In the US West, the history of African Americans is not just a footnote. Their story is a major part of the events, meaning, and significance of American life. This is especially true when one considers the arcs of both urban and civil rights history that have dominated the field since the early 1990s in publications such as Albert Broussard’s Black San Francisco (1993). But that record is not in the canon of Black New Mexico history. In 2000, the overall state of the field was addressed at the two-day Smithsonian Institution symposium “A Quest for Freedom: The Black Experience in the American West” (Washington, DC, 2001). This conference was organized by the Program of African American Culture at the National Museum of American History. Its committee included keynote speaker Quintard Taylor, chair Lonnie Bunch, and coordinators Alonzo Smith and myself. The most critical areas of this symposium against which to test the field’s significance are those that centrally intersect Timothy E. Nelson’s Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900–1930 in “America’s Racial Frontier” and “Exploding Myths of the Frontier.” After hearing from the most prolific scholars in the field, at the conference’s end most panelists agreed that African American western scholarship had finally evolved beyond being what Taylor had conceptualized—in his groundbreaking book In Search of the Racial Frontier (1998)—as moving from being merely a “footnote” towards a period of significance.
In the broader scope of the African American West, Blackdom is informed by black western scholars Kenneth M. Hamilton and Quintard Taylor. Central to Hamilton’s work on Black Towns and Profit (1991) was finding significance in Black Town formation through Black entrepreneurship in Nicodemus (Kansas), Mound Bayou (Mississippi), Langston City and Boley (Oklahoma), and Allensworth (California). Whereas, essential to Taylor’s work are Black community formation; the significance of African American westerners’ history and culture; the West as a place—one that stretches westward from states on the 98th meridian (e.g., Texas, North Dakota) to states that border the Pacific Ocean; and multiracial relations, from Afro-Spanish explorer Esteban in 1528 to the present.
In the canon of Black New Mexico scholarship, Blackdom differs from what has been written, which up to 2023 has been very little. The first notable written work was in 1976 by Barbara Richardson, author of Black Directory of New Mexico. It would not be until 2004 that another book would critically address the history of Blacks in New Mexico in Maisha Baton’s oral history Do Remember Me (2004). Between the writing of these two works there had been a plethora of local histories written by New Mexicans who had little historical training. A few publications written by trained historians focused on the Black frontier; they included articles on Esteban and the freedom-seeking mulatta Isabel de Olvera as well as several books on Buffalo Soldier Second Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper. In the 2010s, works like Bruce Glasrud’s (ed.) African American History in New Mexico: Portraits from Five Hundred Years (2013) and Randolph Stakeman’s book chapter, “African Americans in Albuquerque, 1880–1930: A Demographic Analysis” in Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack (eds.) Freedom’s Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West (2018) extended Black New Mexico’s history into the domain of contemporary western scholarship. As a modern frontier history that follows the path blazed by Kenneth Wiggins Porter and Sherman Savage but is also focused on twentieth-century developments, Blackdom continues along the contemporary western trajectory as a history of significance about African Americans in the rural West.
To date, Black New Mexico’s history is dominated by work on African Americans in Albuquerque. In the early twentieth century, this town was an agricultural community that transitioned into a commercial city with a small industrial core. At that time, Albuquerque’s black community was small, isolated, and made up mostly of a people relegated to labor as cooks, domestics, and service workers who had migrated to New Mexico on the Santa Fe railroad from Texas and the Deep South. Like other black westerners, they were active in their pursuit for freedom, forming black institutions, including churches, stores, self-help organizations, and a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter to fight racial segregation in education and public accommodations. This experience differed from that in the southeastern section of the state, where Blackdom and Chaves County stood. During the early twentieth century, much of the latter area was known as “Little Texas” in part due to its oil production and large population of white Texans who eventually required statehood and a shift to local power, institutionalizing Jim Crow into the region after New Mexico gained statehood. As for Black migrants, this was a place where Black military men and Black farmers settled. They built a parallel community and economy that relied on its Black community—which was not the case in Albuquerque. More significant is the difference in that through corporate oil drilling, Blackdomites thrived in the 1920s, the same period in which African Americans in other parts of New Mexico stagnated socioeconomically. Outside of studies on the Roswell Correctional Center, this area has received scant historical attention. The few histories of Black New Mexicans tend to focus on their urban experiences during the Second Great Migration (1940–1970) highlighted by civil rights activism and a population that grew from 4,672 in 1940 to 19,555 in 1970.
Having observed this project grow from post-dissertation development to book, I found the history’s connection to my research and to my own father’s family history in freedmen settlements in Seguin, Texas, to be of great interest. And I have learned that through land ownership, critical planning, and faith, Black families and groups like the Blackdom Townsite Company always had the potential to build what Nelson calls an “Afrotopia” or African American utopian community. Similar to places explored in Black Towns and Profit, Blackdom was unique in that it was forged by African Americans as both a refuge from Jim Crow and as a place for Black economic empowerment. It evolved from dry farming and Black survival (from 1903 to ca. 1922) to black landowners receiving royalty checks from corporate oil drilling and to their thriving until the Great Depression; and, possibly beyond, according to Frank Boyer (1st Blackdom Townsite Company President). As a history, Blackdom differs from the histories of African America and the African American West, not because the racially regenerative quest to forge a “Promised Land” has never been attempted but because the intentional development of an Afrotopia was accomplished in the most unlikely of places and times, in New Mexico and during Blacks’ radical transformation and embracing of urban-industrial life during their Great Migration. This focus and interconnecting of Borderlands history with the interdisciplinary-transdisciplinary nature of Africana scholarship gives Blackdom the potential to be the model for our understanding of Black Town formation and function in the twenty-first century.
herbert g. ruffin ii, associate professor
syracuse university, arts & sciences,
african american studies
Syracuse, New York
January 3, 2023