Long before Martin Luther King Jr. was born, Francis “Frank” Boyer had a dream.
The African American Georgia native, born just six years after the end of the Civil War, envisioned a town run and populated by African Americans somewhere in the southeastern part of the territory known as New Mexico.
The community, which would be named Blackdom, would give African Americans struggling under the Jim Crow laws of the South the chance not only to flee racial discrimination and violence but carve out careers as farmers, ranchers, businessmen and, eventually, oil men.
Even more ambitiously, the town’s article of incorporation laid out a plan to educate all of Blackdom’s children and put them on a path to college.
Some 60-plus years before African Americans marched and fought for equal treatment in the nation’s civil rights movement, Blackdom stood as a symbol that African Americans could be masters of their own destiny.
“Blackdom proved black people could thrive, not just survive,” said African American historian and author Timothy Nelson, who wrote a 200-page dissertation on the rise and fall of Blackdom in 2015 for the University of Texas at El Paso.
“They called it Blackdom for a reason. This was a black kingdom where sovereigns lived,” he said.
And yet, some 30 years after its founding in the early 1900s, Blackdom was all but abandoned, a victim of drought, nature and an oil boom gone bust because of the Great Depression.
Today, a plaque commemorating the history of Blackdom and a few stone ruins are all that remain of the original community, located about eight miles west of Dexter and 20 miles south of Roswell.
Blackdom’s fight for a self-sustaining life came decades before King urged African Americans to take to the streets to demand equality with such phrases as, “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”
As such, Blackdom could have just as well been named Hope.
For State Historian Rob Martinez, the creation of Blackdom by Boyer and other settlers was an act of striving for civil rights in the twilight years of the Old West.
“Whenever people say, ‘We’re going to get away from what you are doing to us and go live free,’ that’s an act of civil rights, isn’t it?,” he said.
Whether the founders of Blackdom were purely interested in creating a safe haven for African Americans escaping the shackles of slavery and racial hate or more vested in building a community that could financially profit those who lived in it remains unclear. The truth may be a mix of both.
But most historians agree on one matter: It was Frank Boyer, accompanied by a man named Daniel Keys, who walked 2,000-plus miles from Pellham, Ga. to the Roswell area sometime in the period of 1899-1900 with the goal of starting an African American town out west.
While both men worked odd jobs for white residents in the area — among other tasks, Boyer said he was a carriage driver for a U.S. district judge — Boyer eventually began working to create an all-black settlement not far from Roswell.
Boyer was born free into a family of slaves and, after earning a college education, became an educator. Many historians have said his father, Henry Boyer, worked as a wagoner on expeditions along the Old Santa Fe Trail in the 1840s and thus urged his son to head to New Mexico to start his black utopia.
But Frank Boyer told the El Paso Herald in a 1947 interview that he had served as a Buffalo Soldier in the United States Army for five years in Arizona and New Mexico before he returned to Georgia for a time.
“Frank had been out here with the Buffalo Soldiers, that’s why he knew the land,” Nelson said.
In 1903, Boyer and a dozen other African American settlers signed the Article of Incorporation to create the Blackdom Townsite Company. Three ambitious goals were included in that document: building a town called Blackdom; setting up an educational system for African Americans that would lead to college; and commercial development of the land.
The Homestead Act of 1862 gave them the opportunity, because it offered adult U.S. citizens the chance to claim any surveyed part of government land as long as they built a residence upon it and worked it for at least five years, making improvements on an annual basis.
“Coming out west to start their own town under the Homestead Act was a way to flee the racial violence and economic discrimination under the Jim Crow laws of the South and have a chance for economic prosperity, social safety and even the acquisition of political power,” said Carlyn Pinkins, a University of New Mexico doctoral student of history who is working on a thesis project about black homesteading communities in the Southwest.
“It also allowed them to secure a better future for themselves and their children.”
It wasn’t easy and the growth of the community stalled for a few years while the initial homesteaders struggled with building their own farms while working in menial positions for ranchers, farmers and business owners in nearby Roswell and Dexter.
It didn’t help that, early on, Boyer and the other founders really didn’t have a plan for the community, Nelson said.
That didn’t stop Boyer and other founders — a diverse group that included a railroad auditor, a cook and a farmer — from placing ads in newspapers and journals around the country urging other African Americans to join them in what they called “The Only Exclusive Negro Settlement in New Mexico.”
“They marketed it,” said Nelson, who said increased human capital was necessary to maintain the homestead and develop Blackdom into a booming town, especially as New Mexico moved toward statehood, which would come in 1912.
Though Nelson and other historians have pored over census figures to determine just how many people lived in Blackdom at its height, it remains a difficult task because not every resident was included in those reports and because many lived in Dexter and Roswell and kept what Nelson and Pinkins call second residences in Blackdom.
Most historians say at its peak, Blackdom had 300 to 400 residents. Frank Boyer told the El Paso Herald the number was closer to 800.
Over time, residents built a church that doubled as a schoolhouse, as well as a post office, a blacksmith shop and a hotel. Some sources say the community had its own newspaper.
The post office, established in April 1913, according to postal documents housed in the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington, ran for at least six years and brought “legitimacy and recognition by the federal government,” said Lynn Heidelbaugh, a curator at the postal museum.
The post office in Blackdom was attached to a store initially run by James Eubank, Blackdom’s first postmaster, and later by a woman, Bessie Malone, the third and last postmaster of Blackdom, Heidelbaug said.
While Blackdom’s residents may not have been as severely punished by racial discrimination as their peers in the South, they were well aware the tide of that violence could turn on them at any moment. Newspapers of the time — including the Santa Fe New Mexican — added to tensions by warning of an increasing “Black Menace” moving in on the territory and changing it for the worse.
But Nelson said Blackdom’s strength was in its community, which stood strong and mostly avoided local controversies, such as a local land grant fraud that made national headlines.
Blackdom also has been celebrated in historical accounts for its annual Juneteenth celebration, honoring the abolition of slavery. Some paint this event as an example of racial harmony between Blackdom’s residents and neighboring whites who showed up to share food and take part in a baseball game.
But given the racial strife of the time and place, Nelson’s dissertation suggests, the game gave both sides the chance to dominate the other, showcasing — depending on whose side you were on — “the triumph of Black people over Southern Whites” or a chance for “Southern sympathizers to try symbolically to avenge the South.”
Historical documents and precipitation records for the period tell us drought, pestilence, a lack of access to well water and the departure of Boyer and his family from the area led to Blackdom’s demise by 1920 or so.
The fact that some of the men in the town joined the military as America entered World War I also thinned its ranks. And it was around this time that the Ku Klux Klan opened several chapters in the region, adding to the threat of racial violence against Blackdom’s residents.
The post office closure in the summer of 1919 probably spoke to the “population decline,” Heidelbaugh said, but it’s also possible residents began relying more on the post office in the larger hub of Dexter, she said.
But Blackdom didn’t die for another decade. Many residents stayed on after Boyer left and, following the discovery of oil in the area, joined forces and land plots to create the Blackdom Oil Company.
While the Boyers moved to the town of Vado to initiate another African American community, Blackdom’s residents profited from oil royalties and leases to mining operations in the area. (Boyer died in Vado in the late 1940s.)
Nelson believes that at this point, Blackdom transitioned from being a place of refuge to an investment opportunity for African Americans and others. Existing historical records show that Blackdom’s school continued to operate into the late 1920s. The stock market crash of October 1929 brought an end to that.
Then, like many small desert communities in the state, the winds of change, drought and poverty blew Blackdom away. A few residents may have held on into the World War II era, but by the end of that conflict, Blackdom was a ghost town.
State Historian Martinez and Nelson said Blackdom lives on as both a piece of New Mexico history and a symbol of black pride and success.
“Blackdom leaves a significant legacy for African Americans in New Mexico and the greater Southwest because it shows that they were part of the building up of our state,” Martinez said. “They remain part of the human structuring of New Mexico.
“They had a dream to come out and settle and tame the West, and they did.”
For Nelson, Blackdom’s legacy rests in the many communities and efforts around the country aimed at giving African Americans not just a chance to be equal, but to be better.
“The legacy is Compton, Oakland, Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, you get what I’m saying?,” he said. “It’s the inner city energy that represents Afro-frontierism today. It’s an energy that says, ‘You are on the margins of society, but you are gonna make it anyway.’ ”
