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

Colbert reflects on her education in a predominantly white Missouri town. In fourth grade, her history teacher covered a unit on slavery, which Colbert dreaded. Colbert experienced myriad microaggressions from her classmates in elementary school in the 1980s, ranging from comments about the texture of her hair to jokes that their summer tans were nearly as dark as her natural skin, as well as additional instances that she does not name.

Though all of history class was repetitive and boring, the unit on slavery was “excruciating” for Colbert (1). The teachers did not treat the enslaved people as real people with feelings and hopes and complexity, and they always stared at Colbert, as did her classmates, during these lessons. The lesson on slavery lasted merely a week, Reconstruction was glossed over almost entirely, and the lesson on the civil rights movement was a “sanitized” rendition of the biographies of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., without any mention of other activists like Stokely Carmichael, Fannie Lou Hamer, or John Lewis (2). The curriculum completely omitted the Trail of Tears, which ran through Colbert’s hometown. She does not blame the teachers themselves for the curriculum, but she does wonder why not a single history teacher was willing to break free of the script and share a more honest perspective on the history of the United States. 

Colbert grew up in Springfield, Missouri, a town that was only 3% Black during Colbert’s childhood in the 1980s and 1990s. She was often the only Black student in her classes and rarely saw other Black people in Springfield. Her parents grew up in Jim Crow-era Arkansas, merely 30 minutes away from Elaine, a town that saw an event of horrific racial violence in 1919. After this event, some of Colbert’s ancestors migrated away from Elaine.

Both her parents grew up in poor farming families with many siblings. Her father worked at an electronics company when they moved to Springfield and had to have his white supervisor cosign for their apartment because they would not rent it to a Black couple otherwise. When they later moved to the house Colbert grew up in, they were the first Black family on the street. Colbert did not know why Springfield was so white until she was living in LA, when she first read about the 1906 triple lynching in Springfield, a horrific act of violence in which a white mob brutally murdered two Black men, Horace B. Duncan and Fred Coker—who were falsely accused of rape by a white couple, despite the fact that the men had alibis from their employer—and a man, Will Allen, who was accused of killing a white man. After the mob violence, many Black people left Springfield to settle elsewhere.

Colbert compares Springfield to Tulsa, a town where she had felt somewhat safe as a Black person, but a town that also faced an episode of intense and racially motivated violence that is the subject of Colbert’s historical research and analysis: the Tulsa Race Massacre.