Scientists searching for victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre find another bullet among remains exhumed from a mass grave
By DeNeen L. Brown
As archeologists searching for mass graves in Tulsa worked to exhume a set of human remains near where an oak tree once stood in the city-owned Oaklawn Cemetery, they found a bullet among the remains.
"This discovery marks the third confirmed gunshot victim in the city's yearslong search," Tulsa city officials said in a statement released Friday, Aug. 2, 2024.
Since Tulsa began a fourth round of excavations at Oaklawn, scientists have found 40 additional unmarked graves, city officials said. During this most recent search, archeologists exhumed three sets of remains found in "adult-sized" wooden caskets. Those remains were found near the site of "a known Tulsa Race Massacre victim C.L. Daniel and possibly his brother." Two of the remains were located just west of where Daniel's remains were found last month. The third set of remains were found just south of that area.
The man was identified as C.L. Daniel, a World War I veteran, who was killed in 1921. His remains were discovered during a 2021 excavation of a mass grave in Oaklawn Cemetery, which is blocks from Greenwood, the all-Black community destroyed by a White mob in a rampage that historians say left as many as 300 Black people dead and 10,000 without homes.
The identification of the remains comes four years after scientists began an excavation in Tulsa in search of mass graves that may be connected to the massacre, one of the worst incidents of racist violence in U.S. history.
“C.L. Daniel was a veteran who served our country in World War I, who was killed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and whose family did not know where he had been buried for the last 103 years — until this week,” Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said in a news release.
This is the first identification of a victim of the Tulsa Race Massacre since the 2001 release of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission report, which named as victims Reuben Everett and Eddie Lockard, whose headstones are the only known markers of massacre victims.
Daniel’s remains were discovered in a mass grave near the tombstones of Everett and Lockard, which say they died on June 1, 1921.
The city has been working with the company Intermountain Forensics to identify remains found in mass graves. City officials said the company found records in the National Archives that tied Daniel to the massacre — notably a Feb. 11, 1936, letter from his mother to the Veterans Administration requesting help receiving benefits after her son was killed in “a race riot in Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921.”
In 2020, city officials and scientists working on the search for mass graves announced they had found a mass grave in Oaklawn Cemetery.
Bynum had launched the search for potential mass graves two years earlier, after a Washington Post story detailed the unresolved questions surrounding the massacre.
“The ultimate goal is to find out who these victims were and to connect them with their families,” Bynum said in 2020. “… I think about those families who have gone for 99 years with no idea where their family members were. We are a step closer today to having the ability to tell them that.”
