He tried to build a Black state. A Northeastern professor tells his daring, flawed story
Northeastern’s Caleb Gayle wrote ‘Black Moses’ because Edward McCabe was one of the first Black Americans elected to political office and he was “deeply flawed.”
When Northeastern University professor Caleb Gayle decided to write “Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State” about the 19th-century politician Edward McCabe, it was because McCabe was one of the first Black Americans elected to political office.
It was also because McCabe’s life is a great story.
“It’s a thrilling, adventurous tale that just happens to also be true,” says Gayle, an associate professor of journalism and Africana Studies at Northeastern. McCabe, who made his way from New York to Oklahoma with an aspiration to lead the new territory as governor, was educated and ambitious but his plan was doomed from the outset, Gayle adds.
“The reason I was so interested in him wasn’t because he was perfect, but because he was deeply flawed,” says Gayle, who previously wrote about enslaved Blacks who became citizens of the self-governing Native American Creek Nation. “His rationale was deeply flawed and you could see from the start that he was going to fail.”
In the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction, newly freed Black Americans looked for places to settle and many expected to receive land, as had been promised in the Freedmen’s Bureau bills after the Civil War.
In the 1870s, McCabe traveled to Kansas, where he was an early leader of a Black-founded community called Nicodemus. He was appointed county clerk and later won an election for Kansas state auditor. Armed with these successes in a climate eager for Black self-determination, McCabe went to Washington, D.C., and asked President Benjamin Harrison directly to appoint him governor of Oklahoma.
“As Black leaders talking to Black people in a predominantly Black state, that’s what he wanted to do, but in so doing, he was exacting the same experiences of colonization on his own people,” says Gayle. “They were actively trying to colonize Oklahoma, but on behalf of Black people.”
During this time Black Americans migrated in large numbers to both cities and small towns, Gayle says, and McCabe was among the Black politicians and land speculators who saw power in numbers. His plan: Attract as many Black Americans to Oklahoma as possible.
His pitch to Harrison was to appoint him governor and McCabe would provide a solution for the “negro problem,” Gayle says.
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With the idea of settling Oklahoma as a Black state, Gayle says, McCabe was presented with “an opportunity to amplify his own ambitions, to provide his white peers with a solution and also to provide what he thought Black people needed.”
Harrison turned down the idea, but McCabe traveled to Oklahoma in 1890 undaunted. He acquired land and was one of three Black founders of the city of Langston — home of the only historically Black university in Oklahoma. The Black population grew, but McCabe’s vision of a Black majority was not realized.
The territory also attracted poor white immigrants and was home to indigenous people who had been driven off their land.
“What you have is the collision of a lot of different marginalized people’s dreams colliding all at once,” Gayle says, “in part because the U.S. government had long before banished many indigenous nations west to Oklahoma.”
McCabe spent the last years of his life fighting Oklahoma’s 1907 Separate Coach Law, which segregated passenger railroad cars. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the state law.
While McCabe’s motivations in trying to establish an all-Black state may not have always been noble by contemporary standards, Gayle says, the man was gutsy and innovative in his thinking.
“The lesson for us even today is that those who try don’t have to be perfect in their trying,” Gayle says. “That’s what intrigued me. Hopefully, McCabe’s story opens up the opportunity to embrace the imperfections that come with people who put up their hand and say, ‘Sure, I’ll try to lead us.’”
