Nearly a Century After a Tulsa Massacre, the Search for Burial Sites Finally Breaks Ground

One spring evening in the early 1980s, Maria Brown, a Black nursing assistant in a Tulsa retirement home, visited the room of one of her favorite residents. He was a well-traveled white man in his 70s and she often sat and listened to his stories. That day, she asked about growing up in Tulsa.

Ms. Brown, now 80, remembers how he began. “You know about that riot?” he asked. She’d lived in Tulsa for years by then, but she had no idea what he was talking about.

“He said, ‘I’ll tell you what happened.’”

For decades, this was how the memory of one of the deadliest race massacres in U.S. history was preserved: through personal recollections and hushed conversations. Schools did not teach about what happened on June 1, 1921, when thousands of white men and women, enraged that armed Black Tulsans had come downtown to prevent a lynching, attacked what had been one of the most prosperous Black communities in the country.

The white mobs looted scores of businesses, burned over a thousand homes and killed an untold number of residents of the Greenwood district. Estimates of the death toll range from 36 to 300, with long-told stories of bodies stacked like cordwood, tossed into pits or dumped into the Arkansas River.

When it came to the official history of Tulsa, for much of the 20th century it was as if the massacre had never happened.

This has slowly begun to change over the past quarter-century, with a state-commissioned report on the massacre in 2001, a growing interest by historians and a greater willingness to talk about the massacre among the descendants of its survivors.

But until this week, the city had not been committed to searching for the most visceral evidence of the slaughter, the bones of the dead. On Monday, the first test excavation began at a potential site detected by archaeologists on the grounds of Oaklawn Cemetery, the oldest graveyard in Tulsa.

The mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, who is white, announced the planned excavations in 2018, nearly two decades after a similar attempt was halted before it began. Uncovering the truth, the mayor wrote at the time of his announcement, was “a matter of basic human decency.”

Locating possible mass graves has required the use of forensic science, along with sparse records and “stories that have been handed down through generations,” as a state-commissioned report put it in 2001. In one case, they were the boyhood recollections of an 88-year-old man who remembered seeing Black bodies in wooden crates.

The part of town that was invaded had been nicknamed “Black Wall Street” because of the once-thriving community there. Today, the Greenwood district is testimony to official disregard. The district was steadily rebuilt only to be slowly strangled by an expressway overpass and the kind of “urban renewal” projects that devastated Black working-class neighborhoods across the country. Parts of Greenwood, once a byword for Black prosperity, now sit mostly empty, strikingly so for a neighborhood just next to a thriving downtown.

“You would hear stories about what it was,” said Chief Egunwale Amusan, president of the African Ancestral Society in Tulsa. His grandfather fled Greenwood during the massacre and returned to Tulsa, only to have his home taken under eminent domain decades later. When he would ask his grandfather where all these businesses went, the answer was terse: “They just don’t exist anymore.”

After plans for an excavation at Oaklawn were dropped in 2000, the city mostly stopped discussing the search for the mass graves.

But a few people kept the idea alive, including Vanessa Hall-Harper, a Black member of the City Council whose ancestors witnessed the massacre and who has long been pushing for the excavations. At the end of a routine community meeting in 2018, the Rev. Dr. Robert Turner, who had recently moved to Tulsa, stood up and asked the mayor about restarting the search.

Mr. Bynum said he would.

Dr. Turner was a student of America’s historical sins, having been born in a Tuskegee, Ala., hospital where scientists had performed syphilis experiments on Black men years earlier. He had moved to Tulsa to take over the pulpit at the Vernon A.M.E. Church in Greenwood. The church basement, he would learn after arriving, is the only structure in the neighborhood that survived the massacre.

The thought of the mass graves “touched me on a visceral level,” Dr. Turner said. The white people who participated in the slaughter were never held accountable, he said. They were most likely laid to rest decades later in funeral ceremonies, their graves visited by family members. For Black victims dumped into pits, “their family thought they just went missing.”

Dr. Turner joined the small group in Tulsa who had been pressing for a public accounting, including Ms. Hall-Harper and J. Kavin Ross, a local historian whose father Don Ross, a former state legislator, had for decades been one of the only figures in Tulsa to talk openly about what happened in 1921.

They pushed for excavations to begin, for reparations for the descendants of victims and survivors, and for consequences for the perpetrators, potentially including the local authorities who had deputized hundreds of white men before the attack and helped march thousands of Black residents into internment camps afterward. Dr. Turner began making solo pilgrimages to City Hall, where he would read passages from the book of Isaiah over a bullhorn, about healing the broken-hearted and repairing ruined cities.

On Wednesday, Dr. Turner arrived at his usual spot to find a group of white people already gathered to protest an ordinance requiring masks to combat the coronavirus. As he spoke, the protesters mocked him, threw water at him and flashed cash in his face when he talked of reparations. “They started chanting ‘U.S.A.’ in my face, like I’m not an American,” said Dr. Turner, clearly shaken. “I’m just as American as they are. My ancestors built this country.”

The city had planned the test excavation for April, but the pandemic forced a delay. So the descendants of Black Wall Street, having waited 99 years, waited a little more — through the spring and into a June that was among the most tumultuous months in American memory. The day after Juneteenth, with a pandemic raging and amid a national wave of protests over police brutality, President Trump came to the city. At an arena less than a mile from Greenwood, the president referred to the Black Lives Matter protests as an “unhinged left-wing mob” that was trying to erase the country’s history.

The irony was not lost on Black Tulsa.

“To be Black and to be Tulsan,” said Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, whose brother was killed by a Tulsa police officer in 2016, “is to have your history erased.”

On that afternoon some 40 years ago in the retirement home, Ms. Brown listened to the man as he described the day Greenwood burned. He told of being stranded on the outskirts of a city billowing smoke, of how a Black man rushing by took pity on him, pulling him onto his wagon and dropping him off at the house of a white family up the road.

Back in her neighborhood, about a mile from Greenwood, no one wanted to talk about it; years would go by before Ms. Brown learned the full story. Her daughter Mechelle now works at the Greenwood Cultural Center, which documents the neighborhood’s history. Ms. Brown is heartened by the excavation, which she thinks of as a good start at unraveling years of concealment. But it is also depressing, she said. This has taken almost a century.

“They’re just now digging for graves,” Ms. Brown said. “They’re talking about going to Mars now and I don’t know how deep in the oceans they’ve gone. And this is as far as we’ve gotten. My God.”