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

Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is a 2021 nonfiction history book by author and journalist Brandy Colbert. The book won the 2022 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the American Library Association’s Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award. Colbert has written both fiction and nonfiction, including the novels Pointe (2014), The Voting Booth (2020), Finding Yvonne (2018), The Revolution of Birdie Randolph (2019), The Only Black Girls in Town (2020), Little & Lion (2017), and The Blackwoods (2023). Colbert writes primarily for children and teens, and Black Birds in the Sky is aimed at a young adult audience. Her writing has been featured in publications such as the New York Times and numerous anthologies and collections geared toward young adult audiences. Colbert is a faculty member at the Hamline MFA program for writing for children and young adults. Growing up in Springfield, Missouri, with relatives living near Tulsa, Oklahoma, Colbert has a unique and personal connection to the events that she meticulously researches and explores in the text.

This guide refers to the 2021 HarperCollins Kindle e-book edition of Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. 

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss racism and violence and include mentions of sexual assault.

Summary

Colbert opens with a reflection on her own childhood in Springfield, Missouri; specifically, she meditates on her experience as one of the few, if not the only, Black students in her elementary school classrooms. She experienced numerous microaggressions from her non-Black classmates, but the experience that she struggled with most was learning about Black history. The curriculum in Missouri during her childhood and adolescence in the 1980s and 1990s was merely one week about the history of slavery in the US, without any real depth into the humanity of enslaved people, followed by virtually nothing about the Reconstruction period. The civil rights unit was brief, containing only sanitized versions of the activism of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. During these history lessons, the white teachers and students would stare at Colbert, making her feel even more alienated due to her race.

She then dives into the racist history of the horrific lynching that took place in Springfield in the early 1900s and drove many of the Black people to leave the city. She then introduces the massacre that took place in Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the subject of her book. 

Colbert breaks up the denser, historical chapters with sections describing the events leading up to and taking place during the Tulsa Race Massacre. The massacre took place in Greenwood, also known as Black Wall Street, an affluent, thriving Black community built by Black business men like O. W. Gurley and J. B. Stradford. On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a Greenwood resident and Black man working in a shoe shine parlor, went to use an elevator operated by Sarah Page, a white woman, in a building across the street from his work to use the segregated bathroom. He tripped, grabbing Page, which caused her to scream. When a store clerk saw him leaving quickly, he assumed that Rowland had attempted to rape Page and called the police. Rowland was then wanted for a crime that did not happen.

He returned home to his adopted mother, Damie Ford, that night. When he left the house the next day, on May 31, he was arrested by the police and held in the Tulsa jail. However, threats of a lynching developed from the white Tulsa community, especially as the Tulsa Tribune printed incendiary stories about the alleged crime. Fearful of a lynch mob, the sheriff moved Rowland to the top floor of the courthouse. Still, a white lynch mob formed and threatened to kill Rowland. After arming themselves, a group of Black men from the Greenwood District, or Black Wall Street, gathered to attempt to help defend Rowland. This further angered the white mob, who then armed themselves with their own guns and guns looted from stores in Tulsa.

After midnight, violence erupted as a white man tried to take a gun away from one of the Black men trying to defend Rowland and shots rang out. Chaos reigned in Tulsa as the white mob attempted to harm or murder any Black Tulsans they saw. The mob also burned down and looted many of the buildings in Greenwood, even flying planes low enough to throw bombs and sticks of dynamite down onto the buildings and the streets where Black Greenwood residents were attempting to escape the violence. The police and National Guard did little to stop the white mob, with the police even granting temporary deputyship to hundreds of white men, members of the mob, who were then sanctioned by the law to harm more Black people.

The violence and destruction continued into the morning of June 1, when the National Guard finally sent enough reinforcements to impose martial law and stop the mob from terrorizing Greenwood. The survivors of the massacre were taken to internment camps at the Convention Center and the fairgrounds, camps many of them were kept in until a white person could “vouch” for them and grant them a “green card” for their freedom. The Red Cross, along with help from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other organizations, worked to help provide medical care to the injured Black Americans harmed by the mob’s violence. The rebuilding of Greenwood took years, while the government and white society suppressed the history of the event for decades. 

In the midst of Colbert’s depiction of the heinous events of May 30 and June 1, 1921, she diligently incorporates the history of Oklahoma within the context of racial inequality. She introduces the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the following Trail of Tears that forced numerous tribes of Indigenous peoples from their land and homes and killed many innocent people due to exhaustion, fatigue, malnutrition, and disease. Colbert explains how Oklahoma was initially referred to as “Indian Territory,” but as white people began to move westward, the government found ways, through legislation such as the Dawes Act of 1887, to offer land in Oklahoma to white settlers. Land runs, in which the government allowed settlers to freely take land in certain areas at certain times, further encroached into the territory that the government had previously promised to certain Indigenous tribes. As more and more white settlers moved into Oklahoma, they began to rally for statehood. Even before statehood was finalized, the government of Oklahoma implemented Jim Crow laws to segregate people of color, but especially Black Americans. 

Colbert expands her historical lens to further evaluate the impact of racist inequality in the United States more broadly. She examines the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the violent practice of lynching after the end of the Reconstruction period that followed the conclusion of the Civil War. Colbert dissects the term “race riot,” which typically meant violence by a white mob against Black communities, and presents other examples of such “riots” from Illinois to Washington, DC.

Colbert then describes the genesis of Greenwood and the meticulous efforts made by Gurley and Stradford to establish a community where Black people could both live and thrive, starting their own businesses and participating in careers in fields that white society fought to keep them out of, like medicine, law, journalism, architecture, and more. As Greenwood began to grow and thrive, jealousy brewed in the white community as white supremacist beliefs gave white people the notion that Black Americans did not deserve the same opportunities or success as white people. This jealousy transformed into anger, anger that motivated the hateful and bigoted violence of the massacre. 

After the description of the massacre, Colbert examines the impact of the aftermath and its historical implications. She explores how it took years to rebuild Greenwood, as white society attempted to put more and more roadblocks in the way of the Black Tulsans trying to put their community back together. All the while, white society also worked to hide the painful history of the massacre. The history of the massacre was buried: It was omitted from school curricula, avoided in public conversations, and kept out of publications including newspapers and magazines. Steps have been made to uncover the truth and make reparations, but Colbert argues there is still more to be done to truly atone for the violence of the massacre.

In the Afterword, Colbert finishes with a meditation on the process of writing the book in 2020, a year in which protests proliferated in response to the continuing violence against Black Americans after the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. Colbert connects the Black Lives Matter movement to the history of violence against Black Americans and emphasizes the importance of understanding history and working to expose the pieces of history that have been buried, no matter how painful or traumatic they may be.