Keen On

We all are familiar, of course, with Robert Altman’s classic 1971 movie about the settling of the west, McCabe and Mrs Miller. But most of us, I’m guessing, don’t know about another McCabe, this one African-American, the black Moses in fact, who almost created an African -American land in Oklahoma. McCabe’s all-too-American story is told in Caleb Gayle’s new book, appropriately entitled Black Moses, the saga of Edward McCabe’s transformation from a Wall Street clerk to one of the first prominent American proponents of Black sepatism and self-government. What makes McCabe's story so compelling is how close he actually came to success. By the 1890s, tens of thousands of African Americans had followed him to Oklahoma Territory, establishing over fifty all-Black towns. McCabe had learned the art of selling dreams from hotel magnate Potter Palmer in Chicago, and he deployed those skills to convince Black families fleeing post-Reconstruction violence that they could build their own promised land in the American Wes