By Nicole Chavez, CNN
(CNN)When Alaina E. Roberts started piecing her family’s history together she made a surprising discovery that changed what it meant to be a Black American.Her father’s ancestors in Oklahoma were once enslaved by Native Americans.Nearly a century before Tulsa’s Greenwood District became a beacon of Black prosperity in the 1920s, Native American tribes and thousands of enslaved Black people arrived in the state. Members of the Five Tribes — the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole — had been forced out of their homelands in the Deep South, leading to the exodus known as “Trail of Tears.””Owning slaves was a part of their strategy to assimilate into American society and it allowed them to be seen as different from other Native people and as more civilized,” said Roberts, an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh.
