#BlackdomAndBeyond | Roswell Daily Record Sunday, February 3, 2008
#AHAperspectives |
B etween Roswell and Artesia, west of found it difficult to travel, so they chose to Ghana and Sierre Leone. Abukusumo said Dexter and Hagerman, split by U.S. walk. plans are also in the works to include a • - - - •— • restaurant with menus featuring recipes from some of the best black cooks in the U.S. he said. Abukusumo wants to infuse a sense of etween Roswell and Artesia, west of Dexter and Hagerman, split by U.S. Highway 285, lies the scant physical remains of what was, a century ago, a thriving community of African-Americans known as Blackdom. The town site, first settled in 1901 and officially established as a township in 1920, at its height, occupied some 15,000 acres and had 300 residents from 25 families. But its roots as the only site in southeastern New Mexico populated entirely by black pioneers go back to 1840s Georgia. Blackdom got its start as the dream of Pullam, Ga., resident Henry Boyer, a free black man who served as wagoner in Col. Alexander Doniphan's Army Missouri Volunteers, sent to New Mexico to serve in the Mexican War of 1846. "He saw the vast areas, Just unlimited space and he went home and talked about it, but it wasn't until 50 years later (his sojn) Francis Boyer came put here," said the Rev. Landjur Abukusumo, pastor of Washington Chapel Christian Church and president of the Chaves County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "So he came out here and a year later, he went back and got his wife Ella and their kids and came back." The road to get there was, literally, a long one, but they did get there. That the ' town existed at all was due to several factors, Abukusumo said. "At the advent of the Emancipation Proclamation, with regard to the slaves, they were freed but they didn't have any determination, any resources, any substance to speak of to protect themselves to initiate any financial gain or financial substance," Abukusumo said. "A lot of them sharecropped or stayed on the plantations but some of them moved on because they'd fled to the big cities or gone on the Underground Railroad to some of the northern cities." Enter the Boyer family. Frank Boyer and Daniel Keyes, knowing of the Homestead Act of 1862, which made property and land available to people to work the land, decided to make the journey from Pullam, Ga., to the West. But because of the Jim Crow laws enacted in the south to mandate "separate but equal" status for blacks but resulting in inferior status, schools and housing among other things, the men found it difficult to travel, so they chose to walk. "They wanted self-determination and they wanted safety in numbers," Abukusumo said. "And that is what caused Blackdom to grow and become what it became in the 1917 and 1918 time frame, when it was at its height." The story of Blackdom, which eventually hit hard times when drought and a lack of resources to drill wells resulted in the town being largely abandoned by 1930, is just one interesting chapter in the story of African-Americans in the U.S. February is also Black History Month, a time to celebrate the achievements of blacks in every area. "If you don't know where you come from, it's hard to know where you are and impossible to know where you're going," Abukusumo said. "We look back to get a sense of who we are and what our culture is. Medicine, architecture, all kinds of farming things, cattle., arts, music — we come from all of that and it's a travesty not to know who you are and where you come from and the overall makeup of your background and culture." Some of the contributions of AfricanAmericans, such as traffic lights, intravenous fluid systems and hypodermic needles are used every single day but many people don't know these things were invented by blacks, Abukusumo said. Nor do they know certain phrases or sayings, such as "the real McCoy," after an invention by a black man named McCoy, came from blacks, he added. • Abukusumo is also heading a project to build a black American heritage center and museum commemorating Blackdom and the pioneers who lived there. The project currently has gathered $235,000 in capital outlay funds for planning. An architectural firm out of Santa Fe is working on building models of the com- ,plex, which will include performance space, an exhibit hall and genealogical and historical research areas, and statuary depicting the pioneers of Blackdom. The site for this project will be north of College Boulevard and south of the Wool Bowl. Exhibits in the museum, which Abukusumo hopes will draw tourists from across the U.S., will include different articles from the areas of Africa the blacks in our area came from, such as Nigeria, pride and inclusion in the African-Americans of Roswell and Chaves County. "I think our greatest challenge is that we need to understand we came outpf a. time that was post-Civil War and Jim Crow, and our idea was to maintain a low profile and that permeated the African-American community here and still permeates it," Abukusumo said. "The challenge is to insinuate ourselves into the sociopolitical arena of the community and to participate more in the community, to validate ourselves by achievement. Overcoming our natural sense of having been rejected and overcoming the things that still are residual in our mindset and stepping up and doing those things that our culture, our talents, our skills and our experience and abilities lead us to do." When asked how close we, as a society, are to reaching Martin Luther King Jr.'s goals on equality and acceptance, Abukusumo said a great deal of progress has been made, but much remains, as well. The growth of the MLK Breakfast, for instance, shows definite progress, Abukusumo said. In its first year, 60 people attended; this'year, more than 300 were there. The Juneteenth celebration, held on June 19 to commemorate the announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas, is another sign of progress, though Abukusumo said generally, there is more awareness in larger cities. "We advocate and have advocated in our MLK Breakfast, for example multicultural endeavors — the things MLK advocated and preached in his 'I have a dream' speech, that we will be judged by our character and the content of our character, rather than the color of our skin. We'd like to see the infusion of various cultures in the total culture of our community." In Roswell, that culture brings everything back full circle to Blackdom. "If you're an African-American in America, you're about certain things, one of which is acceptance and one of which is dissuading people from the idea that you are lazy and have low selfesteem and low self-acceptance," Abukusumo said. "One of the things that speaks against that is the idea that we have early pioneers. These early pioneers were extremely industrious, extremely hard-working and faith-based. "They were looking for opportunity. They did not seek to oppose. They sought to infuse their community with those ideas, with those results that came of hard work and therefore take a position of equality, based on those ideas of hard work."
