A Black separatist group’s utopian dream for land near Telluride withered after an armed standoff
The Black Hammer group had $100,000 and a real estate contract for 40 acres where they planned a settlement free of cops, COVID and white people
The Colorado Sun
When Black Hammer came to Beaver Pines, a sparsely populated neighborhood on the high desert about 25 miles west of Telluride, they came for the soil.
They were about two dozen leftist revolutionaries, almost all people of color. In Denver and other U.S. cities, the group’s chapters had spent the pandemic handing out food and personal protective equipment while planning their signature project: Hammer City, a utopian settlement high in the Rocky Mountains free of coronavirus, cops, money and white people. Together they would renounce private property, work the land and build power.
Commenters on Facebook and Twitter widely ridiculed the concept as a “cult” doomed for failure. But the activists raised more than $60,000. On May 3, 2021, Augustus Romain Jr., the group’s commander-in-chief, posted a photo of 10 people standing among sagebrush with raised fists and a declaration on Facebook: Black Hammer had “liberated” 200 acres of land somewhere in Colorado. The soil, they wrote, was rich.
Black Hammer never said where their new community was. Within weeks, the group suddenly stopped its dispatches from the desert.
But donations continued pouring in, eventually cresting the $100,000 mark, according to the organization’s fundraising webpage. Critics online wondered where the money went when the Hammers left Colorado. Tureyel Quan, the Black Hammer Organization chief of staff, declined an interview for this article, citing bias in media coverage of COVID-19 vaccines, which the group opposes.
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