Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State

by Caleb Gayle Narrated by Leon Nixon

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Elusive to many, the American Dream was especially out of reach for African Americans in Edward McCabe’s time. The dreams, the political challenges and the business aspects — here the true story of pursuing a Black promised land vividly comes to life.

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction

A New York Times Editors' Choice Pick

“Powerful... [and] fascinating.” -The Washington Post

The remarkable story of Edward McCabe, a Black man who tried to establish a Black state within the United States.

In this paradigm-shattering work of American history, Caleb Gayle recounts the extraordinary tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the audacious idea to create a state within the Union governed by and for Black people - and the racism, politics, and greed that thwarted him.

As the sweeping changes and brief glimpses of hope brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction began to wither, anger at the opportunities available to newly freed Black people were on the rise. As a result, both Blacks and whites searched for new places to settle. That was when Edward McCabe, a Black businessman and a rising political star in the American West, set in motion his plans to found a state within the Union for Black people to live in and govern. His chosen site: Oklahoma, a place that the U.S. government had deeded to Indigenous people in the 1830s when it forced thousands of them to leave their homes under Indian Removal, which became known as the Trail of Tears.

McCabe lobbied politicians in Washington, D.C., Kansas, and elsewhere as he exhorted Black people to move to Oklahoma to achieve their dreams of self-determination and land ownership. His rising profile as a leader and spokesman for Black people as well as his willingness to confront white politicians led him to become known as Black Moses. And like his biblical counterpart, McCabe nearly made it to the promised land but was ultimately foiled by politics, business interests, and the growing ambitions of white settlers who also wanted the land.

In Black Moses, Gayle brings to vivid life the world of Edward McCabe: the Black people who believed in his dream of a Black state, the white politicians who didn't, and the larger challenges of confronting the racism and exclusion that bedeviled Black people's attempts to carve a place in America for themselves. Gayle draws from extraordinary research and reporting to reveal an America that almost was.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Black Moses

“Timely.... [written] with great empathy.... [this] compelling study of McCabe’s quixotic crusade for Black self-determination richly illustrates just how tenuous the promise of freedom remained.” —The New York Times

“Powerful… [and] fascinating.” —The Washington Post

“[E]loquent .... Gayle does more than just rescue a forgotten yet crucial figure; he places McCabe at the center of radical liberation … As our nation continues to fracture into partisan camps, Gayle tells an engrossing tale, revealing that the tensions remain the same." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“It’s a rare and satisfying experience to find a nonfiction book that balances the scope of its content with narrative coherence, without sacrificing either. Gayle’s latest carves a historical epic out of a forgotten episode in the Black separatist movement, enthralling as both a character study and a novel look at America’s racial history.” —The Millions

“A welcome contribution to the history of Black liberation and the struggle for civil rights.” —Kirkus, STARRED review

“Gayle presents McCabe’s misguided dream as a cautionary tale of the dangers of one oppressed people attempting to colonize another rather than making common cause.” —Booklist, STARRED review

“Gayle has brilliantly captured the little-known history of McCabe and the Black-majority towns that dotted the landscape in Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and other Plains states. . . .[a] deeply researched and well-written history.”—Library Journal, STARRED review

“In this enthralling saga, journalist Caleb Gayle resurfaces the little-remembered late-19th-century effort to turn Oklahoma into a Black state . . . .Gayle’s stylish, brisk account elegantly incorporates many tangents (including spotlighting the Native nations being dispossessed by McCabe’s efforts). It’s one not to miss.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“What Caleb Gayle calls a ‘tale of what could have been’ is an eye-opening, heartrending study of a man’s—and a nation’s—broken dream. Black Moses carefully rescues a story – Edward McCabe’s attempt to create a state where Black people could breathe pure freedom— from the indifference of history.” —Stephen Harrigan, author of Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas

“Caleb Gayle has written a compelling book about a breathtakingly ambitious, borderline crazy, and ultimately doomed idea. It’s a wild ride through American history.” —S. C. Gwynne, author of Empire of the Summer Moon

“Black Moses illuminates one boldly dreaming man’s quest for abundance—for himself and his people—that is both essentially American and beyond the bounds of American imagining. Gayle skillfully uncovers a history that feels at once wildly alive, scarcely visible, and integral to the United States we inhabit now. This is a hidden history that Americans need to know.” —Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife

“A layered and complicated narrative about Black freedom dreams after the demise of slavery and during the rapid rise of Jim Crow policy. Gayle invites us to look westward to understand the ways Black people sought existential and political autonomy in a nation determined to deprive them of all they needed and desired. The story of Black Moses resonates more than a century later as the unfinished business of freedom haunts everyone. A searing biography of both a charismatic leader and the worlds he tried to create.”—Marcia Chatelain, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America

“When the true history of America’s west is written, Black Moses will stand as a flagship bearer of that accounting. Caleb Gayle is a gifted writer who rolls out this splendidly researched, spell-binding yarn with grace, honest grit, and full-on immediacy. Wonderfully done.” —James McBride, author of The Good Lord Bird and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

“An unforgettable account of a forgotten hero. Black Moses tells the story of a larger-than-life figure whose journey has the power to inform and inspire us. Caleb Gayle brings impressive research and propulsive prose to this shrewd and vivid work of history.” —Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-07-31
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193442424
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/12/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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