A new historical work is bringing fresh attention to one of Oklahoma’s most ambitious but often overlooked political movements: Edward McCabe’s late 19th-century campaign to make the state a haven for Black Americans.
Tulsa native and professor Caleb Gayle has released a book chronicling McCabe’s efforts in the 1890s to establish Oklahoma, then still a territory, as an all-Black state. Gayle says the project was inspired by McCabe’s “massive, all-encompassing dream” to create a refuge for African Americans escaping Jim Crow laws and racial violence in the South.
“It gave me the opportunity and excuse to come back home and to spend my time in the archives with people who hold these oral histories so tightly,” said Gayle, who grew up in Tulsa. “It brought me closer to the place that raised me.”…