Black Birds In the Sky by Brandy Colbert

In Black Birds In The Sky, Brandy Colbert describes the events leading up to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the aftermath of that tragedy on the Black community and America as a country.

The story begins with the events of May 30, 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Many stores and businesses were closed for the parade scheduled later that morning. However, the shoeshine business that employed nineteen-year-old Dick Rowland was open. Rowland had been born Jimmie Jones. His early life had been difficult as he and his three sisters were homeless and orphaned. He was eventually taken in by Damie Ford, a divorced black woman. Damie moved to Tulsa to be closer to her family, the Rowlands and to take advantage of the better job prospects in the booming city.

They eventually moved to the Greenwood District, a prosperous Black community that included many different Black professionals. These professionals supported one another and the Black community, with the area becoming so prosperous that it was given the nickname Black Wall Street. When Jimmie started elementary school, he took on the name of Dick Rowland. Initially a good student, Dick dropped out during high school and began working at a shoe shine business owned by a white man. 

On that May Memorial Day in 1921, Rowland needed to use the bathroom but because of the Jim Crow laws in place, he was required to use a "colored" bathroom. However, there were no "colored" washroom in the white shoe shine parlor so Rowland went to use the bathroom in the Drexel building, something he had done many times previously. When he went to step into the elevator, operated by a young white woman named Sarah page, it is believed Rowland tripped and grabbed her arm to steady himself. Page screamed in surprise and police were called by a clerk on the first floor who had heard her scream and saw Rowland leaving the building. Very quickly, Rowland became a suspect for attempted rape.

This event became the trigger for the what would become one of the most horrific acts of racial violence in America.

 Discussion

Black Birds In The Sky is the heartrending story of the race riot in 1921, that saw hundreds of Black Americans injured or killed and their thriving Black community in the Greenwood District almost completely destroyed, razed by fire and looted.

Brandy Colbert begins by describing the events that were to ignite the Tulsa Race Massacre on September 1, 1921, namely the alleged interaction between Dick Rowland and Sarah Page. From there she goes on to describe the history of the land that would eventually become the state of Oklahoma. Colbert begins with the early Indigenous peoples who lived on the Oklahoma land, the European colonizers who explored and fought over ownership of the lands, and the forced settlement of Indigenous peoples (the Five Tribes which included Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole) from their ancestral lands in the eastern and southern United States onto the lands of Oklahoma and Kansas. This history emphasizes the deceitful manner in which European settlers and the American government dealt with non-white peoples.

This deceit continued with the land runs in Oklahoma and Kansas. Now settled onto new lands, the Five Tribes were further subjected to traitorous land runs in which Americans and Europeans could simply claim "empty" land as their own. Colbert describes the land runs which also included the migration of Black people to Oklahoma land and their eventual re-settling into towns. Despite these new areas of the continent not having a history of slavery, racial discrimination and segregation became entrenched.  By the time Oklahoma entered the Union in 1907, Jim Crow laws which forced the segregation of Blacks, were already being enacted.

Colbert also describes what it was like to be Black in America during the post-Civil War period including the Fifteenth Amendment which allowed Black men to vote and saw the election of Blacks to political office, the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of the Klu Klux Klan, the connection of American policing to slave patrols in the pre-Civil War period, and the rise of vigilantism and lynching towards Black men who almost always assumed to be guilty of assault, rape or murder. 

The attitudes of white people towards Black Americans, even those who fought valiantly for America in World War I, was one of superiority and fear of  social change. White Americans believed that Black veterans would demand equality and would use their weapons to obtain it. As a result, white Americans used political and justice systems to re-instate a new kind of slavery, one that denied Blacks their rights even when the Supreme Court ruled in their favour.  

 

Before she recounts the events of the Tulsa Race riot, Colbert explains the history of the Greenwood District, its founders Ottowa W. Gurley and John the Baptist (J.B.) Stradford. "By 1921, Greenwood was home to a Black hospital, a Black public library, two Black schools, two Black newspapers, two theaters, three fraternal organizations, five hotels, eleven boardinghouses, and about a dozen churches." In Deep Greenwood, the commercial district, "...one could find just about anything they needed in Deep Greenwood, with reportedly six hundred businesses within its thirty-five city blocks by 1921." Colbert writes, "...Greenwood was beginning to resemble neighborhoods in big cities like Chicago and New York, with its doctors and attorneys, theaters and restaurants, booming real estate market, and millionaires in the making."

According to Colbert, Greenwood was unique among other Black communities. "While Black people were still being disenfranchised in the Southern states from which many Greenwood residents had migrated, Greenwood was absolutely thriving. The community's focus on businesses that were Black-owned, Black-operated, and patronized primarily by Black people meant that each dollar spent in Greenwood would circulate throughout the businesses and people there around thirty times; the wealth stayed in the community and continued to grow it."  This all made for a great deal of resentment by white Tulsans who believed the Black community had no right to such success and wealth. 

All of these factors came together on May 31, 1921, to create a terrible firestorm. From this point on Colbert describes the events of the riot and its aftermath. Not surprisingly, "Black people were blamed for the massacre and punished for crimes they did not commit" while "...no white people were ever imprisoned for the murders and property destruction over the eighteen hours they terrorized Greenwood." What is perhaps even worse, was the erasure of the Tulsa Race Massacre from public discourse and from social memory. It would be fifty years before someone would publish an article on the massacre, bringing the events of the past to light once again. Today Black Tulsans focus on achieving a resolution to this tragedy, something that remains challenging to date.

Colbert's account is detailed, interesting and connects the many facets of American history to show how the groundwork was laid for the massacre and how Americans simply refused to acknowledge the tragedy afterwards. Black Birds In The Sky is an important book in that regard, because it breaks that barrier of silence, informing a new generation and demonstrating the harm hatred does to people, communities and a nation.

The Afterword explores the parallels between the events of 1918 to 1921 with a pandemic and race riot and the events of 2020 with the U.S. Election, the killings of Black Americans by police, and the Covid pandemic. Colbert notes "...how many harmful elements of US politics and culture have endured despite the progress we have achieved." The back matter contains a detailed Source List and Image Credits as well as an Index.

Book Details:

Black Birds In The Sky by Brandy Colbert
New York: Balzer + Bray      2021
216 pp