This Visionary African American Politician Dreamed of Creating an All-Black State in Oklahoma Territory

Edward P. McCabe petitioned Benjamin Harrison for an opportunity to show him that Black people “are men and women capable of self‑government.” When the president was unmoved, McCabe and his followers went west anyway

Edward P. McCabe argued that Black people could not only belong in the new American territorities, but actually be in charge. Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via Newspapers.com, Wikimedia Commons under public domain and Kansas State Historical Society

After the Civil War, even as Reconstruction was failing across the United States, Black Americans in the South faced a choice: Should I leave, or should I stay? Edward P. McCabe—who had clerked on Wall Street and for a prominent Chicago businessman, then rose to prominence as Kansas’ state auditor, the first Black person elected to a statewide office in the American West—wanted to help them make their choice.

McCabe’s compatriots, like activist and businessman Benjamin Singleton, began advertising in large posters and newspaper advertisements that read, “Ho for Kansas!” Their plan was to escape the South while also establishing Black townsin Kansas. Newspapers across the country presented the options for Black people in the former Confederacy: “Ku Klux or Kansas.” The latter—with its origins as a free state and its sons including John Brown and other abolitionists—offered a semblance of a promised land.

In previous decades, some free Black people had left—or been pushed to leave—the U.S. Many of these pushes were supported by white leaders who are today sometimes rightfully valorized and memorialized: politicians like President Abraham Lincoln, ministers, philanthropists and other wealthy leaders whose names are now emblazoned on schools, charitable foundations and libraries.

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

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

At the Hampton Roads Conference in February 1865, Lincoln sat across from representatives of the Confederacy, including its vice president, Alexander Stephens, to begin peace talks to end the Civil War. According to a still-contentious account from Union General Benjamin F. Butler, Lincoln wondered aloud:

But what shall we do with the Negroes after they are free? I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace, unless we can get rid of the Negroes. Certainly they cannot if we don’t get rid of the Negroes whom we have armed and disciplined and who have fought with us, to the amount, I believe, of some 150,000 men. … What, then, are our difficulties in sending all the Blacks away?

During Reconstruction, the federal government emphasized reconciliation with the South over repairing the damage done intentionally or allowed passively to Black citizens. Some Black people did, in fact, leave the U.S. for Canada, the Caribbean and the relatively new West African nation of Liberia. As the sun set on the Reconstruction era, casting shadows of despair across the South, what hope remained for Black citizens was met with violence and intimidation.

Did you know? William Henry Ellis and the push to colonize Mexico

Around the same time that Edward P. McCabe sought to turn Oklahoma into an all-Black state, African American businessman William Henry Ellis mounted multiple unsuccessful efforts to establish a Black colony in Mexico.

Beginning in the late 1870s and accelerating into the 1890s, states passed laws like Mississippi’s 1890 Constitutional Convention mandates, which imposed poll taxes and literacy tests, and Louisiana’s 1898 grandfather clause, which exempted white men whose ancestors had registered to vote before 1867 from meeting the new voting requirements—all under the banner of restoring “order.” These laws not only codified racial segregation and voter suppression but also defended those who inflicted harm and valorized those who enforced fear, laying the groundwork for the Jim Crow regime that would dominate Southern life for decades.

A different answer to Lincoln’s question would come a half-century later. Between 1910 and 1970, Black people chose to leave the South in the greatest internal migration in American history, abandoning the region’s racist violence for the doubtful safety of the North. Most call this the Great Migration: a signal that there was a mass movement of Black people toward finding their own opportunity. But the term is misleading.

Because, for a brief moment, Black people went west, in what by rights should be called the original Great Migration—a movement from the 1870s to the 1900s of freedpeople who pushed beyond the old North and the old South. Some called them Exodusters. They were Black people who, like the Israelites in the Bible, had urgently hatched plans to pick up all they had and move west, as historian Nell Irvin Painter writes in Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction. First, following Singleton’s posters, these settlers populated Kansas. Then, they fanned out across the Old West, into the places we now call Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado and New Mexico.

They dreamed of a state that would be governed by Black people, inhabited by Black people. For a brief moment, no matter how elusive, between 1889 and 1907, the state known today as Oklahoma might have been such a place, home to thousands of Black people building all‑Black towns and schools, seeking political office, and even breaking ground on universities and hospitals. We see remnants of these dreams in towns like Boley, with its still-extant Boley Rodeo, the first Black rodeo in the country. Or in cities like Tulsa, where we see in its northern neighborhoods the outlines of what was once Black Wall Street, a hub of some 191 commercial establishments, along with churches, schools and more, all meant to serve Black people, circulating dollars within those communities without a touch of white approval. And they came because of the magnetism and ambition of one man.

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McCabe had become famous well beyond Southern and Black newspapers because he shared a stirring message: that Black people could not only belong in the new territories, but actually be in charge. And he set his sights on what is now Oklahoma. At the time, that region was a patchwork: Oklahoma Territory in the west had been opened to white settlement after the land runs of 1889, while Indian Territory in the east remained under the nominal control of the Five Tribes. McCabe’s vision centered on frontier towns at the seam of the two territories, in what he hoped would soon be united as the new state of Oklahoma.

This dream of turning Oklahoma into an American promised land for Black people was destined to collide with others’ plans for the place—and in drastic fashion.

At the time that McCabe was moving to occupy Oklahoma for Black people, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and Muscogee Creek Nations—which had been banished to this part of the country under a law signed by President Andrew Jackson decades before—were pitching separate Indian statehood for the same territory, calling it Sequoyah. While there were already Black people in Indian Territory, they, unlike McCabe, had a hereditary claim over parts of this land as members of some of these Native nations. Indian Territory also became an attractive landing zone for white elites who saw the opportunity to make a buck, a buck that seemed endless as oil and gas were discovered there and literally sprang from the ground.

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In 1890, McCabe met with President Benjamin Harrison to lobby for an all‑Black state. “Some of us have names borrowed from masters, some of us have the blood of those who owned us as cattle, but disowned us as sons and daughters,” McCabe, who had been born free in 1850, told the president. “But in a new country, on new lands, with a climate suited to our race, we desire to show you that we are men and women capable of self‑government.” Harrison was apparently unmoved, and McCabe couldn’t return to Oklahoma Territory waving a flag of secured statehood for Black people. Instead, he left with the hope that if he could convince enough Black voters to make Oklahoma Territory home, he might be able to turn Oklahoma into an unofficial Black state.

Report after report told of the trainloads of aspiring Black settlers leaving neighboring states during this period, in segregated cars without amenities. They were demeaned on their ride to the land McCabe promised them, as there was “a penalty for a Black person to ride in a ‘white’ compartment, and a like penalty for a white person to ride in a ‘Black’ compartment,” as the Kansas-based Atchison Globe reported. For “educated colored people of the South,” according to one “prominent local” Black man quoted by the Kansas City Times, the entire ride was found to be “very much humiliated because of this caste law, and it would be a class of sensitive people with money and brains who would go to the new country.” But demeaning, humiliating and dehumanizing train car journeys could not stop these hopeful migrants from seeking a new kind of freedom in the newly opened territories.

Many leading newspapers across the South and even in Oklahoma Territory denigrated the aspirations of McCabe and the many Black people who sought to make their home as settlers. To do so, they gave McCabe’s dreams and the dreams of those he led—dreams of making Oklahoma an all‑Black state—a two‑word name: “n—— talk.”

The newspapers couldn’t understand the language McCabe used, expressing aims like “their own laws”; the ability to govern themselves “unmolested by the selfish greed of the white man”; and “a Negro city, a Negro county, a Negro state.” But their incomprehension was not because the words were complex. They couldn’t understand them when they were uttered by a Black man because this Black man, and the people he led, used these words to imagine something beyond the limited notion of freedom from slavery.

What McCabe wanted was not the lack of slavery or the absence of oppression, but rather citizenship in a state that he ran, where he took his counsel from Black people. He wanted abundance. The mere appearance that McCabe’s mission could be misconstrued as another person trying to claim land on the day of a second land run in 1891 made him a dangerous target.

On September 22, 1891, McCabe was shot by unnamed white cowboys. They approached him as he rode between Guthrie, the capital of Oklahoma Territory, and Langston, the de facto Black capital, confronting him in broad daylight. When McCabe refused their demands to turn back from his path, the cowboys raised their guns, took aim and fired, knocking him from his horse, though not killing him. Sealing his fate just outside the Black utopia he had been shaping would serve him right, the gunmen may have thought. After all, McCabe had been offering the kind of radical Black hope that others dismissed as dangerous talk that needed to be extinguished. They fired their shots to put an end to that talk.

The shooters did not realize that what they scorned was not a loudmouthed irritant so much as it was a creed—the framework for the creation of a new world. They did not realize that this so‑called talk was the speaking into existence of another life, one that felt just beyond the bounds of the believable, achievable to the cowboys who had claimed the prairies and nearly within reach for the Black people who came to settle and govern this land.

That dream fully collapsed when Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907. Amid fears that a segregation clause would jeopardize admission, the new state’s Constitution omitted explicit Jim Crow provisions. But in its first days, the new Oklahoma legislature pushed through Senate Bill One (also known as the coach law), mandating segregated railroad cars and waiting rooms and immediately enshrining de jure segregation, not only in transportation but soon thereafter in schools. The legislature also banned miscegenation and imposed voting restrictions. The promise of a Black‑governed commonwealth gave way to disenfranchisement and racial terror, as Jim Crow laws erased many political and legal gains those Black settlers had made—even as some of those all-Black towns persist today as living legacies of the original vision.

McCabe’s dream reaches far back, long before he and his thousands of followers declared Oklahoma as theirs. It is the story of a people cast out of enslavement and into the wilderness, where they found creative ways to build lives of abundance for themselves, lives on their own terms. They cared not simply about being free but about dictating the terms of expressing that freedom. That their world would be built by their volition, that no decision‑making table would exclude them, but instead demand their presence. This is the story of those who dared to do more than dream about a promised land—they built one. That it failed makes its brief existence no less real nor less valuable today.

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The tale of McCabe and his followers is a story about ambition—about the wherewithal to dream, to hope against hope. It’s the story of being forced to leave in order to start again, only to lose it all, and a fight for a century to recover nuggets of truth among the wreckage. It’s the story of dreams, big ones, and what comes after we wake up. It is the story of trying, why we cannot stop trying, and why being able to try is worth remembering at all. Most of all, this story shows that even the most American of promises was never available to all Americans. McCabe’s story shows that even striking out west—as Horace Greeley once instructed—does not offer salvation.

From Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State by Caleb Gayle, published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Caleb Gayle.

Caleb Gayle – Author, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State