A welcome contribution to the history of Black liberation and the struggle for civil rights.
Searching history of a Black activist’s quest to establish self-sustaining communities in the newly opened West.
Edward Preston McCabe was known as “the One Who Would Be the Moses”—sometimes with a sneer, as journalist Gayle notes at the start of this stirring narrative—for his efforts to recruit Southern Black migrants to settle in Oklahoma, and for “his vision…for a part of the United States to be occupied and colonized by Black people.” Following the Civil War, Gayle writes, supposedly emancipated Blacks had good reason to want to leave the South: Reconstruction was fast proving a failure, having been abandoned by the federal government, and resurgent white supremacy forced a choice: “Ku Klux or Kansas.” Kansas was indeed a destination in what Gayle rightly considers the first Great Migration, preceded by a movement to settle white abolitionists there in order to block the expansion of the slave states. “The negotiated and retreating Reconstruction made McCabe’s argument for a Black state for him,” Gayle writes, but Kansas wasn’t all it was promised to be, and was little friendlier than the South in many ways. Although towns such as Nicodemus were founded, they were so isolated and removed from white market centers that self-sufficiency was all but impossible. Enter Oklahoma, which McCabe promised, as one contemporary newspaper reported, to be “the New Canaan of the Colored Race.” Hundreds of Blacks settled there during the land rush era, but always in the face of opposition from whites, one leader of whom promised that “if the negroes try to Africanize Oklahoma, they will find that we will enrich our soil with them.” Both promised and very real violence finally drove McCabe away, his project doomed, and, on attaining statehood, Oklahoma quickly established Jim Crow laws to ensure white supremacy and crush the migrants’ dreams.
A welcome contribution to the history of Black liberation and the struggle for civil rights.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780593543795
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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