How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [143]
McCabe became involved in the Topeka-based Oklahoma Immigration Association, part of the larger movement to encourage African American migration to Oklahoma. In 1890 he himself relocated there and, with landowner Charles Robbins, founded the town of Langston. He started a newspaper, the Langston City Herald, which trumpeted the town’s existence as “a Negro city.”5 Other newspapers sounded a bugle: “The blacks, it appears, are preparing themselves to try the experiment, not merely of the equality, but of the supremacy of their race,” the New York Times alerted its readers in March of that year. It warned that a “secret society of negroes which has undertaken this work in Oklahoma has a candidate of its own for the Governorship of the Territory.” Though there was no secret society, there was such a candidate, and he was Edward P. McCabe. With the imminent creation of the Oklahoma Territory, McCabe had gone to Washington at the behest of the Oklahoma Immigration Association to seek support for his appointment as governor. “There is much bitterness over the candidacy of Edward P. McCabe, colored, for governor of [the Oklahoma] Territory,” the Times reported, citing an unnamed Oklahoman who “declares emphatically that if President Harrison appoints McCabe governor, the latter will be assassinated.”
Opposition to McCabe’s appointment—and to an African American—majority state—was not, however, universal. “A partial solution of the Southern negro question … is now at hand,” Chicago Tribune columnist William H. Thomas wrote. “A governor is soon to be appointed to preside over [the Oklahoma Territory] and a reliable, capable colored man should be placed in that position. That would mean a home for the colored man in the South.”
Edward P. McCabe (1850-1920) (photo credit 40.3)
President Benjamin Harrison, concerned with the potential for violence, ultimately chose a man with military experience, former Indiana congressman George W. Steele, to be governor of the Oklahoma Territory. Even after this appointment, however, articles in the press continued to sound alarms about a conspiracy to make Oklahoma a black-majority state. “Few people here seem to realize the possibility of Oklahoma becoming a Negro State,” a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune told its readers in 1891, “so quietly, yet so constantly, have the blacks been coming into the territory.” (In point of fact, the African American population in the territory was less than 9 percent.)6
A New York Times editorial in 1892, entitled “Not Ready for Statehood,” joined the chorus of concern. “Oklahoma contains more conflicting elements than does any other Territory in the Union,” it began. “With allotment comes citizenship to the Indian, ill prepared for the privileges that go with that state.… Then comes the negro race, which is a considerable factor in Oklahoma, a factor determined to maintain its rights according to its own peculiar ideas.”
The Chicago Tribune noted that Oklahoma’s racial conflicts were not as simple as white people versus red and black. “Another cause for excitement,” it commented in September 1891, “is the hatred of the Indians for the negro.… They know that they themselves cannot prevent the negroes from settling on the land, but they hint in unmistakable terms that they will make it very uncomfortable for the ‘black man’ if he settles among them.”
The racial boundary between African Americans and American Indians was, in fact, even more complicated. Prior to the Civil War, some wealthy members of the Five Civilized Tribes had been slave owners—these slave owners typically being of mixed Indian-white descent. On the other hand, runaway slaves frequently took refuge among these same tribes, and (further blurring the boundary) intermarried, resulting