Black Birds in the Sky Quotes

“Since the founding of the United States, racists have felt threatened by laws meant to expand justice and equality—they see the legislation as a roadblock to their own success, rather than something that provides people with the human rights they’ve always deserved.”
― Brandy Colbert, Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

“While one could assume that the Tribune believed it was too soon to rehash the massacre, ten years later, in June 1946, the newspaper once again ignored the subject in its “Twenty-Five Years Ago” feature. Unfortunately, the Tribune wasn’t the only publication or entity that tried to bury the truth. The Oklahoma volume of the American Guide Series mentioned it in 1941 but devoted only one paragraph to the subject. History textbooks completely ignored the event—in fact, it was not included as part of the state’s public school curricula until 2000, nearly eighty years after the massacre. This resulted in near total erasure of what had happened in Greenwood, to the point that many people who moved to Tulsa after the massacre and even some born and raised there in the ensuing years, both Black and white, often knew nothing about it.”
― Brandy Colbert, Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

“Armed white civilians, the Tulsa police force, and the local National Guard were all working in tandem to disempower the Black Americans fighting for their lives. They ignored the armed white people who were injuring and killing innocent Black children and adults. They ignored the blind, disabled Black man being dragged behind a car down Main Street with a rope around what remained of his amputated leg. They ignored the arsonists setting fire to Black businesses and homes, and instead worked to round up the Black community, taking them to internment camps where they were imprisoned solely because they were Black (though officials later claimed this was for their own safety). Firefighters were threatened by armed white people when they attempted to put out the fires in Greenwood, despite the fact that the plumes of black smoke rising in the sky over the African American neighborhood could be seen from miles away.”
― Brandy Colbert, Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

“Black Americans first made their way to Oklahoma with the forced migration of the Five Tribes. Several of the tribes, though they themselves were oppressed by white colonizers, also enslaved Black people and brought them to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears.”
― Brandy Colbert, Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

“Black Americans first made their way to Oklahoma with the forced migration of the Five Tribes. Several of the tribes, though they themselves were oppressed by white colonizers, also enslaved Black people and brought”
― Brandy Colbert, Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

“The Indian Removal Act would force nearly fifty thousand Indigenous people to leave their homes and relocate to unsettled land in the West so that their more desirable land east of the Mississippi could be given to white people.”
― Brandy Colbert, Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

“I had always heard that modern day police departments were rooted in slave patrols, yet I was still surprised by the clear connection in my research. Many, many police officers set out, each day, to do their job of protecting the people they serve and would never think of shooting, let alone killing, an unarmed person simply because the sight of black or brown skin made them fear for their lives.

But it's hard to divorce the way in which slave patrols in the south targeted black people before slavery was abolished from the way in which police departments, their reorganized reincarnations, did afterward. To these forces, black people were always the enemy- a community to be tamed, whose mere existence presents a threat to the maintenance of the status quo. And those ideals have clearly persisted through generations of law enforcement who failed to see black people as free, equal, and worthy of living their lives unbothered.”
― Brandy Colbert, Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre