TULSA RACE MASSACRE: 21 NEW GRAVES FOUND IN OKLAHOMA

Wed 02 November 2022:

21 more graves believed to include the bones of Black victims from the 1921 Tulsa Massacre were discovered by officials in the US state of Oklahoma.

Two adult-sized graves and two child-sized graves were uncovered on Tuesday at Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa, where a total of 17 graves were found there on Friday and Saturday.

The bodies are currently being examined by officials to determine whether they correspond to 1921 accounts that the male victims were interred in simple caskets.

The genders of the victims or types of coffins recovered have not yet been determined.

“This is going to be part of our process of discriminating which ones we’re going to proceed with in terms of exhuming those individuals and which ones we’re actually going to leave in place,” Oklahoma state archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck said in a statement.

The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the darkest tragedies in US history in which a violent white mob targeted and murdered Black people. Historians have placed the death toll between 75 and 300 people.

In the violence that left Black Wall Street, a once-famous and prosperous business sector, completely destroyed, more than 1,000 residences were burned down and hundreds were robbed.

Following years of reports about widespread unmarked graves, the present hunt for victims started in 2020.

In 2021, close to thirty tombs were discovered, and 14 sets of bones were exhumed from coffins for DNA analysis. Two of the remains contained enough DNA to start the process of constructing a genealogy profile.

In order to attempt and gather more useful DNA to eventually identify the victims, the present search includes re-exhuming the remaining 12 bones from the first find and bringing them to a lab at the cemetery.

Until the procedure is finished, all the remains will be temporarily reburied in Oaklawn Cemetery.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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