If you don't understand Oklahoma, you can't understand America

The Guardian

4 days ago

In a moment, I will tell you how I learned to love Oklahoma, a state I have had to point out on a map more times than I can count to Americans and foreigners alike. One with 77 crimson red counties and a license plate that once simply read: 'OKLAHOMA IS OK.'
But first, it is important to tell you about my first Oklahoma school history lesson – one I learned when I was eight years old, after my parents moved our family cross-country.
Tulsa's reputation as a haven for the devout held deep appeal for my Jamaican parents, whose lives were steeped in Christian faith. The city's predictable rhythms, its flatness, even its so-called boringness – it all offered a reprieve from what they saw as the chaos and moral drift of our old home in New York.
One day, my new school gathered every fourth grader and led us to the backlot. We were lined up across the lawn and equipped with wagons, protractors and dulled stakes to drive into the ground. We waited for a teacher's voice to yell, 'Go!'
We were to take off quickly, racing each other to find a plot we wanted to take for ourselves. We measured, as well as fourth graders could, the land we wanted to be ours. The entire affair was raucous as us newly minted 'pioneers' yelled, laughed and named our plots whatever our imaginations would allow.
We were re-enacting a land run – one of seven held between 1889 and 1895 – that marked the opening of lands once deeded to Indigenous nations, only to be seized again as part of their forced removal across what we now call the American west.
It may be hard to believe, but Oklahoma City's public schools didn't get around to banning the practice from history lessons until 2014. In its place came a sanitized, feelgood version of state history – one that, like many civil war re-enactments, recasts the fight to preserve slavery as a story of bravery and idealism.
During those history lessons, the ugliness was not even hiding in plain sight. The disregard for the lives on which the state was built was – and still is – a point of pride.
Today, the University of Oklahoma – my alma mater and the state's flagship university – leads every game, welcome event and recruiting fair with its famous chant: 'Boomer!' followed by an echoed 'Sooner!' It's a rallying cry repeated across all its athletic programs, which, like many state schools, are funded far more robustly than classrooms.
Boomers were settlers, mostly white, who agitated in the late 1800s to open land in Indian territory (present-day Oklahoma) for white homesteaders. Led by pugnacious figures such as David Lewis Payne (the putative 'Father of Oklahoma'), they staged illegal incursions before the land was officially opened.
The Sooners entered the land before the legal start time of a land run, cheating to claim the best plots. These rule-breakers are now mythologized in Oklahoma culture. The university's mascot is not an animal or a person, but a covered wagon: an emblem of the pioneering spirit that carved a life from theft and violence.
For much of my life, I struggled to feel pride in a place like this – not just because of its history, but because of the lie we told about it. The real story was buried beneath a more palatable narrative, where horrors were treated as little more than pit stops on the way to celebrating homesteaders. Land theft from Native nations, the displacement of Black families, the racial terror that shadowed statehood – these were footnotes, if they were mentioned at all.
But over time, it was precisely those harder truths that gave me something solid to stand on. That reckoning – naming the harm, sitting with its consequences – is not just about the past. It's a tool we need now, in 2025, when the country is suspended between two impulses: nostalgia and denial.
Across the nation, the fight over whose history counts is really a fight over who gets to claim America. The violence that birthed Oklahoma was not incidental, it was foundational. And unless we confront that, there's no building anything real.
Misunderstand Oklahoma, and you misunderstand the country.
Growing up in Tulsa, the north star for me and my friends was college, followed by a job that could take us anywhere but Oklahoma. Dallas and Houston seemed almost idyllic: more affordable than New York or Los Angeles while still offering an upgraded version of a lifestyle we were already familiar with.
Nothing made me want to stay. Downtown Tulsa felt frozen in amber, a relic of its 'oil capital of the world' heyday, long faded. The place felt ghostly. To me, its nightlife, diversity, direct flights and appetite for progress were all but nonexistent. Until recently, Oklahoma had not had a major-league sports team – though the Oklahoma City Thunder recently broke through, winning the 2025 NBA finals. What professional sports teams we had were literally and colloquially minor, baseball teams with stadiums that left much to be desired.
This is a story of haunting familiarity to people whose home towns are seen as flyovers, rarely seen as worth a stop.
And then, everything changed.
In the decade since I left, Oklahoma has been refashioning its cities, courting new talent, and, according to the Kansas City Federal Reserve, beginning to reverse its long-running brain drain. College graduates like me once left in droves. Now, it seems that the tide is shifting.
If you are an artist, Tulsa will subsidize your loft or studio. If Teach for America has whet your appetite, Tulsa will help with your housing costs. If you have a startup that might struggle with raising venture capital on the coasts, you will find that Tulsa will offer it to you.
Even remote workers with no ties to the state can receive $10,000 or help with a down payment, just for showing up and staying for a year. Convenient, when the airport now offers direct flights to places my younger self could only dream about: New York, Miami, Los Angeles.
These are all points of pride for many. But for all the praise, concerns do remain: rising housing costs, shallow community ties, and whether programs such as Tulsa Remote offer lasting benefits to longtime residents, especially since those efforts are not government-led efforts but philanthropic ones, and rely entirely on the continued generosity of a few wealthy individuals.
Reinvention has always been part of Oklahoma's playbook. Again and again, the state has tried to become something new by recruiting outsiders, whether settlers in the land runs or now digital nomads with graduate degrees, while asking far less of itself when it comes to honoring the people and histories already here.
That strategy may bring headlines, but it rarely brings healing.
No matter how overjoyed I was to see my home state in the headlines for the NBA championship – rather than for being ranked 49th in education or 49th in healthcare – my pride doesn't come from Oklahoma's polished reinvention. It lies in the hard work of seeing my state clearly, in all its contradictions: the violence and the love, the buried history and the stubborn hope.
And to do that, we need to go back nearly 140 years.
I have spent the past five years combing through archives and crisscrossing Oklahoma and the Great Plains, chasing the story of Edward McCabe: the visionary who tried to create a Black state within the US, a figure who stood at the centre of some of America's most volatile collisions.
In the 1880s, McCabe, the first Black statewide elected official in the old west, came to the Oklahoma territory with a vision so bold it startled both Black allies and white detractors: a state colonized by Black people, governed by their own hands, and as McCabe promised, 'unmolested by the selfish greed of the white man'.
It was a dream not of mere survival, but of sovereignty – and it's why a reporter traveling from Minnesota dubbed him 'The One Who Would Be Moses'.
That dream, like so many others on that soil, was paved over by the very forces it tried to escape: anti-Black violence, white economic opportunism and settler colonialism's endless appetite.
McCabe did not ask for a utopia without contradiction. His ride to Langston – one of the all-Black towns he helped found – from his post in the territorial capital of Guthrie, where he served as county treasurer during the 1891 land run, was anything but safe.
White cowboys stopped him on the road, ordered him to turn back, to stop where he stood. He refused, more than once. Then they opened fire. He lived to tell the story, but just barely. It was a warning: dreams built on contested ground do not go unchallenged, and Black ambition could be answered with bullets.
His story, in all its promise and peril, was not that of a perfect man with a clean mission. He promoted colonization while ignoring the fact that the land he hoped to reclaim for Black people had already been promised, stolen, and promised again to Indigenous nations. He stood at the nexus of Black aspiration and Native dispossession. And in doing so, he reflected the central American dilemma: that ambition will never be clean because the ground itself is stolen.
McCabe's dream of a Black-governed state was mocked, sabotaged and eventually erased from civic memory. But in the erasures, we find the outlines of what was feared: not just Black people having land, but Black people on their own terms.
That was always the deeper threat. Not a land grab, but a claim to belong. A declaration of autonomy.
That is why I return to him: not because he got it right, but because he tried. His efforts, and those of his peers, can still be seen in the 13 all-Black towns in Oklahoma (down from the 50 that once stood tall). These towns were founded as havens – places where Black Americans could govern themselves, own land and live free from white oversight. Many who built and settled these towns were just one generation removed from slavery, carrying the memory – often their own or that of their parents – of what it meant to be owned, uprooted and denied the right to belong. Their movement westward was not merely an act of escape; it was an act of creation. They were not just fleeing the violence of Reconstruction's collapse; they were imagining something freer, fuller and governed by their own hands.
Today, those towns are no longer exclusively Black, nor are they legally restricted to Black residents. Anyone can move there, marry there, build a life there. But their founding spirit endures.
McCabe spoke in what newspapers would call 'nigger talk' – a term of derision meant to dismiss any Black person who dared to articulate sovereignty, self-governance or the audacious idea of belonging on their own terms. But McCabe wore the insult as armor. He turned the slur into strategy, the scorn into a blueprint. And they tried to kill him for it. But what they didn't realize is that this was not just talk, it was a creed. A blueprint. A framework for building a world not yet born.
That is the lesson Oklahoma teaches.
Oklahoma has always been a place America used to test its next chapter. After Reconstruction failed, and the US government abandoned its promises to Native nations, parts of the territory were branded 'no man's land' – as if no person of value had ever lived there. But it was not empty; it was further removed. Oklahoma could have been a blueprint for belonging, a place carved out for those most marginalized: Black people fleeing racial terror, Native nations pushed from their homelands, immigrants seeking a foothold.
Instead, it became a proving ground for the ugly zero-sum politics that plague America today, pitting groups against each other. Today, Oklahoma remains at the forefront of deciding what counts as American – whether in its classrooms, its public religion or its laws. Just look at how it is redrawing church-state boundaries in public education, and even forcing social studies textbooks to convey 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact.
If we are serious about holding this country together, we have to reckon with the real American inheritance, where ambition and betrayal, dreaming and dispossession, are not opposite. They are co-tenants.
What McCabe knew is that place matters. Not just as geography, but as some kind of theology. It matters that this particular expression of Black belonging emerged not in areas with longstanding, high concentrations of Black people – but in a place where white America was still shaping into its newest frontier. And it was in this place being reinvented that McCabe thought he could be most successful.
My parents left New York searching for moral clarity in the middle of the country, but found none of this history in any brochure. For me, a child of migrants raised on the rules of holiness, I learned the unholy truth in reverse: that even sanctified ground can be built atop stolen land. That even the righteous can inherit the sins of the empire.
Oklahoma is a map of America's legacies. It doesn't pretend to be a blank slate. Instead, its history offers a truer, unvarnished portrait of America, with its ambitions, its erasures, its stubborn beauty and its almost devotional violence.
It's not the place where dreams go to die. It has long been the place where dreams go to collide.
Caleb Gayle is the author of Black Moses, a Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State, out 12 August (Riverhead books)