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

The Afterword makes clear the connection between the Tulsa Race Massacre and the contemporary political climate. She references her own writing of the book during 2020, noting the challenges of the pandemic and the chaos of Trump’s presidency and the presidential election. She then connects the past of Greenwood and the white mob’s violence with contemporary police brutality. She writes:

The murders of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Michael Brown in 2014, John Crawford in 2014, Tamir Rice in 2014, Eric Garner in 2014, Samuel DuBose in 2015, Freddie Gray in 2015, Sandra Bland in 2015, Walter Scott in 2015, Terence Crutcher in 2016, Alton Sterling in 2016, Philando Castile in 2016, Jordan Edwards in 2017, Stephon Clark in 2018, Elijah McClain in 2019, and Atatiana Jefferson in 2019 were well documented and protested. And yet the protests that emerged after Floyd’s death felt monumental (195).

In listing victims of police brutality (certainly not all the victims of police brutality during those years), Colbert draws attention to the prominence of racial violence and injustice that still pervades American society, while also putting names to the victims and making them more human. Colbert could have used statistics to make her point, putting numbers and percentages on the page. However, using the names of the victims centers their humanity, and the repetition of the names and years illustrates how massive the problem is, even 100 years after the destruction of Greenwood. By including a reflection on the contemporary dimensions of anti-Black racism in the US, Colbert anticipates and counteracts any reading of the massacre as an event that was only possible in the past, underscoring instead how many of the racist and white supremacist dynamics that led to the massacre still hold true today.

Colbert circles back to the connection to her life and her family’s life that she began in the Foreword. She asks:

How could my life, or my ancestors’ lives, have been different if just one of those events had turned out differently? What would this country look like if more Black people grew up being taught their history as much as they are taught the stories of white Americans? How would people interact with one another if white Americans learned early on that they are not the center of every story, or that their stories are not the only ones that matter? (202-03).

Placing these rhetorical questions at the very end of the book situates these ideas as the lingering conclusion. Colbert wants to encourage her audience to keep paying attention to Black history and to consider the implications of the past and its impact on the present. The impact on the present Colbert measures in human impact, as these questions and her references to contemporary victims and survivors of racist violence illustrate.