generational sovereignty in Afrotopia. While Blackdomite children grew up and married amongst one another, there was no such rule (written or otherwise) that men were required to carry the public burden of engaging hegemonic society beyond the veil of Blackness or Blackdomite society. In Blackdom, directly and indirectly, Black women lorded over more land than Blackdomite men and were omnipresent in society.
Colonizing “free” government land was formulaic, but often expensive to prove up. While it is clear how Black men rented their labor as they started homesteads, it was unclear how the women of Blackdom organized resources and the capacity to ascend Afrotopia outside of the rural family labor structure. In the case of Mattie of Blackdom, I make the assumption that she was Mittie Moore of Roswell, an infamous bootleg’n, gun-slang’n, homestead’n madame. The selective storytelling saves space for Mittie’s ascendancy into Blackdom’s elite during the Harlem Renaissance, when matriarchs such as Ella Boyer exited. No present documentation suggests the two women ever spoke, face to face. Evidence suggests, however, that when Blackdom’s society shifted to a more extractive model for “Blackdom,” Mittie Moore’s ownership of a whole square mile south of Blackdom in the fall of 1922 had little to do with Blackdom selling the church by the summer.
Lillian
Lillian Collins, of the influential Blackdomite Collins family who moved to Chaves County in 1908, sat down for an interview with Elvis Fleming from the Southeastern New Mexico Historical Society in 1985. Lillian’s interview offered flashes of faded memory. Beyond what appeared in the documented interview, I asked Elvis if he recalled any off-record comments, but too much time had passed to remember.
Lillian recalled her family’s move to Roswell and the tremendous hostility they faced when New Mexico was on the eve of statehood. Full Blackdomite manifestation included dual residency: Blackdom (rural) and Roswell (city). Women with children more than likely dictated in which space they lived; it was unlikely that children had much say in the matter. According to Lillian, who was speaking to a White man (and was therefore possibly constrained in her communications), she recalled Black kids attending the local high school and the segregated school system’s refusal to grant diplomas. Blackdomite children in Roswell had entered a foreign space hostile to their presence. Hazel Taylor Parker provides a confirmation of Lillian’s account of increased racial tension around the same time in Chaves County. “After Dexter [a nearby town] started settling in, well, the people who was comin’, they was prejudiced in their hearts. Anyway, they did not want the negroes around and this is why they moved further out.” 6
In 1908, when Lillian first moved as a child with her family, Roswell was a fairly integrated city. Not leaving the impression of a totally hostile society, to Elvis she said, “When we moved to town we did not really have the problem because, uh, they were such sweet people, uh, of any race.”7 Lillian continued, “The Mexicans and Whites were mostly welcoming . . . [but] we had a problem in the latter years when the kids would have rock fights,” referring to “Anglo” kids from a different school versus the “Coloreds” from her school. The fight continued until someone called “the law.”
The Revival, Part 1 (1909–1915)
Ella Boyer was an archetypal Blackdomite woman whose life and vocation as a formally trained midwife focused on children. During Ella’s tenure engaging the Borderlands, she held office in the Order of the Eastern Star, an auxiliary organization of Black Freemasonry. Ella bore and raised ten children and homesteaded on 160 acres on the eve of boom times. Her power emanated from her relationship with Frank (Freemason, patriarch, and devout husband) as well as her children who carried with them family traditions to places like Southern California. Ella’s influence extended beyond the private sphere as she thrust herself into Blackdom’s homestead class, leveraging her power as a matriarch.
Blackdomites were not satisfied with a loose unincorporated town, and the 1909 Homestead Enlargement Act became a major catalyst for further development. Black people were inspired by the prospect of maturing the idea of Blackdom as well as their investment in context of New Mexico’s statehood, which further partitioned Mexico’s northern frontier. An incorporated all-Black town showed potential for generational wealth creation. Ella Boyer, née McGruder, was one of the first Blackdomite women to homestead and kick-start the Revival.
By 1912, on the eve of New Mexico’s incorporation as a state of the union, Blackdom was revived and fully functioning as a thriving unincorporated Afro-Frontier town. During World War I, Blackdomite children were conscripted from “Blackdom” and, therefore, federally recognized. Most important to Blackdom’s future economic prospects, oil exploration in the Permian Basin exploded. In May 1920, Black folks (Blackdomites) solidified their place in the region’s oil boom, with Black women in the forefront of the Afro-Frontier scheme. Blackdomites maximized opportunity behind the corporate veil of their municipality.
Ella Boyer was a well-educated Black woman from Georgia who literally brought life into Blackdomite society. Trained at the Haines Institute (founded by Miss Lucy Laney), Ella honed her midwifery skills. She “officiated so many births there were too many to count.”8 Traveling by train from Georgia, she joined her husband with a group of children and family large enough to fill up a baseball field. Her 1900 migration and settlement in the New Mexico Territory included ten children by the census of 1910. According to Ella’s homestead records, she began a 160-acre homestead north of and adjacent to what would become the forty-acre Blackdom town square.
1909
On February 19, 1909, the US Congress increased the homestead allotment to 320 acres and up to 640 acres or a whole square mile. Theoretically, provided the land was hard to irrigate, if all of Ella Boyer’s children owned the maximum amount of homestead land, they would possess the equivalent land mass of present-day Compton, California. In 1910, Blackdom emerged when bitter battles became what was known as the Mexican Revolution. Militarily strategic against Pancho Villa’s raids, New Mexico was “on the verge of statehood,” and Blackdomites had positioned themselves to take advantage of the shift from federal territory to state status. Including the era of Blackdom’s Roaring Twenties, they indulged in Afrotopia and found exponential growth as the Revival led to boom times.
Consequently, more Blackdomite women joined the homestead class. Opportunistically, Frank Boyer became an assignee for Mattie Moore and Pernecia Russell under the amendment to the homestead laws. Blackdomites were a part of the homesteader boom that by 1910 helped colonize over 40 million acres with a hundred thousand land patents. Blackdom Townsite inspired Black people to homestead until the Great Depression. According to new law, Frank was allowed to file a land patent for Mattie and Pernecia without land counting as part of his maximum allotment. Frank Boyer began a homestead patent for the forty acres for Blackdom’s town square devoting Mattie’s thirty-five acres and Pernecia’s five acres. Along with Ella’s 160 acres, the forty acres of Blackdom town square helped solidify the Boyer family’s Blackdom legacy.
In 1909, one of New Mexico’s first oil wells was drilled in Eddy County, in the Lake Arthur village area, where the Boyer family lived for a while when they were in Blackdom or Dexter. A convergence of positive events combined with Blackdomite boldness and inspired a second major wave of homesteading families. Proving up land continued to be a difficult feat. Ella Boyer got caught up and had to provide a deposition before completion of her almost decadelong homestead process. Desert-land entry homestead patents required one to show significant improvements. On November 22, 1910, Ella Boyer filed the annual paperwork required. She invested $1,237, but there was not sufficient irrigation to satisfy the General Land Office in Roswell. Her process dragged on, requiring that she testify. All homestead patents required legal procedures and federal perjury charges were a consequence for false information on proving up papers.
In 1909, 40-year-old Mattie Moore from Donley County, Texas, made her homestead claim as sole heir of Dickson Garner under the Soldier’s Additional Homestead Right process (with Frank Boyer as assignee).9 As assignee, Frank was able to take over Moore’s homestead patent in the name of Dickson Garner, her supposedly dead soldier husband.10 The heirs of Dickson Garner already claimed land using those benefits, and Mattie needed a new story. Mattie Moore’s homestead entry in 1909 led to the initial investigation and rejection of the paperwork for 34.79 acres of Blackdom’s town square.
David Geyer, a lawyer in Roswell, helped Frank in his duties as assignee and was granted the power of attorney.11 Mattie wrote to Peter Keller, commissioner of the Buffalo, Missouri, General Land Office, with a story about her two sisters who died in infancy. Nothing moved Keller to grant Mattie her claim. Moore then attempted to claim sole heirship of “Dixon” Garner. W. A. Dixon, Chester Q. Dixon, and Margaret White of Conway County, Arkansas, transferred an additional right for eighty acres as the sole heirs of Allen Dixon, who was assumed to go by the alias Dixon Garner/Dickson Garner. In February 1911, the General Land Office in Washington, DC, answered the request of the Roswell General Land officer requesting a ruling on Mattie Moore’s claim. On the eve of New Mexico statehood, Blackdomites’ forty-acre town square was in limbo.
Mattie Moore, Pernecia Russell, and Ella Boyer faced many obstacles in entering Blackdom’s homestead class. Ella, Mattie, and Pernecia applied for homestead patents under the additional lands provision and received tremendous scrutiny. Frank Boyer appealed. Aside from the male-dominated historical record of Blackdom, Mattie Moore, Pernecia Russell, and Ella Boyer were foundational. As assignee of Pernecia Russell, Frank Boyer was in a fight for Blackdom’s five acres. After another investigation, the Roswell General Land Office found that the widow of John B. Russell (Pernecia) had already made her claims to an allotment of 45.01 acres years earlier under the assignee Francis F. Bamforth in Wyoming. Pernecia Russell (allegedly) sold land to J. T. Pendleton as well. Thus, Pernecia had exhausted her right to homestead land.12
Blackdomite society continued to expand as Blackdom’s town square languished. Peter Collins earned his family’s first patent in 1909, as the Collins family settled into the dual investment of a home in town (City of Roswell) and a ranch in Blackdom. Monroe and Thomas, Peter’s brothers, completed homestead patents in 1914. Peter, not to be outdone, earned his second homestead patent in 1915. Another brother, Frederick, earned his first in 1916. Thomas E. (son of Thomas) completed his first patent as the US engaged in world war. As Blackdom entered boom times in 1919, Thomas senior applied for a second patent, betting his land on the Blackdom Oil Company.
1910 Census
Through a narrow window of refuge, Frank Boyer succeeded by the time of the taking of the 1910 US census in Chaves County, New Mexico. However, Blackdom made his achievement as the first president of the state’s only platted and incorporated “exclusive Negro settlement” significant. The Santa Fe Pacific Railroad Company was interested in acquiring one million five hundred thousand acres in the Pecos Valley Region and guaranteed land in an all-Black town a worthy investment.13 Chaves County had a population of 17,000 while Eddy had 12,000 residents. There were 233 Black people in Roswell and fifty-six in Artesia circa 1910.
“Blackdom Wants a School”: Santa Fe New Mexican, October 13, 1910
Exclusive Negro Settlement | Superintendent of Public Instruction James E. Clark today had a letter from Blackdom, twenty miles south of Roswell and near Dexter, Chaves County, asking for advice as to school curriculum. The letter states that Blackdom is the only exclusive negro settlement in New Mexico, that the colored people have taken up 10,000 acres in homesteads and will install a pumping plant. The community has built a commodious school house and now asks for assistance in arranging for the curriculum and a teacher.
1911 “Negro Thanksgiving”
Blackdom bustled by 1911, and the Boyer family decisions dictated the direction of the Black municipality. Racialization pressures in the region incentivized the Blackdomite revival.
In an interview with Maisha Baton, Roosevelt Boyer Sr. (Frank Boyer’s son, born January 26, 1906) claimed that Frank Boyer would have been rich if he could harness the power “he got his hands on”—referring to the Blackdom Townsite Company. Intimately familiar with the pervasive White consciousness in the region, Frank Boyer believed that those who embodied hegemonic society would “make it [living/ homesteading] cost more for negroes.” Roosevelt recalled how emphatic his father was about not building Blackdom when he said, “I don’t want to do it. I won’t do it.” Frank Boyer and his cohort of Blackdomites persisted by teaching sovereignty in church and Masonic meetings. They decided to reimagine Blackdom.
Blackdom’s rebranding began in February 1911, when the General Land Office in Washington, DC, answered the Roswell General Land officer request for a ruling on Mattie Moore’s claim. Hoping to plat and announce the address of Blackdom, Blackdomites were faced with testimony of the commissioner of the Buffalo, Missouri, General Land Office Peter Keller. In short, Blackdom’s land patent was rejected; there were inconsistencies in Mattie’s story. Heirs of Allen Dixon had received land allotments as Dixon Garner, spawning further investigation.14
Black people in diaspora united at the intersection of a similar consciousness established a physical location signifying God’s sovereignty: Blackdom. At a time of great progress and celebration, on December 7, 1911, Artesia’s Pecos Valley News reported on a “Negro Thanksgiving”:
The Blackdom population has imbibed the spirit of the valley times and have organized a Boosters’ club. This club gave a banquet Thanksgiving evening. Blackdom is the negro town of the Pecos Valley, eighteen miles east of Roswell. Its citizenship and officials are composed entirely of the colored people. Francis Boyer was the toastmaster of the evening. Toasts were responded to by the following gentlemen:
“Immigration,” W. M. Young. “Our School, “James Eubank. “What we produce,” Daniel G. Keys. Music. “Real Estate,” W. M. Young. “Pumping and Windmills,” Clinton Ragsdale. “Possibilities in Livestock,” George Wilson. Music. “Business opportunities,” G. W. Wilson. Music. “Homesteading,” Monroe Collins. Songs to enliven the occasion were sung by the Dixie Chorus and the best instrumental music attainable was on hand. The menu was made up of the products of Blackdom.15
There was no official start to the revival, but if there was an inauguration of the new era, Blackdom’s 1911 Thanksgiving served as that moment. On January 6, 1912, the Afro-Frontier town had developed into an ordered society in time for New Mexico to become the forty-seventh state. After a year of mitote about New Mexico’s statehood, Blackdomite hope was reflected in their rebranding.
On December 30, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported, “Blackdom Amends Charter: Colony of Negroes Found a Townsite in Chaves County.”16 Designated Secretary of the Blackdom Townsite Company Wesley T. Williams partnered with Frank, who remained president, and Ella Boyer became vice president.17 A few days earlier, Wesley became the first Black man appointed to the position of United States Commissioner in New Mexico. According to the article, “The Blackdom Townsite Company of Blackdom, Chaves County, today filed amendments to their charter with Nathan Jaffa, secretary of the territory. The amendments concern a change in the number of directors allowed the company. Blackdom is a colony of negroes.” Blackdom’s future was secured by the three officers.
A surge of Black people in Chaves County joined Blackdom’s homestead class, and the phenomenon continued for two decades. Longtime supporters of Blackdom such as Charley Thompson began homesteads after years of little motivation. Charley’s wife Emma moved to the homestead, and they completed the process on January 23, 1914. Wesley Williams finalized his first homestead on October 15, 1914. The Thompson family was typical of the converted Blackdomites who bought into the Afro-Frontier scheme in the context of New Mexico’s statehood and Blackdom’s Revival. After Charley signed the articles of incorporation in 1903, he worked as a janitor in Roswell during the lost years (1903–1911). The town of Blackdom in Revival reestablished Charley and the Thompson family in regional markets as they ascended into Afrotopia.
1912 Lucy Henderson
Two days prior to statehood, William C. Henderson completed his first homestead in the New Mexico Territory. The new buzz about Blackdom began when the Chicago Defender published Lucy Henderson’s letter that proclaimed Blackdomites’ ascendance into Afrotopia. Founded in 1905, the Black newspaper was a major outlet to Black thinkers and doers. Lucy’s letter expressed the freedom of Chaves County and the sovereignty of Blackdom.18 She was amazed at the amount of “free land.”
Lucy didn’t appear on record as homesteading; however, on February 13, 1911, George W. Henderson, in partnership with his brothers Ash and Marshall, homesteaded 320 acres in the State of New Mexico. Edward F. Henderson (George’s brother) completed his forty-acre homestead in March. Curiously, the Henderson group of homesteads extended beyond the borders of Blackdom and mimicked the creation of a separate Afro-Frontier town and forty-acre town square. In the absence of new evidence, one assumes the Henderson family helped organize a sister community south of Blackdom near Artesia with their combined 640 acres (whole square mile). On the eve of Blackdom’s boom time, George E. Henderson desired a stake in Blackdom Oil and completed a homestead in Blackdom’s commons on August 12, 1918.
At a time of tremendous violence against people under the conditions of “Americanism,” Lucy’s letter signified security compared to the exploited and indebted rural classes of Black folks at the time. A cohort of Black women entered leadership roles in Blackdom, particularly after April 10, 1912, when the town got a post office, which Bessie E. Malone managed for years and into the WWI period.
In December 1912, James Harold Coleman placed an advertisement in The Freeman (Indianapolis, Indiana) that read, “WANTED 500 Negro families (farmers preferred) to settle on FREE Government Lands in Chaves County, New Mexico. Blackdom is a Negro colony. Fertile soil, ideal climate. No ‘Jim Crow’ Laws. For more information write James Harold Colman.” The headline, “WANTED,” was larger than the article. James was drawn to Blackdom for many reasons after divorce from his first wife, Julia Pearl.
Significantly, James Coleman nurtured his relationships in the Black literary network of people, institutions, and outlets when he resettled in Blackdom. Anti-lynching was the focal point of Black activist media campaigns at the time, and the Blackdom phenomenon became a salvific experiment for Black folks catching hell in neighboring states. James, one of Black America’s “Who’s Who,” was associated with “In Interesting Race News” (Topeka Plaindealer), December 20, 1912. “Colored people have established a town called Blackdom in New Mexico near the line. It is made up by people from Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, California, Texas and Virginia.” Further skimming revealed, “At Mounds Bayou, Miss., Negroes own and operate a $100,000 oil mill,” touting the greatness of independently wealthy Black people who settled in all-Black towns in the South with Jim Crow. For the more enterprising, “Frank Brown, a young colored man of Baltimore, Md, who has an invention designed for the elimination of the use of coal and to reduce the cost of labor. It is called a wave and gravity motor.” James Coleman was the conduit for Blackdom’s rebranding during Revival.
1913 The Crisis Magazine
Julia Pearl Hughes (Coleman-Robinson) was born to John and Mary Hughes in Melville Township, Alamance County, North Carolina, and was the first African American woman to successfully own and operate her own drugstore. Julia graduated in 1893 from Scotia Seminary (now Barber–Scotia College) in Concord, North Carolina, and in1897 graduated from the Pharmaceutical College at Howard University. She relocated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to do postgraduate work at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and managed the Frederick Douglass Hospital pharmacy. In 1899, Dr. Hughes opened her own drugstore, Hughes Pharmacy, at 937 Christian Street in South Philadelphia.
On February 16, 1900, Dr. Hughes married James Harold Coleman, a traveling journalist from Virginia. Julia and James moved to Newport News, Virginia, and Dr. Coleman opened a pharmacy. Successful for over a decade, they started the Columbia Chemical Company in 1909. The Coleman partnership created the hair-care product Hair-Vim, but they dissolved the business after a year and headed towards divorce. In 1912, James Coleman accepted the Chaves County challenge and relocated. Julia moved to Washington, DC, to stay with her relatives. In 1914, Julia started a weekly newspaper with Timothy Thomas Fortune, called the Weekly Sun. She rebranded and established the Hair Care-Vim Chemical Company in the basement of her family’s home and was officially divorced from James, in 1916, with no children. From January through December, the Blackdom advertisement maintained James Coleman’s signature cartoonish use of “WANTED,” with the type font size equal to the size of the rest of the words.
1914 Anita Scott Coleman
Blackdom was a transcolonial, transnational, and transitional space contextualized by the US–Mexico Borderlands. The NAACP contacted Blackdomites to serve as a temporary refuge to help Marie Scott’s brother escape to Mexico. Marie, a 17-year-old Black girl, was raped by two drunken White men who “skulked into the black residential section of Wagoner, Oklahoma, looking for female sexual prey.” Marie’s brother heard her cry, came to her rescue, and killed Lemuel Pease, one of the attackers. Both the sister and brother fled, but the sister was hunted, caught, and jailed; a mob overran the jail and hanged her on March 31, 1914.
James Coleman answered the NAACP’s request for Blackdomite help to provide refuge to the fugitive. James advertised Blackdom in The Crisis for a second year throughout 1914 with his name as the official contact. Marie Scott’s brother reportedly told the porters that he murdered Pease when he found the men trying to rape Marie.19 Through a network of Afro-Frontierist communities, Blackdom served public and private means when the space became a stop on the way to Mexico.
In 1916, James married again to Anita Scott in Blackdom, from where they engaged the New York literary community. The marriage of the Colemans, Black folks inspired by Blackdom’s revival, mimicked the time of renewal and rebirth. Anita and James of Blackdom had two children. Anita Coleman was born in Mexico where her Buffalo Soldier father retired in Sonora, Mexico, around 1890. During the Harlem Renaissance she, like James, appeared in the pages of The Crisis magazine. Anita Scott Coleman’s work has been posthumously published under the title “Unfinished Masterpiece.”20 Consistent during the Harlem Renaissance, those who had the means escaped rural life for the big city. James got a job in Los Angeles, and they left Blackdom before the “Great crash.”
The Revival, Part 2 (1917–1919)
On November 1, 1917, the Roswell Daily Record reported “Guilt Not Proven”:
Not proven was the result of the city against Mittie Moore in Judge Parsons’ court this afternoon. As evidence of what City Attorney John E. Clayton and the police force is up against this case is a good example. Sunday night at the home of Mittie Moore, a dive on South Virginia, two pistol shots were fired. This morning the city attorney and chief of police visited Hampton Lee, a negro in the employ of the Elks Saloon. Lee stated that Mittie had fired two shots at one John Wilson, that both shots passed through Wilson’s coat and that he stood by and watched Wilson take the gun away from Mittie. This afternoon when placed on the witness stand, he denied all these facts, saying that he was blocks away when the shooting occurred. So it is that Mittie is free again.21
1915 Mittie’s 640 Acres Three Miles South of Blackdom Town Square
Mittie (Mattie) Moore was a Black woman who embodied Chaves County’s vice-driven economies through the Great Depression, which brought death to the old Blackdomite society. Unashamed, Mittie was unapologetic and helped further embolden people like Dixie Porter. In the spring of 1917, America entered World War I and the conscripted children in Chaves County appeared on the front page (above the fold) of the Roswell Daily Record. Editors at the newspaper felt it important to also print a story about Dixie Porter’s problems with the law. Perhaps as noteworthy as the list of conscripts in Chaves County, Dixie was the aggressor in a domestic violence case against her husband. Dixie’s public utterances as well as her ties to Mittie feature in a veiled reference to “South Virginia Ave.”
Mittie Moore had many encounters with Roswellian authorities. Beginning in 1914, her body became a subject of Roswell’s legal system. In Revival, Blackdomites were more discerning, and Mittie’s activities were the antithesis of their intellectual, religious, and agricultural society. Neither Roswell nor Blackdom were spaces that appreciated Mittie’s presence. Chaves County was open to prostitution. For example, Pauline Garnett was found guilty of the offense without any fanfare on October 8, 1912. The city fined Pauline $25, and she immediately paid it in full. Edith Garnett was also arrested October 8, on the charge of “being a bawdy house inmate.” The city fined Edith $25 and she promptly paid her fees in full.
In 1913, the Attorney General of the United States began selecting local “white-slave officers” in the newly created states of Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico.22 As a result, New Mexican legislators marginalized “houses of ill repute” throughout the state. By March 1914, the city of Roswell adopted Ordinance 33 of Section 64, making prostitution a misdemeanor subject to fines and thirty days in jail plus the original fine that came along with being caught engaging in bawdy business. Being an “inmate” in a bawdyhouse was an offense against a city ordinance that was expanded to curtail the activities that led to Mittie’s takeover of the city’s vice in 1913. In 1914, Mittie Moore was arrested for prostitution. It was during this period when Mattie exited public records and Mittie entered public records.
In June 1914, Mattie Moore’s assignee Frank Boyer triumphed in getting the land dispute case reopened. Mattie vanished from public record, but Mittie appeared. During the same month, the city of Roswell charged Carman Kyle with “violating Section 64 Ordinance 33, being an inmate of a bawdy house.” Carman was found guilty, fined $25, and immediately paid the fine in full.23 The city of Roswell charged Mittie for violating section 62 of Ordinance 33 of the Compiled Ordinances of the city of Roswell—setting up and keeping a house of assignation and prostitution—changing the relationship between the Black bawdy business she operated and the city.24 Mittie was fined $50, double the price to be paid and thus a de facto Jim Crow style of law enforcement.
Mittie challenged the discretion of Peace Officer Kirby, who was the arresting officer. Mittie appealed the case and requested a jury trial, a platform that couldn’t be denied her. Mittie defended herself with the medieval legal strategy, Contempt of the Sovereign, in the case of City of Roswell v. Richardson.25 Statehood made the legal strategy obsolete because the sovereignty of individuals in the territory transferred to the “sovereign” State of New Mexico. Mittie’s case ascended to the newly established state Supreme Court in Santa Fe.
In the area, Blackdomites employed the expertise of attorney George Malone who was the first Black man to try a case in front of New Mexico’s state Supreme Court. In 1915, Mittie’s appeal of her conviction led to the New Mexico Supreme Court. Mittie’s action pitted District Judge Granville A. Richardson against the city of Roswell, against whom he had issued a writ of prohibition.26 Who had control over Mittie Moore’s body was at the core of the debate in this case of jurisdiction. Instead of shrinking her profile and accepting the relationship that Roswell authorities offered to her, she decided against such a precedent. In the end, the petition was dismissed and the alternative writ quashed, upholding the lower court’s ruling. Nevertheless, Mittie established herself as a force.
Concurrently, Mittie was becoming a large landowner connected to Blackdom, as she entered a homestead patent under the name Mittie Moore. During the World War I era, Mittie eventually married, becoming Mittie Moore Wilson. She was comfortable in the Roswell sex worker economy, which had become a Chaves County institution. It helped support local government with fines and court fees essentially functioning as taxes but also helped Blackdom, for it was the undergird of the town’s relevance through Mittie and her ownership of one square mile.27 Her relatively routine life became increasingly difficult when city officials used the new conditions created by World War I to curtail Mittie’s activities. As the United States entered World War I, Mittie’s defiance began representing more than illegality. She became the antithesis of patriotism and the idea of the “citizen soldier.”
There was a large investment in the development of an oil industry at the Blackdom Townsite, and the local newspapers began attacking the project by making Mittie the focus.
Public notices were printed in the Roswell newspaper under the heading “Notice for Publication,” which was a document that came from the Department of the Interior reporting ownership of land. In the case of Mittie, the US Land Office at Roswell, New Mexico, printed her notice in the newspaper. The notice for Mittie read,
NOTICE is hereby given that Mittie Moore Wilson, formerly Mittie Moore, of Blackdom, N.M., who, on July 21st, 1915, made Homestead entry, No 032454, for W1/2 Section 17, Township 14-S., Range 24-E., N.M.P. Meridian, has filed notice of intention to make three year Proof, to establish claim to the land above described, before Register or Receiver, at U.S. Land Office, Roswell, N.M., on the 14th day of October, 1919.
1916 George Malone
Even though the racialization process for Black people was increasingly hostile, New Mexico was still a less threatening place for migration than other racialized spaces. Black men like George Malone moved to New Mexico; he made his way to Blackdom after the 1911–1913 Blackdom advertising campaign. Malone was a lawyer from the South, having graduated from the Central Law School of Walden University, a Black institution in Nashville, Tennessee.
After practicing in Mississippi, he moved to Blackdom in 1914. He was one of the teachers in the town. Malone applied to the New Mexico Supreme Court for a permanent license to practice law.28 Roswell lawyer Harold Hurd vouched for Malone’s integrity and informed the clerk of court “that most of the colored population called upon him for assistance.” In early August 1916, the Rio Grande Republican announced that Malone was admitted to the state bar, and he “is a negro, and at present the only negro lawyer in New Mexico.”29 Malone became the first Black man to argue in front of the New Mexico Supreme Court in August 1916. Shortly after Malone had his Supreme Court appearance, he moved to Albuquerque to practice law and died within the year.
Because of the inactivity in the town post-1916, many scholars understood the drought of 1916–1917 as the beginning of Blackdom’s demise, in part as evidence of the Afro-Frontier town in full decline; however, the activity during that period was misunderstood. Building Blackdom was a business decision instead of a decision to seek refuge. When greater opportunities existed outside of Blackdom, residents of the town prioritized opportunity above all else. While drought destroyed Black wealth in the county at different points in the town’s history, Roswell, for example, welcomed Black people as servants. In this scenario, this group of Afro-Frontierists established a dual existence living, working, and communing in White-dominated societies while also maintaining a virtual existence in Blackdom that sometimes materialized in economic and community progress. The real and palpable problems in Frank Boyer’s life aside from a 1916 drought supposedly began Blackdom’s mass abandonment.30 Drought conditions did not return until after 1916. Rainfall was 16.82 inches in 1916, 6.21 inches in 1917, and 9.18 inches in 1918.
1917 World War I
Eustace Boyer (Frank Boyer’s second oldest son) was 24, single, and recently discharged from the US Army. Eustace eventually earned a homestead patent but was part of a cohort of Blackdomite male children conscripted to fight in World War I. Eustace was absent from his homestead starting in October 1917 and ending in April 1919. He started the patent process in December 1916, a year before he volunteered for conscription. Upon his return to Chaves County, he built a one-room box house (12 feet by 14 feet) and one-and-a-half miles of fence and cultivated ten acres, all of which cost about $500.31
The Blackdom vision continued into the 1920s. Whole families found opportunity in owning drought-ridden desert lands attached to the idea of Blackdom. At the age of fifty-eight, Erastus Herron and his 52-year-old wife Charlene began their homestead patent process in 1917. The Herron family migrated from South Carolina and supported Blackdom’s revival. Queen Ester Herron was the first of the South Carolinian family to homestead in 1914, receiving her patent in 1917. By the 1930s, the Ragsdale family homesteaded close to three square miles in Chaves County, all of which was associated with Blackdom: Clinton (1913, 1920, and 1926), Ezell (1917, and 1921).
Cleanliness
In early 1917, the United States prepared to enter World War I, and it did so on April 6. The US government began a propaganda campaign promoting an effort on the home front of the “war” against waste, gluttony, and other unpatriotic behavior. The war effort was both an advantage and a disadvantage to Mittie Moore’s business interests. The war economy brought men and money to the area in part because of the New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI) in Roswell. Notions of patriotism and purity were propagated to build up a citizenry to support war. The US government distributed pamphlets that were then printed in local newspapers urging people to do what they could to help.
For people under the conditions of American Blackness, vagrancy laws were used to harass. A key element in the enforcement of White supremacy in the South, the use of vagrancy increased after 1917 in Roswell—a Southern-styled oasis. Specifically, in the case of Mittie Moore, prostitution and vice went from “necessary evil” to an abomination in civil society.
Mittie Moore Wilson married in 1917 and increased her efforts to homestead on desert land. Roswell and the NMMI mobilized for World War I, and Blackdom’s growth as a town suffered as the war effort took precedence. Most important, the regional war economy was a reprieve from the persistent droughts that began to worsen throughout the region. Many scholars have argued that the 1916 start of a series of droughts was the cause of Blackdom’s decline. However, Blackdomite land holding ballooned through the WWI era and continued into the 1920s. Perhaps droughts pushed Black homesteaders into the city looking for work. Homestead records suggest that short-term abandoning of homesteads was typical over the course of proving up. With the drought began a resultant push of Blackdomites into nearby towns and cities.
An article in the Roswell Daily Record noted, in a reference to citizens’ contribution to the war effort, that “keeping or setting up of houses of ill fame, brothels, or bawdy houses within five miles of any military camp is prohibited.”32 This idea maintained that “all these provisions and restrictions are in the interest of every right-minded soldier. They go a long way toward insuring clean and healthful living conditions in the camps.” Mittie’s bawdy district was two miles away from NMMI. Being clean or sanitary was an act of patriotic duty, and being a Black bawdy woman in the bawdy district was considered to be the opposite of patriotic in the above context.
During World War I in the US–Mexico Borderlands, social standardization under the guise of patriotism divided society into citizen and noncitizen, clean and unclean. Eventually, Roswell devolved into a Black and White society as the popular media increased the dehumanization of dark-skinned peoples. Cleanliness, then, operated euphemistically.33 On February 7, 1917, the Roswell Daily Record reported: “The city physician, the chairman of the sanitary committee and the city manager A. G. Jaffa reported that the city was in a most unsanitary condition and should have a general cleanup at once.”34 The politically vulnerable mayor of Roswell, John Mullis, promised to clean up the city as part of his political platform. Mayor Mullis quickly responded to the city manager’s declaration and decreed February 12–17 “Sanitary Week.” Cleanliness had many meanings, and in the beginning, Mayor Mullis focused on garbage and debris. The City Fathers (city administrators) were in dispute over what to do about the lack of cleanliness in the business district.
Mayor Mullis appointed V. C. Bullard as special watchman; the latter was to respond only to issues pertaining to the business district. The businessmen had to pay Bullard’s salary, and he would have all the powers of a police officer. Inspections began on Monday, February 19, to make sure that all debris and garbage was hauled away. City officials were serious about “cleaning up” and declared that all premises found unsanitary would result in an arrest. In the end, Mayor Mullis was able to declare the business district clean, without any arrests having been made.
After the successful trash and debris cleanup campaign, Mayor Mullis shifted his focus to sanitizing Roswell’s social blights. The war effort and the patriot purity propaganda campaign motivated efforts to end gambling, excess drinking, and prostitution, among other vices. On March 2, 1917, “a stranger [J. E. Sessions] appeared before Mayor Mullis and complained that he had been robbed of $26 and some change by a woman at the Grand Central Hotel on the corner of [Alameda and Main, half a block from the South Virginia and Alameda intersection].”35 The new focus of Mullis’s cleanup campaign resulted in the conviction of the manager at the hotel for permitting and allowing prostitutes and “lewd women” as guests of the hotel. Mamie Roberts, the manager, was charged with the crime of keeping a bawdyhouse along with Muraie [sic] Smith.36 She was fined $31 ($25 fine and $6 in new fees). The women were also given two options: sixty days in the county jail with a suspended sentence, or removal from the county within forty-eight hours.37
According to the Roswell newspaper report, “Mayor Mullis and Night Policeman James W. Johnson [were] doing all possible to break up this kind of business.”38 What followed Mamie Roberts’ arrest was an onslaught of raids on all that was “lewd” in the city, specifically that which took place on or near South Virginia Street. Night police officer Jim Johnson targeted Mittie’s South Virginia Avenue bawdy district near Alameda on Saturday afternoon, April 1, 1917. Officer Johnson rounded up seven “Negro” women. Each of them pleaded not guilty and were given a trial. After all the evidence was presented to Judge Parsons, they were found guilty and sentenced to a fine of $25 plus $5 dollars in court fees with a thirty-day jail sentence that was ultimately dismissed. Mittie was the target of Mayor Mullis’s dragnet, but she eluded the initial assault against her until the mayor finally caught her on April 4, 1917. On April 5, 1917, the Roswell Daily Record reported, “Mittie Moore Captured.”39
Mayor Mullis received great praise for his actions. The local newspaper lauded Mullis’s “long strides in the right direction, and many other offenders are at present treading on rather slippery ground and unless either right their ways or depart from these parts forever will one day find themselves before the bar of judgment and the judgment is to be no joke either on their efforts to ‘clean-up.’”40 The other women captured in the sting operation were Lucile Williams, Rebecca Glen, and Ida Watson.41 Mayor Mullis and night policeman Jim Johnson had many successes in their effort to clean up South Virginia Avenue, and the attack jeopardized Mittie’s business.
Targeted, captured, and fined $50, Mittie appeared finally brought to justice. For years, the authorities as well as the public had watched as Mittie operated with virtual immunity, and for a moment, she seemed caught. However, Mittie appealed her case that went to district court and was awarded a dismissal.42 Increased law enforcement ensnared the women around Mittie as well. Aside from being arrested in the 1917 dragnet in March, on August 9, 1917, a few days after being convicted for beating her husband, the Roswell Daily Record reported that “Dixie Porter was released” on a $200 bond. Dixie was charged with larceny for stealing $89 in gold. The targeting of Mittie by social and political elites in the city of Roswell destroyed any possibility of a cordial relationship between the city and Black sex workers. Mittie projected boldness that inspired the women around her.
In August 1917, the War Department sent to local municipalities citizen-soldier handbooks with excerpts printed in newspapers around the country, including the Roswell Daily Record.43 The provisions provided guidelines for a good citizen-soldier, prefaced with the disclaimer, “It is informal in tone and does not attempt to give binding rules and directions.”44 Roswell city officials did not go to the extreme of abiding by the provisions, “Congress has provided that it shall be unlawful to sell any intoxicating liquor including beer, ale, or wine to any officer or member of the military forces while in uniform, an exception being made in a case of liquor required for medical purposes.”45 The handbook was not law but rather suggestive of the kinds of actions delineating patriot from enemy.
One of the major unifying elements for White people in the name of patriotism was brought to bear with the highly publicized D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation.46 Within the film, there were lines separating good and evil, sanitary and unsanitary, and Black and White. The authoritarian position of a new motion picture technology drew these lines, solidifying boundaries between White and Black as well as patriot from Black. The Birth of a Nation was new technology in the racialization process of Black people in Roswell. Blackface minstrelsy was a delivery system of Victorian ideals: White/good/civilized/patriotic versus Black/bad/savage/enemy. With great fanfare, on October 5, 1917, the Roswell Daily Record announced that the “master creation” was coming to Roswell for the first time on the 17th, 18th, and 19th of the month.47
The plethora of articles about Black deviance, not only in Roswell but around the world, took the anti-Black deviance cleanup campaign to its apogee. On August 4, 1917, on the front page of the Roswell Daily Record was the story of Dixie, “a colored lady of South Virginia [who] entered a plea of guilty this morning before Judge Parsons to the charge of using angry words and a few directed blows upon, towards and against the body of her husband, Bruce.”48 Judge Parsons requested that Dixie explain her actions to the court. Her demeanor and all the evidence showed her as the aggressor. Unapologetically, Dixie said that she was “convinced” that Bruce “needed a whipping” and so she gave him one. The city fined Dixie $5. Bruce Porter was charged for fighting with his wife, but the charges were dropped when the court recognized that he was only defending himself.
Mittie owned a few speakeasies in Roswell, and while she was in the Elks Saloon on a Sunday night, she was confronted by her fiancé, James Wilson. With her revolver, Mittie Moore “of South Virginia Avenue” shot at James Wilson twice. She reportedly missed him by only inches, putting two holes in his jacket. This incident was significant enough that the city attorney and chief of police visited Hampton Lee, a Black man who worked at the bar, to find out the whole story. Lee’s version of events established that Mittie shot in the direction of James Wilson, who began to wrestle with her and ended the altercation.
Mittie was caught again, it appeared. But when the trial came up and James Wilson was on the witness stand, “he denied all these facts, saying that he was blocks away when the shooting uccurred [sic]. So it is that Mittie is free again.”49 Some combination of fear and loyalty prevented James from testifying against Mittie. While building her empire, Mittie embodied the antithesis of Victorian sensibilities, and it set the standard for her workers. On December 5, 1917, the Roswell Daily Record featured two stories about Mittie. The first reported the arrest of Novice Eubank, of the Blackdom Eubanks, caught by Officer Jim Johnson in the “home with famous Mittie Moore Wilson on South Virginia.”50
The headline of the second December 5 piece read, “Mittie Moore Here Again.”51 The article expressed a level of disdain and vitriol that existed for her:
The police force raided the home of Mittie Moore on South Virginia last night and this morning made charges in Judge Parsons’ court against Mittie for running a baudy [sic] house. The police say that they have the goods on her this time and for a time at least they will have her placed where the dogs can not bite her.
According to the Police Judge’s Docket, CHRONOLOGY Defendant in arraignment, pleads not guilty.
After hearing the testimony of witness and argument of counsel, the court fines the defendant, Mittie Moore Wilson guilty as charged, and sentences her to fray the costs of this suit and be imprisoned in the City-Jail, at hard labor for a term of thirty days. Defendant being aggrieved at the decision of the court also for and obtains an appeal, upon the presentation and approved of a Bond in the sum of $250. Bond made with R. D. Bill and Frank M. Daniel as sure ties; bond approved and filed with the clerk of the Dist. Court this 24th day of Dec. 1917.52
Mittie posted bail and continued to fight. She and Novice Eubank were awarded a not guilty verdict on January 22, 1918, in the appellate court.53
The “capture” of Mittie was the end of an era, as the stories about her and the “Black menace” declined dramatically after 1917. Curiously, the Roswell Daily Record was obsessed with printing stories about a Black population that numbered less than one percent of the total population in the city. The constant bombardment of stories was an assault on the Black image, which helped in the dehumanization of the infinitesimal Black population.
Part of solidifying the dehumanized image of Black people was the appearance of confirmation of Black people reported as minstrel-like. For example, in April 1917, the Roswell Daily Record led the news with the headline, “Negro Shoots—Misses” in an almost cartoonish report of a skirmish between two Black men.54 According to the article, George Robinson, “a noted negro in celebrity who was arrested for gambling this week, one Will Perkins was a bad shot, who is just out of jail after being convicted of gambling would now be dead.”55 Policeman Jim Johnson was just in time at 106 East Alameda—a block away from the intersection with South Virginia Avenue—outside of the Grand Hotel. Both men had guns and were charged with assault with a deadly weapon. The minstrelsy caricaturing of Black men as comedic, fumbling, awkward, childlike deviants purposely resembled the caricatured version of Black men projected on the pages of the local newspaper and in local theaters.
1918 Thomas Collins
Thomas Collins, a member of the prominent and influential Collins family, was fifty-two when he completed his first homestead patent with the help of homestead proof witnesses William Proffit, George Washington, Nick Gates, and Clinton Ragsdale—all of whom were residents of Blackdom.56 Thomas had a child and a wife; he could hardly afford a long homestead process. The first year he was able to cultivate about twelve acres of maize and kaffir corn, as he did the second and third year. Thomas’s 1913 crop, on twenty-three acres, included beans; this was his best crop ever. He built a two-room house with a shed for his two horses and a chicken coop and fenced thirty acres of his land with three- and four-string barbed wire. He did everything he could to improve the land.
The Ragsdale family homesteaded close to three square miles in Chaves County in a cluster west of Blackdom over the course of two decades. In 1913, amidst Blackdom’s Revival, Clinton Ragsdale completed his first homestead. Clinton’s brother, Ezell completed his first in 1917 while preparing for deployment overseas in WWI. Clinton completed his second homestead in 1920, shortly after Blackdomites announced the incorporation of Blackdom Oil. Ezell returned from military service and completed his second homestead in 1921. Clinton completed his third homestead claim in 1926 as a tangible means of his expression of Afrotopia during the Harlem Renaissance.
When Thomas Collins entered his final homestead proof on June 7, 1918, he did not cultivate anything because of severe droughts. Thomas invested and sacrificed for nine years, according to his final homestead proof. Although he endured adverse elements, he was not abandoning Blackdom, and neither did the vast majority. Blackdom residents repeated the tradition of working in the greater Chaves County economy until conditions were such that they were able to refocus on their homesteads and Blackdom.
Erastus Herron was a laborer all his life and traded work for room and board as did many Blacks who migrated to Chaves County with only their labor to offer. Erastus began his homestead process in 1913 living on the Eubank homestead, two miles west of the homestead he finally colonized by May 1914.57 He made a homestead entry in January 1914. He submitted his final entry in September 1918. However, he faced problems with his application because Clabon Stephens of Blackdom filed an application to contest the entry, claiming that Herron had not established residence on the land. Stephens demanded the rights to the land once the case was over, and an investigation ensued. Curiously, the land was not lush with green pastures or flush with water access. Instead, it was nonmineral and agricultural, chiefly valuable for grazing. All the land was flat and mostly filled with small gravel and stones.
The 1919 investigation revealed that Herron established residence on February 11, 1915, with his family. Before that time, he continued to build when he could. Herron’s cultivation of the land consisted of plowing and planting a patch of land four hundred ten feet by two hundred fifty feet in the 1914 season. The house he built was a two-room frame about sixteen feet by twenty-four feet. Aside from the storm house and cellar, there was also a two-wire fence surrounding a field nine hundred feet by twelve hundred feet with an enclosure of three hundred feet by four hundred feet that had a three-wire fence surrounding it.
Bostick, from Roswell, furnished the wire and post under a bartering agreement. Herron was assured that the grazing on his land was temporary and once the agreed upon time was over, Bostick’s fence would then be the property of Herron. During the year of the investigation in 1919, Herron faced tremendous odds. He had one milk cow that grazed the land. His daughter had two horses, but the family’s two mules died months before the investigation. The land could have been plowed with new mules, but the drought rendered Herron helpless. Raising livestock was the only way to make a profit at the time. Even though there was no known water source for this homestead, Clabon Stephens wanted to take the land for himself under a process of reclamation under the desert land law. Apparently, out of spite, Stephens had a fight with Herron’s son and tried to get even with him by interrupting the homestead process.
Nick Gates was a witness on Herron’s final proof and was questioned in the investigation on February 8, 1919. Special agent Mason Leming interviewed Gates on his homestead less than a mile away from Herron. Gates stood by his contention that he witnessed Herron cultivate twelve acres. When the questioning intensified, Herron made the statement that the judge got “tangled up,” or did not quite understand what he was saying. Gates did attest to the fact that he saw the Herron homestead at least once a week for years. George Malone was postmaster at Blackdom in 1919 when he was interviewed in the case of Erastus Herron. The interview took place at the post office at the Blackdom Townsite. Malone stated that Herron lived on his homestead for at least nine years. Malone, who came to Blackdom in September 1915, lived half a mile from Herron with his family. From 1915 to the time of the investigation, Malone stated, what he witnessed was continuous residence on the part of the Herron family. Malone was not only postmaster but also a teacher at Blackdom’s “colored” school.
The Black Menace
The idea that there was a need to tame the “Black menace” led to the city of Roswell hiring Oscar Dowl, a well-known brute of a man, as a police officer. According to a January 4, 1918, article, “Pate Standifer, for several months’ special city policeman, has been replaced by Oscar Dowl, who served the city during the Christmas rush. Dowl is well known here, having lived here for a number of years.”58 On January 5, the Roswell Daily Record reported that among the felony prosecutions taking place, Dowl faced charges of assault with a deadly weapon. According to Dowl, “a negro whom he arrested charged that Dowl beat him with a loaded stick.”59 After being relieved of duty in November 1918, “Dowl shot and killed Onie Reynolds,” a White citizen of Roswell.60 The city’s escalation of propaganda against the “Black menace” progressively lessened over the course of 1918 after the Dowl case.
The “Black menace” was not completely excluded from Roswell’s newspaper in the post–World War I era after 1918, but there was a significant retreat from the constant targeting of Black people with stories showing their inability to be productive in civil society. There were more stories of the “noble Black savage” that year. For example, the Jezebel caricature of Black women like Mittie Moore and Dixie Porter was offset with the caricature of Black women as “Mammy”—the ultimate of all the Black patriots—asexual and usually older women. In a front-page article, a Roswell Daily Record headline referred to the “Negro Woman Doing Her Share of War Work.”61
According to the article, “No one has paid much attention to what the negro mammies and educated black women of America are doing to help win the war, but they’re doing their share just the same. Paralleling the work and organizations of white women in the Southern branches of the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense, the colored women are keeping even, and in some instances a jump or two ahead of the procession. It is not that the Mammy caricature did not exist in 1917.” The Roswell Daily Record reported on Mmes. S. M. Boyer, L. H. Henderson, E. K. Allen, and Harriet Smith, among others, who worked as a Red Cross unit of Blackdom “doing fine work” knitting scrubs for the war effort.62 However, the stories were overshadowed by the crusade of Mayor Mullis to rid the Roswell streets of the “Black menace.”
1919 Blackdom Oil Company
Blackdom boasted having the first Black US Commissioner, Wesley T. Williams, in the area, as well attorney George Malone. The witnesses on Erastus Herron’s final homestead proof attested to Herron’s integrity, underscored by the fact that he had two sons in the Army in France and took good care of the few children still at home. His wife testified that the family moved to the settlement in February 1915. In 1915, while in the midst of a Supreme Court case, Mittie began homestead No. 032454 in association with Blackdom. The Department of the Interior, US Land Office at Roswell, New Mexico, informed the public that Mittie was a legitimate landowner in Blackdom on August 29, 1919.63 Twenty days earlier, a “New York company was blocking acreage at Blackdom and locating a site for the test well is expected to be in township.”
On New Year’s Eve 1919, the Roswell Daily Record published the headline “Will Pool Acreage,” describing the actions of Blackdom residents. According to the article:
The Blackdom people are making final arrangements to pool their land and it is all they expect to have in excess of 10,000 acres. This land is to be put in a Roswell bank and kept there until some drilling company comes along with an acceptable proposition. The reports on the street that the National Exploration Co. had secured this land and were preparing to block it with their Orchard Park holding, are without foundation.64