Remains with gunshot wounds exhumed from Tulsa cemetery in search of 1921 race massacre victims

Remains exhumed from an Oklahoma cemetery can’t be linked to the 1921 Tusla race massacre but researchers say multiple gunshots to one unidentified man shows that the search should continue.

Forensic findings of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Graves Investigation presented to the City of Tulsa this week found multiple gunshot wounds to one set of remains, believed to be a Black man in his late 20s.

Forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield told CBS News it likely can never be confirmed whether any of the recently exhumed remains were massacre victims, though DNA evidence could provide circumstantial evidence.

"The person had a death that involved another human, so that part is clear, but when that death occurred, there are no definitive indicators and the exact context of ... how did the bullets get introduced, there’s no indications under the earth for that," Ms Stubblefield said.

Researchers from the University of Oklahoma excavated are area of the Oaklawn Cemetery known as New Potter’s Field in the summer of 2021, a century after the race massacre that an Oklahoma state commission found left 26 black and 10 white residents dead, by the Health department’s estimates.

Red Cross records placed the death toll at 300, while contemporaneous reports in The Tulsa Tribune placed it at 68 in one article and 175 in another.

Accounts of the victims vary from being transported out of Tulsa on flatbed railroad cars, and others being thrown in the Arkansas River or being cremated, wrote Robert L Brooks and Alan H Witten in the Tulsa Race Riot report.

“The most frequently reported version is of victims being buried in mass graves. Some of these are oral histories of riot survivors,” they wrote. “However, in many other cases, they are secondary histories, stories that have been handed down through generations and across kinship lines.”

The excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery was an effort to find one of those mass graves and identify victims of the race riot.

Of the 14 human remains studied from the dig, only one had observable trauma associated with the three gunshot wounds. The .38-caliber rounds were believed to be from a Colt revolver but could not be definitively linked to the firearm.

Tulsa mayor Mayor GT Bynum said in a statement that the city would continue to excavate Oaklawn Cemetery and analyse other sites in search of the race riot victims.

“As I have said at each step of this investigation, we will follow the truth wherever it leads.”