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

Jim Crow laws were pieces of US legislation that enforced separation between races. Specifically, Colbert defines the laws as “mandates that segregated Black Americans from white Americans” (14). The name Jim Crow comes from a character in minstrel shows, which were a form theater in the early 19th-century United States in which white performers donned blackface and mocked Black Americans and their cultural customs with racist caricatures. The legality of Jim Crow laws was upheld by the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which ruled that segregation was legal as long as the segregated facilities were “separate but equal.” In fact, when the Jim Crow laws went into effect in the South, the facilities for Black Americans were rarely, if ever, equal to the facilities for white Americans. Some Jim Crow laws also robbed Black Americans of their right to suffrage, instituting grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and poll taxes to discourage Black voters. Colbert uses the understanding of Jim Crow laws to build her analysis about the culture of the United States that motivated so many Black Americans to move to Greenwood to pursue economic opportunity in a community that was mostly segregated but thriving.