by Christina Stock

Friday, February 27, 2021

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“An online seminar hosted by the New Mexico Humanities Council (NMHC) on the historical township Blackdom on Feb. 23 attracted 87 participants. The audience was able to learn about the latest research and insights into the cultural and historical significance of the township of Blackdom, founded in 1903, 18 miles south of Roswell and 8 miles west of Dexter. By the mid-1920s, most residents had left, turning Blackdom into a ghost town."

Bethany Tabor, NMHC program officer, served as the moderator. She introduced the speakers, which included Janice Dunnahoo of the Historical Society for Southeast New Mexico (HSSNM) Archives in Roswell. Dunnahoo is a contributing author for the West Texas Historical Association, Wild West Journal, True West Magazine, Texas-New Mexico Border Archives Journal, and a weekly contributor to the Roswell Daily Record.”

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Clarence Fielder especially enjoyed sharing the early history of the African-American community of Las Cruces, which centered around his own experiences as well as those of his parents and grandparents. Mr. Fielder was also instrumental in restoring the Phillips Chapel CME Church, founded by his grandparents Ollie and Daniel Hibler, which served as a school during segregation and was named to the National Register of Historic Places as the oldest existing African-American church in New Mexico.

The 12-minute story profiles Mr. Clarence Fielder, a beloved and dedicated teacher who grew up in Las Cruces and taught for many years in the public schools and in the Department of History at NMSU.

06:48 Executive Producer, Nan Rubin interviews Dr. Timothy E. Nelson who was one of Mr. Fielder’s students at New Mexico State University.

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KAYLA LAWRENCE
October 19, 2020

University of Northern Iowa's History Club Invites Alum Dr. Nelson to present his research of the Afro-Frontier in American history

August 30, 2021 - NARA Focuses on Expanding Access to Digital Records

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Dr. Richard Edwards haD been diligently working on this matter since 2008. See the link for his article below.

Richard Edwards is a primary leader in the “Homestead Records Project,” a consortium formed to digitize, preserve and make accessible approximately two million original homestead land-entry files.

This unfortunate decision would leave the important homesteading states of Colorado, Montana, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, New Mexico, Washington, and California back in the hard-to-access and costly-to-access paper records regime. I believe NARA’s decision is mistaken, and that it should be a HIGH priority to finish digitizing these records. Richard Edwards, Director, Center for Great Plains Studies, Professor of Economics, August 31, 2018

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

—Timothy E. Nelson

Click to see Santa Fe New Mexican Article by Robert Nott

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.”

Entire Academic Article can be purchased @ [Great Plains Quarterly 39 (Winter 2019):11–37] via University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Great Plains Studies

by Jacob K. Friefeld, Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom, and Richard Edwards

Abstract: African Americans participated in homesteading in the Great Plains primarily by establishing “colonies” or geographically concentrated homesteading communities. We studied Nicodemus, Kansas; DeWitty, Nebraska; Dearfield, Colorado; Empire, Wyoming; Sully County, South Dakota; and Blackdom, New Mexico, which were the largest and most important Black homesteading communities in their states. Black homesteaders, like their white counterparts, were mostly very poor, struggled to grow crops in a harsh climate, and used the land they gained to build new futures. But because of their previous experiences in the South and racism in some nearby communities, Black homesteaders developed a distinct understanding of their efforts, particularly of schooling and the “success” of their communities.

Jacob K. Friefeld holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is co-author, with Richard Edwards and Rebecca Wingo, of Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History (2017).

Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Great Plains Studies. His written work includes a co-authored chapter with Margaret Jacobs in Why You Can’t Teach US History without American Indians (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) and the Wall Street Journal.

Richard Edwards is director of the Center for Great Plains Studies, professor of economics, and senior vice chancellor (emeritus). Recent books include Atlas of Nebraska with J. Clark Archer and others (2017) and Natives of a Dry Place: Stories of Dakota Before the Oil Boom (2015).

Notes and credits the work of Timothy E. Nelson, Ph.D.

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