24 More Graves Excavated in 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

For 18 hours between May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob attacked the Black-majority neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood was considered Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” due to its thriving business district where 10,000 Black residents financially prospered and spurred resentment among white supremacists.

America’s Black Wall Street, which consisted of brick and wood-framed homes, grocery stores, hotels, nightclubs, billiard halls, theaters, doctor’s offices and churches, took less than 24 hours to be destroyed by an angry mob of white supremacists. Hundreds of Black residents were murdered and $1.8 million worth of property was destroyed ($27 million today) and years of potential Black generational wealth for the community’s children and grandchildren were stomped out.

On Tuesday forensic scientists uncovered 24 additional unmarked graves belonging to victims of the 1921 massacre, three of which contained child-sized coffins, after the latest excavation which began last week. Last year, researchers found 19 unidentified bodies as a part of their investigation, which was first introduced by the city’s mayor in 2018. Those bodies have since been reburied. The city first began test excavations in July 2020 and discovered multiple coffins in the Sexton area of Oaklawn Cemetery in October 2020.

Four of the graves discovered this week will be excavated by hand before researchers are able to determine if they should be exhumed for further analysis.

"Experts continue to be narrowly focused on which graves will be exhumed and have determined that no child-sized burial will be," the city's statement reads.

The purpose of the probe is to discover just how many people were killed in the massacre, with historians estimating that as many as 300 Black people were killed, all of which are believed to be buried in a series of mass graves. The burials, which took place days following the massacre, occurred under martial law, so family members of the victims were barred from witnessing the burials of their loved ones.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre remained largely unheard of after it was buried by the local government and newspapers. But in 2018, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum announced an investigation into the massacre that would allow the city to search for unmarked mass graves after he first learned that there was a possibility that they existed in 2012, when he was still a city councilor.

"It is the great tragedy in the history of our city. It's something that was such a point of shame for our community for so many years that people did not talk about it," Bynum said in 2018. "This is a murder investigation. Whether you were murdered in 2018 or 1921, the city will do everything we can to find out what happened with you and bring that to justice."

The Oklahoma Historical Society has deemed the Tulsa Race Massacre the “single worst incident of racial violence in American history.”