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

The erasure of the Greenwood massacre and Colbert’s attempts to recover the historical narratives of the Black Americans who survived it are central to Black Birds in the Sky. Colbert reflects on the historical erasure of the facts, or even existence, of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Colbert’s historical analysis rests on a careful restoration of the truth of the event through the perspectives of the survivors and victims’ families.

Putting the pieces of the past together is challenging, especially as society worked tirelessly to bury the past. Colbert writes about Tulsa of the past:

It was still trying to establish itself in the United States, and a shameful event like the Greenwood massacre would only make people think that Tulsa was an unruly, violent, racist place to live. Political leaders and business owners didn’t want the story of the massacre hanging over them (169).

The history of Black Wall Street and its very existence, Colbert argues, were erased for the sake of white Tulsa’s reputation. White society was threatened by the perception of their past actions. The truth of Greenwood would damage their standing as a “civilized” city, so they worked tirelessly to bury that truth.

One example of this erasure is the lack of information about Greenwood in Oklahoma history curriculum. Colbert states, “Julian Hayter, a historian […], told NBC News that school curriculum ‘was never designed to be anything other than white supremacist, and it has been very difficult to convince people that other versions of history are not only worth telling’” (187). The point, Hayter argues, of history curriculum is to uphold the status quo and preserve the stories that the white majority wants to see preserved.

Colbert’s very book, then, challenges this precedent and pushes back against the normative ideals of what stories are worth recording and recovering. This is a challenge because, as she notes, “other than these few instances, the massacre largely remained lost to history” (172), the instances referring to the few and far between historical projects designed to research and rediscover the truth of Greenwood. Colbert situates her work, therefore, as the beginning of a greater and broader attempt to understand the impacts of the Tulsa Race Massacre on the survivors, their descendants, and the community as a whole while contextualizing the event within the broader scope of Black American history. In so doing, Colbert pushes back against the past erasures of Black historical narratives.

As Colbert details in the book, systemic racism played a significant role in the development of the economic disparities that made Greenwood such an anomaly in the United States in the 1920s. After the end of slavery, Black Americans struggled to find economic opportunity.

As Colbert illustrates, sharecropping was a common practice in the South after the abolition of the chattel slavery system. Both poor white people and poor Black people found themselves trapped in this unfair system. As Colbert notes, some poor white people

were so disillusioned that they began to associate with freed Black people; in reality, poor Southern white people often had more in common with Black Americans at the time than either of them did with the well-off white men who’d held the vast majority of political and economic power in the country since its inception (50).

Although some poor white people initially found common ground with Black Americans over their shared economic struggles, this soon shifted into fear and jealousy.

White people of all socioeconomic backgrounds soon felt that Black Americans did not deserve the same level of economic success as them. As Colbert notes: “Historians have identified a pattern in that the rioters would attack and loot the homes of successful Black people—business owners, real estate workers, and government employees” (79). In the riot in Springfield, Illinois, the white mob specifically targeted the houses of Black people who had made their own economic success in a community that sought to repress them. Racism, in this way, furthered economic disparities: If white society could not stop Black people from becoming successful (through sharecropping, lower wages, discrimination in the job market, etc.), they would harm and murder Black people when they found success. 

Tied to the socioeconomic basis for this violence, Colbert describes how material destruction is also consistent across all the racist violence against areas where successful Black Americans lived. Of the Springfield violence, Colbert writes: “Fire was used as a weapon, too; the structures the mob set ablaze amounted to nearly $375,000 worth of damages—the equivalent of several millions of dollars today—and destroyed the livelihood of the Black community” (75). Colbert foreshadows the fires that destroyed Greenwood in her description of the events in Illinois. Like in Greenwood, the violent white mob used fire to destroy the buildings in the Black community of Springfield, robbing countless families of their homes and successful business people of their ability to earn income. White people sought to create economic disparity between themselves and their Black neighbors, through either discriminatory measures or outright murderous violence. Through the examples of both Springfield and Tulsa, Colbert illustrates the devastating impact of racism on the economic standings of Black communities.