When Northeastern University professor Caleb Gayle decided to write “Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State” about the 19th-century politician Edward McCabe, it was because McCabe was one of the first Black Americans elected to political office. It was also because McCabe’s life is a great story.
“It’s a thrilling, adventurous tale that just happens to also be true,” says Gayle, an associate professor of journalism and Africana Studies at Northeastern. McCabe, who made his way from New York to Oklahoma with an aspiration to lead the new territory as governor, was educated and ambitious but his plan was doomed from the outset, Gayle adds. “The reason I was so interested in him wasn’t because he was perfect, but because he was deeply flawed,” says Gayle, who previously wrote about enslaved Blacks who became citizens of the self-governing Native American Creek Nation. “His rationale was deeply flawed and you could see from the start that he was going to fail.”
