APRIL 12, 1920, “WILL DRILL AT BLACKDOM”

“Bourgeois values define the family situation in America, give it certain goals. Oppressed and poor people who try to reach these goals fail because of the very condition that the bourgeoisie established.”

Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

In 1903, Albert Hubert was one of thirteen founders of the Blackdom Townsite Company who didn’t fully invest and stayed “a servant,” his whole life. According to (3) decades of census records, Albert was a stable head of household in Chaves County, New Mexico. Abiding was no easy feat. Albert’s life strategy sustained him as a Black man at the chaotic intersection of Mexico’s northern frontier, and America’s Western frontier as borders crossed people.

As late as 1930, Albert didn’t homestead and had invested his labor in Roswell, New Mexico (20 miles north of Blackdom) where he lived on East Third Street (for 30 years). Blackdomites occupied space virtually by maintaining a home “in town” and proving-up a homestead connected to the idea of Blackdom. At the will of the people, dual existence allowed Blackdom to assemble, disassemble and reassemble. Blackdom’s nimble concept allowed the township to weather times of tumult and thrive in boom times.

In 1914, Blackdom Townsite’s original 40-acre plot was officially patented, but the process began in 1909 after a lackluster attempt in 1903. The homestead class dictated Blackdom Township’s agenda; meanwhile, the townsite languished for years while they struggled to produce a sovereign life on subsistence dry-farming. Many Black men had to leave their families on homesteads for long periods of time to make ends meet.

Roswell Daily Record: Blackdom Oil Company Monday, April 12, 1920 [pg 2]

Albert’s side-hustle in the city became his main-hustle and Blackdom Township lost him to a consistent paycheck as well as the responsibility to his blossoming family. He was a literate Texan, who according to the 12th U.S. Census of 1900, was “about 30” married to 20-year-old Pearl. The Hubert family included their two-year-old daughter Sadee, and possibly a nine-year-old daughter Bernice from a previous relationship. From 1900 through 1930 the Hubert family steadily grew every 3 to 5 years. 

By 1920, the Hubert family consisted of Pearl and six kids—Bernice (24), Juanita (18), Linwood (son 14), Valerie (daughter 12), Burt (son 10), and Mattie (daughter 7). Albert worked for the Travis Ellis family whose patriarch was a railroad auditor who migrated from Kentucky. In 1900, Travis was 29 and his Indiana-born wife Maude was 27. With the help of Albert, Maude worked from home taking care of two daughters.

Southeastern New Mexico had developed into a Southern-styled Confederate society and some Roswellians embraced visiting lecturers who promoted the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1924, the Pioneer Klan of Roswell inaugurated its existence with a cross-burning in the city. Albert’s Kentucky-born employer may or may not have been a Klan sympathizer, but Albert was risk-averse and not likely to test those limits. For him, Blackdom may have appeared both dangerous financially and physically. 

Albert was both a “servant” and co-founder of Blackdom. One can only wonder what he felt on April 9, 1920, when he read in the Roswell Daily Record, “Will Drill At Blackdom.”

by Dr. Timothy E. Nelson ©

“...these are idiosyncratic expressions, and the idiosyncrasies of an emerging middle-class might seem unimportant if they exist only in specific moments and spaces apart from the more dominant bourgeois realities of repression, firmness of identity, the exploitation of others, and competition.”

Brian Roberts, American Alchemy

Apache Land fell victim to colonization and disease. By 1900, a Southern Confederate-styled movement gained traction in the Mexico-U.S. Borderlands. American Reconstruction shaped a racialization process that materialized in the form of militarization of frontier spaces, and medicalization of Indigenous peoples. Opportunity for Black Colonization was born out of voluntary and involuntary participation in the mayhem. Colonization operates on a continuum.

Black Military personnel often seized the time in moments of chaos and found opportunity to lead liberation/colonization movements. Across time and space, colonizers compensated people of African descent like Juan Garrido, who gained land from the Mexican government in the 1520s. Juan was a tool of colonization and military service was his opportunity.   

Chaos and mayhem at the turn of the 19th Century presented Black Loyalists with options. In some cases, Military service, on behalf of the British, helped, people under the conditions of Blackness, (Black people) gain land sovereignty to the detriment of Indigenous Africans. Freemasonry, an adjacent set of institutions, had no immunity to opportunistic Black sovereignty seekers. After aiding Revolutionary War efforts, Prince Hall employed freedom to charter a new Freemasonry conducive to the illumination of Black people.  

By 1900, colonization left Mexico's northern frontier a contested space. Resilience of the Indigenismo{/a/x) stalled New Mexico’s statehood process from 1848 to 1912. Semiotically led by Buffalo Soldiers, Blackdomites and Prince Hall Freemasons achieved sovereignty in less than 20 years. The vision for Blackdom included plans to produce self-governing people. 

Blackdom differed little from the Manifest Destiny movements projected by “Anglo-Saxons.” Increased militarization of the Borderlands ushered in the establishment of the New Mexico Military Institute and helped fortify a relative supremacy of Whiteness in the regional consciousness. 

Roswell Daily Record

Wednesday, April 7, 1920

Roswell, New Mexico

On September 3, 1891, the Goss Military Academy was founded through the efforts of Captain James C. Lea and Colonel Robert Goss. With an initial enrollment of 28 students, including female students, the school was the first in New Mexico to adopt military features. The Academy was later made a territorial school and renamed New Mexico Military Institute in February 1893. {reference]

Robert Goss was a colonel in the Confederate Army. Semiotically, Black people also found opportunity in military service of the Confederacy.  

In 1903, Blackdomites colonized the notion of separate-but-equal. Separation of “Black” from “White” was a racialization strategy. In New Mexico, people with all rights and privileges associated with Whiteness had few real mechanisms to fully establish White supremacy in Chaves County. Jim Crow Laws were illegal in the New Mexico Territory. Blackdomites employed their freedom, volunteered to separate, and struck oil. Blackdomites exploited the distance between White Supremacy and free Black bodies in #TheAfrōFrontier they developed. 

by Dr. Timothy E. Nelson ©

[3/20/2020 Quarantined in New Mexico| Miles Davis begins to play and light snow begins to fall on Santa Fe.]  Saturn in Aquarius

~#ÑēɡrōDamus: Yes. And, in this Apocalypse, Blackdom can serve as a reminder for people under the conditions of Blackness to nurture sovereign spaces as a solution-based model. Global disaster provides an opportunity in the midst of the chaos. Past is often prologued, and this depression will present collective action as a solution. Those seeking sovereignty will have the opportunity. 

The good news; Black liberation movements excelled during times of global transition.  By 1820, collective action was needed to maintain order in, what was, the struggling and ever-expanding United States of America after the War of 1812 and other world events. Meanwhile, some of the illuminated people under the conditions of Blackness planned and executed schemes to achieve their sovereignty from narrow platforms of freedom. 

El Paso Herald

Thursday, March 4, 1920

[Pg 8]

During the 1820s, the American Colonization Movement spawned an enclave of free people under the conditions of Blackness to begin the Liberian colonization experiment on the Western coast of Africa. Liberia was to border Sierra Leone, which was a previous attempt at repatriation and sovereignty by Black British Loyalists of the 1780s. Liberation Theology and colonization informed the sovereignty movements to colonize Western Africa after the American Revolution.

In Mexico, the world of oppressors and the oppressed morphed into something neither recognized after the Mexican Independence movement. The abolition of slavery in Mexico lent itself to liberation and colonization movements that developed over the course of the 19th Century. 

At the turn of the 20th Century, Black colonization movements sought to exploit Mexico's frontier spaces and the presence of sovereign dark-skinned peoples. Circa 1919, in the United States of America, free people of African descent sought to thrive as sharecroppers. Other free people under the condition of Blackness chose a chance at sovereignty in Mexico’s northern frontier spaces. Black towns had the potential to bring wealth and money, like in the cases of Little Liberia in Baja California and the Blackdom Oil Company of Blackdom in New Mexico. Black peoples had to invest in integration or segregation; sovereign spaces allowed for both circumstances to work in their favor. There is no clear advantage to either, except investing in sovereignty was a chance at a life beyond freedom.  

Blackdomites were not immune to the chaotic global or local transitions. Instead, Blackdom served as a quarantine from the virus of White supremacy that infected the Mexico-U.S. Borderlands and limited opportunities for sovereignty. Blackdomites maintained their freedom in quarantine and gained sovereignty by investing before, during and after the chaos. They capitalized on opportunities by employing collective action in 1903, 1909, and 1919. 

In 1910, Blackdomites faced New Mexico statehood and the adverse shift to local municipal governance in favor of local White Supremacists. Blackdomites decided to further develop an Afrotopia (Afro-Frontier) in anticipation of chaos and new jurisdictions as the space they inhabited transitioned from a federal territory to a state. Meanwhile, the region was destabilizing because of the Mexican Revolution in progress. 

By 1917, after World War I, Blackdom was in the midst of a renaissance while the 1918 flu pandemic raged across the world. Two years into the pandemic, March 4, 1920, in the El Paso Herald, the headline read “Mexico Expels American Reporters.” Open to page 8 and the first headline read, “To Sink a Deep Roswell Well.” In the article on page 8, “A Buffalo group of oilmen have signed a contract with the Blackdom Oil Company.” 

Yes, the world as you know is over. Yes, this moment of transition can be a good thing.