BLACK MOSES

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.