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 racially motivated violence.

Colbert carefully places the Tulsa Race Massacre in the broader historical context of racial violence and inequality in the United States. Racial inequality has existed in the United States since before the country’s genesis; Black Americans were first brought to the US against their will as part of the chattel slavery system that robbed them of their freedom and any semblance of human rights. Slavery was not directly addressed by the Constitution, but it did include the Three-fifths Compromise, which stated that, for the purposes of population counts for the House of Representatives, Black Americans enslaved in the South only counted as three-fifths of a person. Though the importation of enslaved persons was banned in 1808, those Black Americans already enslaved in the United States were not granted their freedom, nor were their children, who were born into slavery. 

Even after the Civil War, when the 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution officially abolished slavery in the United States, racial inequality persisted. Formerly enslaved Black Americans were given little economic opportunity; many were pushed into sharecropping, a practice by which Black Americans worked land that was owned by wealthier white people.