Dr. Timothy E. Nelson’s multi-faceted work concerns racism, ambition and the search for opportunity. He merges Blackdom’s history with New Western History, Borderland Studies, Diasporic Studies and Blacks in the West, placing Afro-Frontierists® at the center of their histories, rather than as footnotes of other people’s histories.

Dr. Nelson has provided the most in-depth research on Blackdom to date, and he has challenged how the history has been framed. Instead of a story of a failed township of black people fleeing racial violence, lynching, and second-class citizenship, he found that Blackdomites left the South (and the racist mid-west) in search of opportunity and “sovereignty.” Following their economic and social ambitions, black people sought out literal and figurative spaces that afforded them the opportunity to develop their skills, aspirations, and dreams in the creation of “autonomous black communities.”