Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930 - Timothy E. Nelson

Blackdom, New Mexico, was a township that lasted about \nthirty years. In this book, Timothy E. Nelson situates the township's story \nwhere it belongs: along the continuum of settlement in Mexico's Northern Frontier. \nDr. Nelson illuminates the set of conscious efforts that helped Black pioneers \ndevelop Blackdom Township into a frontier boomtown. \n\n \nBlackdom started as an inherited idea of a nineteenth-century \nAfrotopia. The idea of creating a Blackdom was refined within Black \ninstitutions as part of the perpetual movement of Black Colonization. In 1903, \nthirteen Black men, encouraged by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, formed the Blackdom \nTownsite Company and set out to make Blackdom a real place in New Mexico, where \nthey were outside the reach of Jim Crow laws. \n \nMany believed that Blackdom was simply abandoned. However, \nnew evidence shows that the scheme to build generational wealth continued to \nexist throughout the twentieth century in other forms. During Blackdom's boomtimes, \nin December 1919, Blackdom Oil Company shifted town business from a \nregenerative agricultural community to a more extractive model. Nelson has \nuncovered new primary source materials that suggest for Blackdom a newly \ndiscovered third decade. This story has never been fully told or contextualized \nuntil now. \n \nReoriented to Mexico's northern frontier, one \nobserves Black ministers, Black military personnel, and Black freemasons who \ncolonized as part of the transmogrification of Indigenous spaces into the \nAmerican West. Nelson's concept of the Afro-Frontier evokes a Turnerian West, \nbut it is also fruitfully understood as a Weberian Borderland. Its history highlights \na brief period and space that nurtured Black cowboy culture. While Blackdom's \ncivic presence was not lengthy, its significance--and that of the Afro-Frontier--is \nan important window in the history of Afrotopias, Black Consciousness, and the \nnotion of an American West.\n