For New Pittsburgh Courier
Archaeologists will conduct a test excavation at an area cemetery in Tulsa, Okla., as part of an ongoing effort to find remains of victims of a 1921 race massacre.
City officials announced the test excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery, planned for April, during the city’s Mass Graves Investigation Public Oversight Committee meeting, the Tulsa World reported.
The meeting came a little more than a month after investigators announced that geophysical surveys conducted in October had found anomalies consistent with possible graves.
“We would see this as an intermediate step,” Kary Stackelbeck, a state archaeologist, said. “If we were to identify evidence that we seem to believe at the time is consistent with race massacre victims, we would want to leave them in a state that allows for us to come back and undertake future investigations and a recovery effort in a more thoughtful and well-planned-out fashion.”
Tulsa’s mayor announced in 2018 that the city would re-examine sites in search of victims of the 1921 massacre. The sites were last inspected by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The massacre happened over the course of 16 hours, from May 31 to June 1, 1921, when mobs of White residents attacked Black residents and businesses. As many as 300 people were killed, hundreds more injured and thousands left homeless. Tulsa’s prosperous Black business district known as Black Wall Street was destroyed. It has been called one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.
“More than 35 blocks were destroyed, along with more than 1,200 homes, and some 300 people died, mostly Blacks,” according to a story by Allison Keyes at Smithsonianmag.com. “The National Guard was called out after the governor declared martial law, and imprisoned all Blacks that were not already in jail. More than 6,000 people were held, according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, some for as long as eight days.
‘(Survivors) talk about how the city was shut down in the riot,’ says museum curator Paul Gardullo. ‘They shut down the phone systems, the railway. … They wouldn’t let the Red Cross in. There was complicity between the city government and the mob. It was mob rule for two days, and the result was the complete devastation of the community.’
Gardullo adds that the formulaic stereotype about young Black men raping young White women was used with great success from the end of slavery forward to the middle of the 20th century.
‘It was a formula that resulted in untold numbers of lynchings across the nation,’ Gardullo says. ‘The truth of the matter has to do with the threat that Black power, Black economic power, Black cultural power, Black success, posed to individuals and … the whole system of white supremacy. That’s embedded within our nation’s history.’”
Many Americans are unaware of this horrific incident. In October, the premiere of HBO’s “Watchmen” recreated the Tulsa race massacre. The facts of the massacre appeared to have been unknown to many viewers who expressed their disbelief on social media.
In remembering Tulsa, we should reflect on the words of the philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist George Santayana’s famous aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which is inscribed on a plaque at Auschwitz.
(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune)
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