Black
Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
Brandy Colbert
At my community college, I had the good fortune to take a
class in African American History from the head of the NAACP back
in the early nineteen-nineties. What was taught in those classes was largely
glossed over in American history books. If you’re not very aware of this part
of our country’s history, this is an excellent introduction. It doesn’t just
cover the Tulsa Race Massacre. As Colbert tells the story, she often backtracks
to give us all the influences. The information in this post doesn't even begin to outline everything she includes. I personally might have a preferred a slightly
more chronological format, but her writing style is good in every section, and
the information is extremely thorough.
Colbert breaks the book up into three sections – May 30, 1921,
May 31, 1921, and June 1, 1921, but within those sections she gives us a very
thorough grounding in the history of race relations in the area, the history of
Greenwood, the neighborhood of Tulsa where the destruction took place, and so
much more.
The forward is an engaging personal essay about the author’s
own experience growing up in a predominantly white Missouri town, her family,
and how she came to learn about the events related in the book.
“This history is painful. It angers me. It hurts to see just
how many ways my life and my ancestors’ lives have been affected by white
supremacy. But I am grateful for historians, social justice activists, and
politicians who have made it their mission to ensure this history will no
longer be buried. I am grateful for educators who continue to do the difficult
work of teaching their students the complicated, sometimes brutal history of
this country’s past.”
She begins the book with May 30, 1921 and the events that occurred.
Dick Rowland was a young man, just nineteen, who worked in a shoeshine parlor.
He went into the building and got onto the elevator to go to the floor with the
segregated bathroom for black people.
“The police later determined that Rowland tripped while
entering the elevator, reached out, and caught Page’s arm for balance, causing
her to scream out in surprise.”
That scream led to a series of assumptions and
misunderstandings by others during a tense time, and a warrant was issued for
Dick Rowland.
The author takes a step back and gives us the picture of how
Oklahoma came to be populated by the peoples of that time, including laws that
forced the Native Americans to be relocated there and the end of slavery. It
was a complex history of politics, land runs to settle the land that had been
taken from other tribes, Jim Crow laws, segregation laws, and the forced
migrations of the Five Tribes of Oklahoma.
Then she goes into what it meant “To Be Black in America” at
that point in time. One of the best illustrations of the disparity is how
President Johnson in 1866 wrote a letter that stated, “This is a country for
white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for
white men,” while the congress drafted the Reconstruction Acts of 1867-68 which
required “rebel states to ratify the fourteenth Amendment before they were
readmitted to the Union.” This gave everyone born in the country equal rights
before the law.
“President Johnson is surely a mascot for the failure of
Reconstruction; his racism and refusal to hold states accountable only served
to undermine the tireless efforts of Congress.”
Colbert takes us through the history of the KKK and how they
were often intertwined with the police membership. “…while it may seem shocking
that the KKK was allowed to terrorize and murder with abandon, in fact their
actions were sometimes approved of or even carried out by police officers
themselves….”
Interestingly, Colbert lays a lot of blame for attitudes about
Black men in the early nineteen hundreds at the feet of the silent film, Birth of a Nation. I found an
interesting review of it that Roger Ebert did which elucidates just how the
movie promoted racism and then revealed it without even intending to do so. It
goes hand in hand with the prevailing attitudes of the day. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-birth-of-a-nation-1915
Colbert says, “The allegations against Black men in particular
were often sexual assault, rape, or murder. However, many if not most of these
claims were false and used as an excuse to justify the lynchings by vengeful
white supremacists. The accusations were often born out of a completely innocent
interaction, such as a fleeting look or accidental touch….” She also points out
that at times the relationships were consensual but secret too.
“Three violent events
that took place in Oklahoma in 1920 may have been clues as to what was in store
for Tulsa just a year later.”
The first was the lynching, by a mob of a thousand, of a young
white man who had murdered a white taxi driver. The police did not try to stop
it, and spectators took pieces of clothing and rope as souvenirs. The police
chief even said of the incident, “It was an object lesson the hijackers and
auto thieves, and I believe it will be taken as such.”
The very next day a young Black man named Claude Chandler was
lynched in Oklahoma City, a hundred miles away. Then, six months later, there
was another lynching of a Black man.
It seemed like mob violence was on the rise. It reminds me of
Malcolm Gladwell’s book about “the tipping point” in relation to school
violence. Once people see it as an option, the flood gates are open. How can it
be stopped? Not easily. Was something similar at play there?
It made me wonder - what stopped lynchings? That question brought me to an article from
the NAACP https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-lynching-america
which asserts that while lynchings have waned due to activism of people like
Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the NAACP themselves, they have not stopped. (If you
do go to the web page, be aware that there are graphic and disturbing images.)
The author touches on Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Colbert includes
a wonderful portrait photograph that captures so much about Wells – there’s
confidence, pride, intelligence, a sense of humor, and a sense of
forthrightness. Colbert explains that she was an anti-lynching activist, a
teacher, a newspaper publisher, founded the National Association of Colored
Women, and cofounded the national Association for the Advancement of Colored
People. I consider her a true hero worth emulating.
Lynchings and race riots seemed to go hand in hand too. “Two
years before the Tulsa massacre, the United States was host to more than three
dozen so-called race riots – a collection of events that would come to be known
as the Red Summer….”
“…race riots were often coordinated attacks against Black
communities by white mobs who felt they needed to take justice into their own
hands for perceived or fabricated offenses. When Black people fought back to
defend themselves, the story was often twisted and called a riot, rather than
the blatant attacks that they were.”
Colbert delves into the Black Americans participation in World
War I as soldiers, which had a direct bearing on the heightening racial
tensions as returning soldiers were allowed to keep their guns though the
places they were returning to didn’t always recognize that right. Soldiers were
often met at the train stations and required to give up their guns.
Finally we return to Dick Rowland and the events leading up to
the Tulsa Race Massacre. After the accident on the elevator, Dick went home to
his mother’s boardinghouse. The police didn’t come for him until he returned to
work the next day. Soon the police received death threats regarding Rowland. A
mob of 300 came for Dick Rowland, but Sheriff McCullough wouldn’t let them have
him.
The mob would not disperse and soon a small group of armed
Black men showed up to help protect him. They were turned away but just seeing
them further incited the mob and they went to the armory. The National Guard
fought off the mob, but the mob continued to grow, reportedly to 2,000 men. A
white man attempted to take a Black veteran’s gun away and a shot rang out. A
shootout was sparked. The Tulsa police
force swore in four to five hundred men as “special deputies” to keep the
peace.
“War had been declared on any and every Black person in
Tulsa.”
And here, the author does it again, she backtracks to give us
the history at one of the most fraught moments in the story. It is good
information and well told. It really sets the scene for how much is going to be
lost for the people in the Greenwood district, but I wish she’d done it before
she got back into the narrative! In fact, I thought it would have been a great
beginning to the book.
Greenwood was a thriving community with a hospital, a library,
two schools, two newspapers, two theaters, three fraternal organizations, five
hotels, eleven boardinghouses, and a dozen churches – all run by Black people.
“Black people had created Greenwood out of necessity; owning,
operating, and supporting Black businesses was their only path to living the
full, unbothered lives that white people were allowed to live while not
violating the strict Jim Crow laws that ruled the state.”
This is an incredibly detailed recounting of the societal
conditions and now the author delves into newspapers, very thoroughly, their
importance and their place in the fomenting of the situation.
At last we return to the events of the night. There are
reports that a mob is coming and there is a shootout across the railroad tracks
that separate the two communities. The Tulsa National Guard attempts to call
for help but it is not forthcoming. “The fires started at around 1:00 a.m.”
Some Black Tulsans tried to flee with their families. Many
didn’t survive.
At daybreak, “hordes of white people with guns stormed across
the railroad tracks and into Greenwood.” A machine gun on top of a building
fired into the district. Attorney B.C. Franklin witnessed airplanes and saw
buildings begin to burn from the tops.
Many of the people in the community did not trust banks and
kept their money hidden at home, meaning those that survived truly lost
everything in the ransacking and fires.
It was a horrific day. People were rounded up by the mobs and
put in internment camps if they weren’t killed outright. Some white people did
step up to hide black people from the mobs, but many were involved in the
violence and looting. Finally, the state troops declared martial law and began
disarming white people. At 8 pm that night it was over.
The American Red Cross was called in for relief efforts and
declared it a disaster, allowing for the organization to act quickly, but many were kept in the internment camps until a white person vouched for them, instead of being allowed to check on their own homes.
“Some city officials later claimed that ‘all those who were
killed were given decent burials,’ but for years, Black and white Tulsans alike
have maintained that the city has a substantial number of mass graves holding
massacre victims.”
101 Years After Tulsa Race Massacre, Lab
Tries To Identify Human Remains
January
13, 2022
In the month after the massacre, a grand jury was assembled, and “colored men” were blamed emphatically. “There was no mob spirit among the whites, no talk of lynching and no arms,” the report read. History and research have thoroughly disproven that report.
“The Tulsa Race Massacre seemed to be
over as quickly as it had begun….”
In 2001, the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 released a report recommending a series of reparations initiatives for survivors and descendants of the massacre. https://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf Most of the recommendations were not implemented.
This book is very readable and a good place to start if you are just learning what you might have missed in your history lessons. I highly recommend it.
