The ongoing excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa has unearthed a total of 78 new graves as the city continues its search for victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, with recent efforts revealing 36 of those burials this past week, according to a city update. As forensics teams work to identify the remains and any evidence of violence from nearly a century ago, the findings have become a somber testament to one of the most harrowing episodes of racial violence in American history.
So far, six burials have been exhumed since the start of the current excavation phase which began on October 14, and one set of remains has been confirmed to show signs of a gunshot wound, demonstrating the violent nature of their death and local officials have been capturing these revelations, meticulously, as part of their endeavor to bring to light the true scale of the atrocity that took place in 1921; three additional sets of remains, found in simple wooden caskets, have been transferred to an on-site lab for further analysis revealing that they were adults.
This recent dig at Oaklawn Cemetery is part of an extensive project that the City of Tulsa initiated in 2021, a century after the massacre took place, and research teams have found evidence of trauma related to gunshot wounds in seven burials so far, solidifying the historical narrative of the violence endured by the Black community during those dark days—a community whose ancestors' final resting places had been lost to time and negligence.
Excavation efforts are expected to continue for at least another week, as the city and its team of archaeologists, historians, and forensic experts press on with their careful examination of the site; their work, a painstaking endeavor to piecemeal together the fragments of history that have so long been buried beneath the soil, oak roots, and the silence of Tulsa's past, has become an essential part of acknowledging and understanding the scope of the massacre's aftermath.
