“They called it Blackdom for a reason. This was a Black Kingdom where sovereigns lived.”
—Timothy E. Nelson
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.”
