Nearly a century after the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre – wherein white war veterans and other looters burned down the affluent Black Greenwood District in the Oklahoma city – researchers believe they have uncovered mass graves of some of the victims. A senior researcher named Scott Hammerstedt said geophysical scanning uncovered two areas in the Oaklawn Cemetery that may contain bodies of the riot’s victims, NBC News reported.
“It very much looks to me like a human-dug pit of some sort,” Hammerstedt said. “The size of it is indicative of what could be a common grave associated with the massacre. It’s the leading candidate that I’ve seen … I’m as confident as I can be in the results that this is a very big candidate with something associated with the massacre.”
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Affectionately known as Black Wall Street, the Greenwood District in Tulsa was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the nation. In the summer of 1921, it was burned to the ground and hundreds were killed by an angry white mob who’d accused one of its Black residents of sexual assault against a white woman.
According to the Oklahoma Commission Final Report, that resident was Dick Rowland, a Black teenager who’d likely tripped and come into physical contact with Sarah Page, a white elevator operator. When Page screamed and Rowland was seen rushing from the elevator by a white man, it set into motion a series of events that would result in Greenwood’s demise.
There have been attempts to get reparations for elderly survivors of the riots, but none have been successful. In effort to learn even more about the horrific riots, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum and the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission called for further investigation into the cemeteries where Black victims could have been buried.
Nehemiah D. Frank is the founder, executive editor, and director of The Black Wall Street Times. His family has roots in Tulsa and is said to have lost significant money and property during the massacre. In an article in TIME, he called the discovery “bittersweet” due to the city’s continual failure to have a formidable reparations conversation.
Frank credits Bynum with taking “a more active role in the pursuit of truth about the 1921 race massacre victims than any previous Tulsa mayor.” He applauds Bynum’s desire to “clarify the truth of what happened,” but said the mayor’s statement that “We’re not going to get into that (conversation about reparations)” was “disappointing.”
“For decades many white Tulsans denied our claims that mass graves filled with black bodies actually existed. At every turn, this story was repressed. Schoolchildren didn’t learn about it in schools until recently. We just didn’t get into that. Neither the victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre nor their families have received any restitution, and although Monday’s meeting felt like progress, the mayor’s comments were a painful reminder that justice in the form of reparations may still be out of reach for the descendants of this massacre,” Bynum wrote
