Place  /  Retrieval

The Disappearing Story of the Black Homesteaders Who Pioneered The West

Once-vibrant African American homesteading communities are falling to ruin.
Black Homesteaders in the Great Plains Proiect

Ever heard of Blackdom in New Mexico? Dearfield in Colorado? What about DeWitty in Nebraska? Didn’t think so. Neither had I several years ago. But they were once vibrant African American homesteading communities. Today their buildings are falling to ruin, their locations are mostly unmarked, and the achievements of their pioneers are mostly forgotten.

At Dearfield, the walls and roof of the lunchroom, once an important gathering place, have collapsed. The decaying building sits behind a chain-link fence. The substantial wood-frame house of the settlement’s founder, Oliver Toussaint Jackson, built in 1918, has been vandalized. Although listed in 1995 on the National Register of Historic Places, and despite local efforts to save it, Dearfield is undergoing demolition by neglect.

Nicodemus, in Kansas, founded in the 1870s, is the best-known black homesteader settlement and the oldest one west of the Mississippi. It is the only one still occupied and is now a National Historic Site. Even so, its First Baptist Church, African Methodist Episcopal Church and other historic buildings are in such poor shape that they cannot be opened to the public. The National Park Service is failing in its responsibility to maintain this historic site.

These places are precious not just to descendants but to all Americans, and their loss is a national shame. The homesteading story is usually told as one of white Americans’ westward movement. But the 1862 Homestead Act had no racial restrictions, and after the 1866 Civil Rights Act clarified that black Americans were citizens, they too were entitled to 160 acres of public land if they paid a modest fee and lived on the property continuously for five years.

Some black homesteaders, former slaves, tried to settle on public lands in the South, but relentless white violence mostly defeated them. In the Great Plains, they found success. A significant colony (as it was called) of about 150 people thrived at Blackdom, near Roswell, N.M., during the opening decades of the 20th century. Dearfield was home to more than 200 homesteaders.

Similarly, perhaps 170 black people lived on homesteads at DeWitty, named for the man who opened its first post office. They established a community that flourished until the Great Depression wiped out many Nebraska farmers, black and white. By then, DeWitty had its own schools and a robust local farm economy. The town’s barber, R.H. Hannahs, hosted a picnic for everyone on the first Sunday of August, a day filled with speeches, music, games and sometimes a rodeo.