Search for Tulsa Race Massacre victims wraps up

The latest search for remains of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has ended with 32 additional caskets discovered and eight sets of remains exhumed, according to the city.

The excavation and exhumations at Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery that began Oct. 26 ended Friday and the remains were sent to a nearby lab for analysis and DNA collection.

Searchers sought unmarked graves of people who were probably male, in plain caskets with signs of gunshot trauma — criteria for further investigation that were based on newspaper reports, said forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield.

Two sets of the 66 remains found in the past two years have been confirmed to have gunshot wounds, according to Stubblefield, though none have been identified or confirmed to be victims of the massacre.

DNA taken from 14 sets of the nearly three dozen remains found last year were sent to Intermountain Forensics in Salt Lake City for further study. DNA from teeth and thigh bones, known as femurs, will be extracted from the eight recently exhumed remains and also sent to Intermountain Forensics, Stubblefield said.

State archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck said 62 of the 66 burials found were in unmarked graves.

Investigators are looking for a possible mass grave of victims of the 1921 massacre at the hands of a white mob that descended on the Black section of Tulsa — Greenwood. More than 1,000 homes were burned, hundreds more were looted and destroyed and a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street was destroyed.

Most historians who have studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300. Historians say many of the victims were buried in unmarked graves, their locations never recorded, and rumors have persisted of mass graves.

Stackelbeck said the remains meeting the criteria for possible massacre victims and exhumed are not in a mass grave, but interspersed in the search area.

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said he considers the entire cemetery to be a mass grave.

“Is there a mass grave where there are people lined up in a row like we thought might be? That is not the case,” Bynum said. “Is Oaklawn Cemetery still a mass grave? Yes.”