As Americans quarrel in public squares, real and online, writers are looking back at our history to make sense of it all. Caleb Gayle rises to the challenge in his eloquent, if discursive, \u201cBlack Moses,\u201d chronicling activist Edward McCabe\u2019s struggles against post-Civil War racism. <\/p>\n
Raised free in the Northeast, McCabe (1850-1920) came of age in the flux of Reconstruction \u2014 whip-smart, a \u201cproblem solver and a doer\u201d <\/b>whose politesse and organizational skills masked a burning ambition. Our knowledge of his youth is sparse, but his adult r\u00e9sum\u00e9 was atypical: While clerking on Wall Street and in Chicago he absorbed the protocols of capitalism and networking, which he applied to a vision of Black liberation.<\/p>\n
McCabe and a friend, Abram T. Hall, Jr., focused on Oklahoma, then called Indian Territory. McCabe first traveled to Kansas, a base where he evolved his concept for a Black-only state. He married Sarah Bryant in 1881 and grew his role as a grassroots Republican politician. His mission: to help the formerly enslaved, known as \u201cExodusters,\u201d out of the South.<\/p>\n
\u201cSalvation was collective, because it was for a coherent group: Black people in the South. It was terrestrial because they planned to find salvation in the real land of Kansas,\u201d the author notes. \u201cAs Reconstruction collapsed, Black people had to act \u2014 and quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gayle\u2019s narrative braids his vigorous research with the work of scholars such as historian Nell Irvin Painter, skipping around as he fleshes out the context informing McCabe\u2019s story: rampant violence surrounding the Kansas-Nebraska Act (to determine if there would be slavery in those states), Lincoln\u2019s notion of repatriating freed slaves to Liberia and McCabe\u2019s maneuvers among late 19th-century politicos like President Benjamin Harrison. This structure opens space to consider the confluence of events and ideology that inspire Gayle\u2019s arc.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo longer would McCabe prize equality but rather a nationalism, a supremacy of his race over matters in the state he hoped to make theirs,\u201d he observes. McCabe was determined to \u201cbuild another \u2018Hayti.\u2019\u201d <\/b><\/p>\n
McCabe joined forces with newspaperman William Eagleson to lobby Harrison for Oklahoma\u2019s admission to the Union as a Black state. Gayle depicts this Washington interlude as grand theater, tinged with strife. McCabe \u201cwent about soliciting investments and donations (called subscribing) from elite Blacks and sympathetic white political power brokers to finance the operation.\u201d <\/b>Gayle, too, exposes McCabe\u2019s colonist motivations in the service of a brutalized minority, seeking Native property.<\/p>\n
He had manage to establish three towns before the notorious land run of 1891, when settlers swept across the plains at the behest of Harrison and others within the GOP. McCabe\u2019s \u201chope in the Republican Party was evaporating. His frustration over the misalignment between his desired pace of progress and that of his white Republican colleagues had been simmering in the background.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Americans quarrel in public squares, real and online, writers are looking back at our history to make…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":127003,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-127002","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114988902513270719","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}