Oklahoma Becoming the American South

In this episode of the Straight White American Jesus Sunday Interview, host Leah Payne speaks with award-winning journalist and historian Caleb Gayle about his acclaimed book Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State.

Caleb Gayle is an award-winning journalist and professor at Northeastern University. He is the author of We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, TIME, The Guardian, Guernica, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, named one of The Washington Post’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Black Moses tells the remarkable story of Edward McCabe, a Black political leader who nearly succeeded in founding a Black-governed state in the Oklahoma Territory at the turn of the twentieth century.

Together, Payne and Gayle explore McCabe’s ambitious political vision, the racial politics of the American West, and the broader historical context of Reconstruction, westward expansion, and Indigenous displacement. The conversation also reflects on how forgotten stories like McCabe’s challenge familiar narratives about American democracy, race, and political imagination.

In this episode:

• The cinematic structure of Black Moses and how Gayle and his editor shaped the narrative

• Who Edward McCabe was and why his story has largely disappeared from mainstream American history

• McCabe’s audacious plan to create a Black state in the Oklahoma Territory

• The Reconstruction-era search for Black self-determination and how McCabe’s vision differed from projects in Liberia or Haiti

• The American West as a site of competing dreams—and conflicts—among Black settlers, white settlers, and Indigenous nations

• McCabe’s political strategy: organizing, coalition building, and attracting Black migration to Oklahoma

• Why Oklahoma ultimately aligned itself with Jim Crow politics during statehood

• The unfinished project of American democracy and the importance of political imagination

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

Can the Rodeo Save a Historic Black Town? One woman’s quest to rescue Boley, Oklahoma, The Atlantic, by Caleb Gayle

In This EpisodeLinks: We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power by Caleb Gayle
Find Professor Gayle at www.calebgayle.com, Instagram: @calebgayle, Twitter: @gaylecalebFind Dr. Leah Payne at drleahpayne.com, subscribe on Substack, follow her on most social media platforms at @drleahpayne, listen along at Spirit & Power: Charismatics & Politics in American Life & Rock that Doesn’t Roll: the Story of Christian Rock, and read along: God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music.

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