Excavation continues at potential mass grave site in Tulsa

TULSA — Donning a black mask and baseball cap, John Patrick-Kinnear sat in a lawn chair Wednesday afternoon outside Oaklawn Cemetery, watching as heavy equipment operators dug a trench near the west edge of the cemetery.

He was there to support the archaeologists, city employees, and historians who were working in hot temperatures to dig up pieces of history that have long been buried.

“It’s an emotional toll on them,” he said. “Each time that shovel goes in the ground, they don’t know if they’re going to hit human remains, and that’s got to be very taxing.”

Workers with the City of Tulsa are digging up a swath of land at the cemetery in the search for potential mass graves containing the bodies of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Using a small track hoe, workers conducted a “test excavation” this week of a site at the cemetery where bodies were reportedly dumped after Tulsa’s Greenwood District, a business area filled with Black-owned businesses, was burned to the ground by a white mob.

The excavation is the second phase of the city’s investigation into the massacre. In October, surveyors with the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey started the investigation by analyzing parts of the cemetery using ground-penetrating radar. They found what they called an “anomaly” consistent with a mass grave, officials said.

Researchers began the test excavation Monday, but they had not recovered any human remains by noon Thursday. They have uncovered some artifacts like broken bricks, construction debris and a shell casing from a bullet, though the artifacts likely aren’t related to the massacre, researchers said.

Officials said during a Thursday news conference that they would complete the excavation of the trench they’re working on either Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. They expect to start new excavations Monday.

“I continue to be optimistic that we are in the right place,” State Archaeologist Dr. Kary Stackelbeck said. “We are just using some different techniques to allow us to better strategize how we are going to do that discovery process, and we’re not just beholden to the geophysical data at this point, to point us in the right direction.”

Tulsa officials formed a Public Oversight Committee in 2019 to oversee the investigation. The group includes descendants of the massacre’s victims, African American community leaders, and researchers who have studied the event.

One of those researchers was on the scene of the excavation Wednesday.

Scott Ellsworth, an award-winning Tulsa writer, donned a safety vest and an orange construction helmet as he watched workers pile dirt into a dump truck.

“The Tulsa Race Massacre was the single worst incident of racial violence in all of American history,” he said. “It’s also something that was purposefully buried and covered up for more than 50 years. So, if we’re going to respect our history, we need to be honest about what it was.”

Ellsworth first heard about the massacre when he was a child, and he wrote a thesis about the event while in college. In the late 1990s, Ellsworth was the chief historian of the Oklahoma Race Riot Commission, a group that urged public officials to begin looking for the graves.

For the last two decades, researchers like Ellsworth have gathered documents and interviewed relatives of the massacre’s victims to gain an idea of where bodies might be buried. Researchers believe the cemetery is one of four locations with unmarked mass graves. The other locations include Newblock Park, an area adjacent to that park, and Rolling Oaks Memorial Gardens.

Ellsworth believes that anywhere between 50 and 300 people were killed during the massacre, and he hopes to see the victims identified.

“We know that there were riot victims that were buried while their loved ones were being all held under armed guard at various internment camps in the city,” Ellsworth said. “No one got to identify their loved ones, their father, their brother, their son. There were no ministers talking over this, and these people were essentially thrown away. So I think it’s important for us, if we can find them, to help bring them back, see if we can discover their remains, be able to possibly identify using DNA, and then they need to be reburied with honor.”

That process, however, won’t be a quick one.

“This is the first step,” he said. “It’s going to take a while on all of this.”

Other community members and researchers also came out to watch the excavation.

Victor Luckerson moved to Tulsa from Georgia in November to begin writing a book about the massacre. A narrative non-fiction book, “Built From the Fire” will discuss the history of the Greenwood District, also known as Black Wall Street.

Luckerson is still researching the history of Greenwood for his book. Being able to watch the excavation is “fascinating,” he said Wednesday.

“There’s still a lot that’s unknown about the massacre and who was involved,” he said. “People here in Tulsa have those stories, and so I think this whole ritual is helping to bring forth more of the truth. All of this is part of a truth-seeking mission, which makes it a positive thing.”