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“Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State” (Riverhead Books) is the latest book by award-winning journalist Caleb Gayle, author of “We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power.”
Gayle recounts the rise of Edward McCabe, an activist who, during Reconstruction, lobbied for a Black-governed state, fighting racism and greed as he sought to create a “promised land” for newly-freed Blacks in the Oklahoma Territory.
Read an excerpt below.
“Black Moses” by Caleb Gayle
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“We will have a new party, that of negro supremacy in at least one State, with negro State and county officers, and negro Senators and Representatives in Congress,” said a young but seasoned Black politician, Edward Preston McCabe, in 1891. With the Pyrrhic advances of Reconstruction after the Civil War becoming a memory, and Black people attacked and disempowered across the United States—both South and North—McCabe was promising something that sounded impossible, but it wasn’t. Indeed, that’s why the reporter to whom McCabe was talking had come all the way from Minnesota to Oklahoma Territory in the first place. Even as America’s western frontier was on the precipice of being overrun, this reporter had come to witness a run on the land. Claiming that land was the first step toward a better life for thousands of Black people, the forty‑year‑old McCabe was known—sometimes derisively—as “the One Who Would Be the Moses.”
At noon on September 22, 1891, along the borders of the Indian Territory, rifles were fired, pistols went off, cannons blazed, all signaling the official start of the new opening of Oklahoma Territory to settlement. With that, lands that had previously been granted permanently by the U.S. government to several Indigenous nations including the Sac and Fox, the Iowa, the Shawnee, and the Potawatomi were now declared free to whoever could grab them and, crucially, to hold them against all others. The night before, some twenty‑five thousand people—Black, white, and Indigenous—huddled at the borders of Native lands. Poor whites from across the country hoped that Oklahoma would be another iteration of an America that would favor them. Black families left the harsh conditions of the Jim Crow South as well as the North and bordering states to grab at a hope that felt tactile. Citizens of Indigenous nations watched as newcomers made their lands sites of fulfilling dreams of building their personal fortunes.
The tens of thousands at the border waited with anticipation and a sense of opportunity for a once‑in‑a‑lifetime chance articulated in simple, transactional terms: Whether rich or poor or something in between, all could run and ride to find land. Stake their ground. Develop their land and stay on it for five years. If they did, that land, 160 acres in total, would be theirs. That land would be their stake in tomorrow.
Excerpted from “Black Moses” by Caleb Gayle. © 2025. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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“Black Moses” by Caleb Gayle
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