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

Thirty-nine Indigenous groups call Oklahoma home. After initially being part of the land gained by President Thomas Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Oklahoma became a state in 1907. However, despite its “purchase” by the US government, the land had already been settled by Indigenous people for millennia. The Clovis and Folsom cultures, the big game hunters, lived in what is now Oklahoma as early as 9500 BCE. The Archaic period followed, before the Southern Plains Villagers inhabited Central Oklahoma. They faced great losses in the 1500s, when violent European colonizers and their accompanying diseases reached them. Francesco Vazquez de Coronado of Spain claimed the land in 1541, despite the Indigenous peoples already living there. The French arrived in the 1700s and brought further conflict.

However, the greatest injustice, notes Colbert, was arguably at American hands, when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to the forced evacuation of many Native tribes from their lands. Though many tribes attempted to fight the legislation, including the Cherokee and Muscogee, they failed to stop the government from forcing them west to what was dubbed “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma. Countless Indigenous people died on the way as they suffered from disease, starvation, and fatigue. 

Tulsa was settled by the Muscogee, or Creek Nation, in the 1830s. They spread the ashes of the final fires of their homelands near the Arkansas River in a place that would eventually become Cheyenne Avenue, not far from the future Greenwood District. Tulsa was incorporated in 1898 but had been settled by the Perryman family 70 years earlier. Benjamin Perryman, whose mother was Muscogee and whose father was white, settled near Tulsa with his family and started a successful cattle ranch. His grandsons were similarly successful, one working in the cattle business, one becoming the first postmaster of Tulsa, and one serving as chief of the Muscogee nation. Much of the land that is now Tulsa was owned by the Perrymans, and descendants of his family remain in Tulsa to this day.

Land and settlement continued to be an issue even after the Indian Removal Act. In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Act. This act allowed the government to take tribal land and separate it into individual parcels for settlement. This was done under the guise of preserving land for Indigenous peoples, but Colbert explains that, in fact, it served to break up tribal ownership and allow more white people to settle west.

In 1889, President Benjamin Harris declared that the 1.9 million acres of former “Indian Territory” would become open to settlers at noon on April 22. Thousands of people crowded the land waiting for noon. The government hosted six more of these land runs in Oklahoma. Much of the land went to white settlers, though Colbert mentions that Nanitta Daisy, a Black woman, also benefited from the acquisition of land.

The discovery of oil beneath the Oklahoma land greatly increased its value. Lewis Ross, brother of Cherokee chief John Ross, found oil in 1859 while drilling a well. Soon, oil companies began to drill commercially in Oklahoma. The real boom began in 1889, when a railroad connected Bartlesville, the home of the Phillips Petroleum Company, with the rest of the US. Thousands came to the town and the town produced millions of barrels of oil. 

After the oil boom, the white settlers began to push for statehood. Oklahoma was divided into “Indian Territory” and Oklahoma Territory. The tribes living in “Indian Territory” struggled to agree on how to engage with the US government; they initially wanted to become their own state called Sequoyah, but Congress banned tribal courts and squashed that ambition, making all tribal laws subject to presidential approval. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Oklahoma Enabling Act into law, which united the two territories. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state.

Even before statehood, however, Oklahoma had enacted Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws were named for the character in minstrel shows played by a white man in blackface who mocked Black culture. The laws segregated everything from schools to phone booths, demonstrating how Oklahoma was “intolerant of the mere existence of Black Americans” (36).

Black Americans first arrived in Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, enslaved by the Native tribes who practiced slavery despite their own oppression by the white-dominated US government. In 1842, enslaved people revolted in Webbers Falls, Oklahoma, at the Joseph Vann plantation. They locked up the plantation owners and overseers and took the necessary materials for their journey to freedom in Mexico, stopping along the way to help more enslaved people in Muscogee nation. They encountered Cherokee and Muscogee pursuers and “slave hunters” in the Chocktaw nation. Though they managed to stay on the run for two weeks, the Cherokee Nation raised a militia to retrieve them.

After the Civil War, the enslaved people were freed and Indigenous groups were required to offer land to the newly freed Black Americans. Black Americans then started their own businesses and gained their own land, often participating in land runs and forming all-Black towns. These towns were not rare, and by 1920 there were over 50 all-Black towns in Oklahoma. These towns offered not only greater opportunities for Black Americans, but also comfort and safety from racist violence. These towns began to die out after white Americans, threatened by Black Americans’ growing prosperity and independence, began to ban them from leasing land, working in their counties, or taking out loans. Despite these setbacks, says Colbert, Black Americans continued to both “survive” and “thrive” (40).

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all enslaved people in Confederate states. This piece of legislature was merely symbolic, as the Confederate states had already seceded from the Union and no longer followed their laws. While Lincoln himself hated slavery, his primary goal was to preserve the Union, not abolish slavery. Despite this, many Black Americans enlisted in the Union army after the passing of the proclamation. Lincoln then worked to pass the 13^th Amendment, which formally abolished slavery in the whole of the United States.

At the end of the war, Lincoln was assassinated and replaced by Andrew Johnson, a former enslaver. Lincoln had proposed a plan for Reconstruction, the 10% plan, which required only 10% of former Confederate citizens to swear allegiance to the Union and pardoned all Southerners but the top Confederate leadership. Radical Republicans found Lincoln’s plan too lenient and wanted to incorporate harsher punishment for the South and greater protections for Black Americans now living in the South.

Johnson was not an advocate for Black Americans or harsh on the South, however. He fought Congress on Radical Reconstruction, but Congress managed to pass a number of pieces of legislation consistent with Radical Reconstruction ideals. For example, Congress sent federal troops to the Southern states to rule with martial law. They revised all rebel state constitutions with white and Black delegates. Last, they committed to Black suffrage and forced any state seeking readmittance to the Union to ratify the 14^th Amendment. Congress then passed the 15^th Amendment, which granted universal Black male suffrage, opening the door for Black men to enter the political realm. 

By 1877, there were 2,000 Black Americans elected to local, state, and federal political offices in formerly rebel states, which helped with dismantling the Black Codes that sought to limit the rights of Black Americans. Proslavery white Southerners found this enraging and sought to reverse the steps made by these Black politicians. Democrats in the South found their way around the 15^th Amendment, instituting measures that curtailed Black people’s civil rights. These measures included grandfather clauses, which dictated that a person could only vote if their grandfather had the right to vote, literacy tests that required that the voter prove that they knew how to read, and poll taxes that required payment in order to vote. The right to vote was also linked to the ability to serve on a jury, which further marginalized Black Americans as they could not be represented by a jury of their peers.

So, as quickly as progress had been made during Reconstruction, it backslid, with Andrew Johnson failing to uphold the Reconstruction Acts, Democrats working to further oppress Black Southerners, and the new President Rutherford B. Hayes pulling federal troops out of the South, which allowed racist violence against Black Americans to skyrocket. 

In Oklahoma, A. C. Hamlin became the first Black American elected to the state legislature in 1908. The grandson of enslaved people, he worked tirelessly to create and pass legislation that helped Black Americans and other marginalized groups like the Deaf, Blind, and orphaned. Threatened by his popularity and the rising power of Black Americans, white politicians created the Voter Registration Act of 1910, which required a grandfather clause and a literacy test, except for those who could vote prior to January 1866, before the passing of the 15^th Amendment. Hamlin was not reelected in 1910, as many of his voters had lost their right of suffrage. The Voter Registration Act was overturned in the Supreme Court in 1915, but Hamlin died in 1912.

Post-Reconstruction, violence against Black Americans increased drastically as a result of heightened tensions and growing white fears of Black Americans’ freedom and equality. The Ku Klux Klan, or KKK, was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, immediately after the end of the Civil War as a “social club” for those angry about Black people’s new freedoms (53). The KKK quickly spread branches to most of the former rebel states. Congress passed three acts to try to suppress it, leading to the dissolution of the KKK in the 1870s, toward the end of Reconstruction.

A few decades later, the KKK reemerged with the popularity of the film The Birth of a Nation, which depicted KKK members as “heroes” who were “protecting” white women from Black men (54). The film was even screened in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. In 1915, the Klan burned a wooden cross, one of their symbols of terror, atop Georgia’s Stone Mountain, announcing their return. They began to garner new members across the whole of the United States, with members even holding important political offices. They also turned their ire not just at Black Americans, but on Jewish and Catholic Americans, too.

In 1921, there were over 3,200 official KKK members in Tulsa alone. Given that the KKK was a known terrorist organization, Colbert questions why the police were not more active in their suppression. She notes that the first police forces in the South were formed to capture fugitives from slavery, arguing that this history might explain why the police were not involved in suppressing the KKK, oftentimes even oppressing Black Americans themselves and working in tandem with the KKK to inflict even greater systemic violence upon the Black community. 

A symbol commonly associated with the Klan is the noose, as they frequently lynched innocent people. Colbert observes that, while anyone could be at risk for mob vigilante violence, Black Americans in the South were at an extremely high risk as white mobs used lynching as a means to terrorize and subjugate the Black communities around them. Before Oklahoma became a state, most of the people lynched were white men accused of a variety of crimes from train robbery to gambling. However, after Oklahoma became a state and Jim Crow laws gained a foothold, nearly all the lynching victims were Black Americans.

Black men in particular were often falsely accused of sexual assault, rape, and murder, crimes that often inspired lynch mobs to take “justice” into their own hands. Some of these false accusations came from innocent interactions, like the one between Rowland and Page in the elevator in Tulsa in 1921, and some false accusations came from consensual sexual relationships between white women and Black men, as white society could not cope with the idea of a white woman truly desiring a Black man in a romantic or sexual way.

In addition, in some states like Louisiana, white women were the only women protected by law against rape, and any Black man even accused of rape was to be executed. In June 1920, six young Black men were accused of rape by a white couple in Duluth, Minnesota. A physician declared the woman showed no signs of sexual assault, but the men were incarcerated anyway. Newspaper fanned the flames of the incident and false rumors spread that the woman had died from the assault, leading a lynch mob of thousands of people to break into the jail and brutally beat and hang three of the accused men: Isaac McGhie, Elmer Jackson, and Elias Clayton. The other three men were moved by the National Guard, and no one from the lynch mob was ever charged with a crime. Ida B. Wells, a Black journalist, frequently campaigned against lynching, even as white mobs threatened to lynch her. 

In Oklahoma, 147 people were lynched between 1885 and 1930. In 1920, three violent events set the stage for the violence of 1921. Firstly, white taxi driver Homer Nida was shot by three passengers, two white men and a woman. Before he died, he identified Roy Belton as the man who shot him. Belton was taken to jail, but a lynch mob broke in and hung him just outside city limits. The Black community of Tulsa was jarred by this violence, concerned that if this violence could happen to a white man, it could very easily happen to them. Just a day later, a Black man was lynched in Oklahoma City for making moonshine. Six months later, in December, another Black man was lynched in Hughes County for allegedly raping an elderly white woman, despite the lack of evidence connecting him to the crime.

Two years prior to the Tulsa Massacre, a series of race riots rocked the United States. NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson dubbed these riots the “Red Summer” (69). The riots were often organized acts of violence carried out by white mobs against Black Americans, and Colbert notes that historical narratives often refer to these events as riots instead of acknowledging them as unprovoked attacks again Black Americans.

With the Great Migration of many Black Americans to the North and West in pursuit of industrial work opportunities between 1915 and 1970, the number of Black Americans in cities in the US greatly increased. Colbert observes that, although the South has the greatest reputation for racism, Black Americans still faced discrimination and racist violence in the North.

Next, Colbert describes how, during World War I (WWI), there was a labor shortage as men were shipped off to war, leading to greater work opportunities for Black Americans in cities. The war was also another opportunity for Black men to get involved in the armed forces. Though most Black soldiers were assigned to labor-intensive service units, there were some units that faced combat and received numerous medals and accolades for their service (such as the Buffalo Soldiers, the Harlem Hellfighters, and the Black Devils). Despite their dedication to their country, the Black soldiers still faced segregation: They were forced to sleep in tents outside the barracks and were treated more poorly than their white counterparts. Colbert adds that, during this time, Black women were also integral to the war effort, raising money for the war effort and offering support to the Black soldiers. 

The first big race riot of the WWI era occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois, in July of 1917. Tensions were already rising due to the Great Migration, and these tensions came to a head when the white workers of Aluminum Ore Company went on strike and were replaced with Black workers willing to work. The angered white workers began lodging false or exaggerated complaints about the Black workers in May. When one Black man was accused of pulling a gun on a white man during a robbery, mobs began indiscriminately beating Black Americans in the street, even carrying out drive-by shootings on Black businesses and neighborhoods. The violence continued to escalate as more false claims were made, especially accusations of rape.

The National Guard were called in to restore order, but left in June. After white men in a Model T did a drive-by shooting of the homes in a Black neighborhood, Black people shot at another Model T, assuming it was the assailants. It was in fact undercover police, which inspired white mob violence against the entire Black community, leaving at least 39, but possibly up to 100, Black people dead, including women and children. Hundreds more were viciously beaten and much of the Black community was destroyed.

This violence, along with the increase in lynchings in Memphis and Waco, inspired the NAACP to host the Negro Silent Protest Parade on July 28, 1917, in New York City. The NAACP was founded in response to a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908. A Black man was falsely accused of rape by a white woman, and a mob gathered in front of the jail to attempt to lynch him and another Black man accused of murdering a white railway engineer. The Springfield police had snuck them out earlier to avoid the possibility of a mob. Angered by this, the mob smashed the car of the white man who helped move the Black men, destroyed the Black business district in downtown Springfield, and lynched two innocent Black men. The violence continued for weeks, and by the end six people were dead (four white, two Black), dozens more were injured, and the houses of 40 Black families had been burned down.

In response, a group of white people organized a meeting to address this violence, which white and Black people attended, including notable activists W. E. B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell. This meeting gave birth to the NAACP. DuBois was the only Black person on the original NAACP Board of Directors. He helped publicize the organization through several publications, including the Crisis journal and the Brownie’s Book for children. The NAACP would help with several notable Supreme Court decisions, including the one that overturned the Oklahoma grandfather voting clause. 

After the war, concerns grew among white people about Black Americans “taking” their jobs and about Black American gun ownership. Colbert notes that there is a long history of white fear about Black people owning guns that dates back to the Civil War, when Black veterans were allowed to take their rifles home. Many states’ Black Codes had rules prohibiting Black gun ownership and even had police confiscate guns from veterans returning from war. In other areas, the KKK would go through Black communities and steal any guns they found. After WWI, politicians were concerned about Black veterans; they worried they would want the same level of equal treatment they had during the war, and that if they did not get it they would use their guns to rebel.

Upon returning from the war, the Black veterans were treated badly, and many were even lynched. If they dared to speak out about the injustice of their treatment after their service to their country, they were jailed, discharged, or murdered. Lynchings increased across the United States as tensions from the war and the Great Migration escalated, and at least 13 Black veterans were lynched. 

In July 1919, a white woman in Washington, DC, accused two Black men of accosting her on her walk home. Charles Ralls was questioned and released, but the woman’s husband led a mob to his Ralls’s home to attack him, his wife, and his neighbors. For another four days, the mob continued attacking any Black people they could find.

Similarly, Colbert describes an incident in the South Side of Chicago in which Eugene Williams, a Black teenager, drifted on his raft to the white side of the unofficially segregated beach he was visiting. A white man pelted him with a rock, causing him to fall off his raft and drown. Violence erupted as a result of Williams’ death and the police’s refusal to arrest the white man who killed him. In the end, 38 people were dead (23 Black, 15 white) and over 1,000 Black families’ homes were burned to the ground.

1919 was a violent year, but arguably the worst violence occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, where Colbert’s ancestors were from. As sharecropping was still a common practice in 20th-century Arkansas, many Black people in Elaine found themselves trapped in the cycle of sharecropping. In a meeting of the Progressive Farmers Union, the Black sharecroppers banded together in a church to discuss demanding fairer treatment and compensation. During the meeting, white farmers shot into the church, and the guards from the union fired back, killing one white man and injuring a deputy sheriff. Rumors then spread that the Black sharecroppers were planning an uprising against the farmers of Phillips County, so the governor sent troops to “round up” the “heavily armed” Black Americans (87).

On October 2, the troops and a mob of angry white people murdered at least 200 Black people, including men, women, and children. On October 7, the troops left, but 122 Black people were arrested for a number of charges. Twelve men in particular were tried for murder and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. These men were dubbed the Elaine 12. The NAACP worked tirelessly for years to free the Elaine 12, and they were all acquitted by 1925. In closing, Colbert writes that the fear drove the heinous massacre was the same fear that would soon spread to Tulsa.