Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and racially motivated violence.

Colbert carefully places the Tulsa Race Massacre in the broader historical context of racial violence and inequality in the United States. Racial inequality has existed in the United States since before the country’s genesis; Black Americans were first brought to the US against their will as part of the chattel slavery system that robbed them of their freedom and any semblance of human rights. Slavery was not directly addressed by the Constitution, but it did include the Three-fifths Compromise, which stated that, for the purposes of population counts for the House of Representatives, Black Americans enslaved in the South only counted as three-fifths of a person. Though the importation of enslaved persons was banned in 1808, those Black Americans already enslaved in the United States were not granted their freedom, nor were their children, who were born into slavery. 

Even after the Civil War, when the 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution officially abolished slavery in the United States, racial inequality persisted. Formerly enslaved Black Americans were given little economic opportunity; many were pushed into sharecropping, a practice by which Black Americans worked land that was owned by wealthier white people. Though it was not formally slavery, these Black Americans were paid little for their work and given limited upward mobility to improve their economic situations. Black Americans were also oppressed by the state governments, especially in the South, which did not want to grant them the equal rights they were promised by the 14^th and 15^th Amendments. States passed Black Codes and Jim Crow laws to force racial segregation and to block Black voters from utilizing their right to suffrage through literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes.

Though some of these laws were eventually struck down through the diligent work of organizations such as the NAACP and Black activists (like politician A. C. Hamlin, journalist Ida B. Wells, writer W. E. B. DuBois, and many more), segregation was still enforced in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, over 100 years after the end of the Civil War.

Colbert includes salient summary and analysis about all these elements of racial inequality, utilizing them as an effective framework to understand and contextualize the heinous violence of the Tulsa Race Massacre within the broader history of racist violence in the US. Though this is only a brief history of the very complex and violent history of racial inequality in the United States, it offers a glimpse into Colbert’s ideological placement of the Tulsa Race Massacre in the greater historical narrative.