As Americans quarrel in public squares, real and online, writers are looking back at our history to make sense of it all. Caleb Gayle rises to the challenge in his eloquent, if discursive, “Black Moses,” chronicling activist Edward McCabe’s struggles against post-Civil War racism.

Raised free in the Northeast, McCabe (1850-1920) came of age in the flux of Reconstruction — whip-smart, a “problem solver and a doer” whose politesse and organizational skills masked a burning ambition. Our knowledge of his youth is sparse, but his adult résumé was atypical: While clerking on Wall Street and in Chicago he absorbed the protocols of capitalism and networking, which he applied to a vision of Black liberation.

McCabe and a friend, Abram T. Hall, Jr., focused on Oklahoma, then called Indian Territo

See Full Page