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

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