Oklahoma forensic archaeologists are expected to announce Monday the results of their geophysical investigation into whether mass graves existed containing the bodies of African Americans killed in the 1921 Tulsa race riot, one of the worst instances of racial violence in U.S. history.
"The only way to move forward in our work to bring about reconciliation in Tulsa is by seeking the truth honestly," Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum told The Washington Post.
"We knew opening this investigation 98 years later, there would be both unknowns and truths to uncover.
"But we are committed to exploring what happened in 1921 through this collective and transparent process filling gaps in our city's history, and providing healing and justice to our community," Bynum said.
He called the process a murder investigation, telling the Post that Tulsa was obligated to determine what happened in 1921 as the centennial of the massacre neared.
Bynum reopened the probe after an October 2018 Post report and the HBO series "Watchmen" raised unresolved questions about the attack by an angry white mob on what has become known as "Black Wall Street."
A team of scientists, led by the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey at the University of Oklahoma, were expected to reveal whether they discovered "anomalies" consistent with mass graves at a public meeting Monday at a Tulsa middle school, the Post reports.
Scientists searched Oaklawn Cemetery and Newblock Park, two of three sites identified in a 2001 Tulsa Race Riot report, as possible mass-grave locations.
The city continues to negotiate with the owner of the third site, Rolling Oaks Memorial Gardens, to allow radar scanning, according to the Post.
The team is also expected Monday to release recommendations to Tulsa officials for the next phase of the investigation, which could include excavation and an inquiry by the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s Office into causes of death.
"The cause of death determination would be an important step to the investigation," city officials told the Post, "as remains will be close to 100 years old and a Spanish influenza outbreak occurred in Tulsa in 1919 prior to the race massacre in 1921."
The city oversight committee on the project includes descendants of massacre victims, community leaders, historians and scholars, the Post reports.
The Tulsa Race Riot began on May 31, 1921, when whites marched on Greenwood, one of the nation's wealthiest black communities.
The mob gathered after a 19-year-old black man, who worked as a shoe shiner in downtown Tulsa, was arrested and accused of assaulting a 17-year-old white woman "on a public elevator in broad daylight," according to a 2001 report by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, which was organized in 1997.
After a clash between "angry white vigilantes gathered at the courthouse intent on lynching the shine boy" and an armed black men seeking to protect him, a shot rang out — and the violence began, according to the Post.
According to historians, as many as 300 African Americans were killed and much of Greenwood was burned down over two days of rioting.
The mob, "some of them government agents," according to the commission's report, destroyed 35 square blocks of Greenwood, the 2001 report says.
The destruction included more than 1,250 homes, churches, schools, businesses, a hospital and a library.
Survivors disclosed that bodies were tossed in the Arkansas River or loaded onto trains, making it difficult to count the dead, and city and state officials began investigating the claims of mass graves in Tulsa in 1998.
Other witnesses reported seeing bodies tossed into mass graves, the Post reports.
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