Artist Nikesha Breeze first set eyes on the remnants of their great-great-grandfather’s town, 15 miles south of Roswell, last year.
“It’s all sky and yellow earth,” they said. “Huge, endless fields of plant life. There’s wild antelope that were on the land, which was really beautiful. They welcomed us.”
The town of Blackdom was conceived in 1903, when 13 men formed the Blackdom Townsite Company with a plan of building an all-Black farming community. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, many people were eligible to claim 160 acres of land, on the condition that they farm the land, build a home and make “improvements”.
The Blackdom project was led by Francis Boyer, a university-educated teacher from Georgia, whose wife, Ella, was also a teacher. After he was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan, he decided to move west, and lead a project he hoped would attract Black people from the South to a state that, at the time, did not have Jim Crow laws.
Despite difficulties in coaxing crops out of the land with its sparse groundwater and intermittent rains, at its height Blackdom had a church, a school, a post office and nearly 300 residents. Descendants of the Blackdom families live all over New Mexico. But, growing up, Breeze knew nothing of this history.
“Most of my family’s in Portland, Oregon,” they said. But, “talking to my dad and my aunties, they said that their grandma used to live on the mesa, down south. And I wondered what that meant. What mesa?”
By chance, Breeze made a home in Taos, and on the recommendation of a great aunt, began tracing her genealogy, discovering their great-great grandmother, Jessie Blacknall, listed on a census in Roswell, and then Blacknall’s husband, Nathaniel Oliver, who was the grandson of one of the first owners of land in Blackdom.
It was a revelation.
“My first impulse was to go there,” they said. “I wanted to feel it and move it and pray on it.”
Much of the land that was Blackdom is privately owned now, but Breeze began to work with the New Mexico State University Art Museum in Las Cruces to get permission to visit what the Blackdom Townsite Company wrote they hoped would be, “a thriving colony of Negroes by means of cultivating crops, growing a town and settlement; build schools, churches, and various institutions for the upbuilding of the moral, and mental condition of the colony."
When they did go, in November 2021, they were joined by artistic collaborators Miles Tokunow, Lazarus Nance Letcher, a musician, and MK, a cinematographer. The group unfolded a performance art project over eight hours, with Letcher playing specially composed viola music echoing the songs and musical structures known to be part of Black homestead life, while Breeze and Tokunow danced and moved.
“I felt an incredibly deep sense of gratitude for all the work and the beautiful determination that I could imagine in my ancestors,” said Breeze.
Footage of the performance is included as part of a larger show of Breeze’s work at NMSU, "Four Sites of Return: Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation & Reclamation," and is also on display at 516 ARTS in Albuquerque's exhibit "Art Meets History: Many Worlds Are Born."
The hope is that the art project, and an online portal for people to learn more, will spread the word about Blackdom.
“There’s a sort of overarching idea that there’s not a lot of Black folk in New Mexico,” said Breeze. “So the idea that there's generational history here in New Mexico for Black and African-American people is something important, for not only New Mexicans, but for all the world to know.”
Blackdom and other Black settlements are also at the center of a new exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum, curated by the African American Museum and Cultural Center of New Mexico with video testimony, artifacts and photos. Poet Hakim Bellamy, until recently the deputy director of the Department of Arts & Culture for the City of Albuquerque, wanted to show Black historical daily life.
“Looking at old family photos, even if they're not my family, of folks in military uniforms and weddings, and like school, I'm just immediately, like, teary-eyed because I'm just like, 'Man, this is like me digging through a box of photos underneath my mom's bed,'” he said.
The exhibit includes a documentary featuring interviews with descendants of the original inhabitants of Blackdom.
“I think it humanizes the Black experience in New Mexico,” Bellamy said. “People might know the name, Blackdom, there is academic research about it. Like, that's all good and well, but hearing it from the descendants who actually - the story belongs to them...it feels intimate, it feels intimate in a different way.”
Bellamy said he wanted show people, particularly young Black people like his 14-year-old son, what an achievement it was to build that life, “just in hard work, and being brave and going out on a limb and in taking a risk, you too can do this extraordinarily ordinary thing.”
Blackdom was abandoned, partly due to drought, in the 1920s. But the achievements of its founders still inspire its descendants today.
Rodney Bowe, director of the Men of Color Initiative at the University of New Mexico, traces his roots to a family in Blackdom who he believes came from South Carolina. Bowe grew up in Roswell, where many Blackdom families ended up, and described a youth proudly steeped in African American culture, where old ties were renewed at an annual family party.
“We'd have 100, 200 people celebrating,” he said. “And I didn't know at the time that everyone came from Blackdom, you know, from these roots.”
Bowe’s ancestor, Loney K. Wagoner, taught in the school in Blackdom, and he sees himself as carrying on a proud tradition as he works in education himself.
“Not only were my family members pioneers,” said Bowe, “they were educational and faith-based pioneers. And so that really put a steel rod in my back to really be the best that I can be.”
