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 violence and includes mentions of sexual assault.

Racist violence has played an intense role in shaping American cities and communities. Colbert carefully traces the history of Black Americans in the United States. She explores the impact of slavery in the formation of Black communities and the continuation of the racist violence begun by the chattel slavery system. Black Americans were robbed of their human rights and freedom, viewed by white society as objects. Most enslaved persons during the height of slavery were kept on plantations and deprived of community outside of their immediate surroundings, subjected to cruel violence by enslavers and “slave patrols.”

Even after slavery was banned in the US, violence against Black people continued in the years after Reconstruction. Colbert writes, “Whatever the reason, violence and terrorism inflicted on Black Americans increased greatly in the years after Reconstruction—and no single organization was more responsible […] than the Ku Klux Klan” (53). The Reconstruction period offered some benefits for Black Americans, like the Freedmen’s Bureau that helped newly free Black Americans find economic opportunities and increased right to suffrage that allowed Black Americans to elect Black men to public office.