Tulsa digs again at cemetery for 1921 race massacre victims

TULSA, Okla. — A second excavation begins Monday in an effort to find and identify victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

The violence happened on May 31 and June 1 in 1921, when a white mob attacked Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, killing an estimated 300 people and wounding 800 more while robbing and burning businesses, homes and churches.

“People, they were just robbed, white people coming in saying Black people had better property than they had and that that was just not right,” said Phoebe Stubblefield, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Florida whose great-aunt Anna Walker Woods had her home burned and property taken. “Burning, thieving, killing wasn’t enough. They had to prevent Black people from recovering.

The locations to be searched are in Oaklawn Cemetery in north Tulsa, where a search for remains of victims ended without success in July, and near the Greenwood District where the massacre took place.

The earlier excavation was done in an area identified by ground-penetrating radar scans as appearing to be a human-dug pit indicative of a mass grave. It turned out be a filledin creek, said Mayor G.T. Bynum, who first proposed looking for victims of the violence in 2018 and later budgeted $100,000 to fund it after previous searches failed to find victims.

The massacre — which happened two years after what is known as the “Red Summer,” when hundreds of African Americans died at the hands of white mobs in violence around the U.S. — has been depicted in recent HBO shows “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft County.”

Bynum, 43, said he didn’t learn of the massacre until about 20 years ago during the mayoral campaign of his uncle Bill Lafortune, and his grandparents confirmed the events.

“That’s a very common thing in Tulsa. That’s how you learned about it, not through books or the media or in school,” Bynum said. “People didn’t start talking about this event in Tulsa until about 20 years ago.”

Bodies, if discovered, will not be disturbed, Bynum said. The excavation would stop, and investigators would “do what they need to do to identify them and determine a cause of death,” Bynum said.