21 new graves found from 1 of US' deadliest racist tragedies

By Darren Lyn

HOUSTON, United States (AA) - Officials in the US state of Oklahoma turned up 21 new graves believed to contain the remains of Black victims from the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.

The coffins were discovered at Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa: 17 adult-sized graves were located last Friday and Saturday; two adult-sized graves and two that are child-size were found Tuesday.

Officials are currently examining the bodies to see if they match reports from 1921 that the male victims were buried in plain 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.

More than 1,000 homes were burned and hundreds looted in the once-known thriving business district called Black Wall Street which was destroyed in the violence.

The current search for victims began in 2020 after decades of rumors regarding mass unmarked graves.

Nearly three-dozen graves were found in 2021 with 14 sets of remains exhumed from coffins for DNA testing. Two of the bodies had enough DNA to begin sequencing to start developing a genealogy profile.

The current search includes re-exhuming the other 12 remains from the original discovery and moving them to a lab at the cemetery to try and collect more usable DNA to eventually identify the victims.

All the remains will be temporarily reburied at Oaklawn Cemetery until the process is completed.