Native Americans weren't alone on the Trail of Tears. Enslaved Africans were, too

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."