Back to Blackdom

In 1903, thirteen Black men and their families fled the violence of Jim Crow South and traveled west to southern New Mexico, where they founded Blackdom, the state’s only all-Black town. More than a century later, the town has disappeared, its land fragmented and landlocked by private property owners, and its story largely erased from public memory. Through the journeys of two descendant families returning to the land their ancestors once homesteaded, Back to Blackdom excavates a buried history and challenges the narrative that labeled the community a failure.