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

 Shirley J.           Adult Non-Fiction         True events of the massacre that occurred in Tulsa, OK in 1921

Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre      224 pages

Brandy Colbert is a terrific author.   Her telling of the events that led up to the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 is compelling.  She is so adept, she carries you to the front lines and the horrors those poor people experienced.   The bottom line of causation - jealousy.    The black community had established itself and several successful black businesses were flourishing, black doctors and surgeons helped get the first black hospital built there, black real estate investors bought land and made it available for other black families to be able to rent, lease or buy their own homesteads.   The black community in Tulsa was flourishing.  Several well-to-do families had large lovely homes.  Then one day, a black man accidentally brushed the arm of a white woman who told authorities he had accosted her.  The story blew all out of proportion, as the tale went the gossip gamut around town it grew and became he assaulted her, then he raped her, then a woman was killed, then a family was killed.   The longer it went the worse it got until groups of whites starting forming and going in attacking innocent black people in their own homes or on the street.   Black doctors and educators, black veterans of WWI got together and brought their guns into town offering to help the sheriff protect the man taken into custody (who had accidentally brushed the white woman in passing).   The sheriff thanked them but told them no, he had it under control.  He didn't.   Though, to that point there hadn't been a lynching in Tulsa or the Oklahoma territory, talk was getting loud and aggressive toward that end.   The armed black men returned to the sheriff and offered their help a second time to which the sheriff told them again that no, he and his deputies had everything under control.  The first time there was a swarm of maybe 1,000 threatening to storm the jail.  The second time, there was a crowd of 10,000 or so and seeing the armed black men incited the white throng even more.  The massacre insued.  Whites killed black men, women and children.   They burned the black community to the ground with shouts and slurs denoting blacks hadn't the right to be better off than they (the whites) were.     Few survivors made it through that horrific ordeal.  Some mothers with young children managed to run out of town amidst bullets zinging all around them and escape to family/friends or kind hearted people in other towns who were compassionate regarding their situation.   A nightmare to live through and a historical fact seldom discussed even to this day.    This is an excellent book telling of man's inhumanity to man in an unbiased forum giving background on the times, the people and the events that led up to one of the bloodiest holocausts in United States history.     I recommend this book to middle schoolers on up so the whole history is told.