Investigating the 1921 Tulsa Black Moose: The Oklahoma State Archaeology and the Public Oversight Committee
After an excavation in the cemetery last year resulted in 19 exhumations, the city began a second excavation on October 26, according to an investigation update. The effort uncovered 16 exposed adult graves and one partially exposed grave, according to Oklahoma State Archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck.
The city of Tulsa has been investigating the events of the 1921 massacre that took place when a violent White mob destroyed the city’s thriving Black economic district. According to the Historical Society and Museum of Oklahoma, as many as 300 hundred people were killed and over 1,000 homes were destroyed.
Scientists at the site in Tulsa will now begin excavating by hand, using finer grain tools to clean up the coffins, according to state archeologist Kary Stackelbeck. That will help researchers analyze the construction style and hardware of the caskets in order to determine when they were interred.
“We’re trying to do every step of this process as respectfully as possible,” Stackelbeck said. The Public Oversight Committee will be helping us in the process of transporting the remains from the excavation to the lab.
The Public Oversight Committee includes decedents and Black leaders in the Tulsa community who advise the city during its investigation, according to the city website.
The investigation will use genetic genealogy analysis to identify victims who are found in the buried graves, along with collecting further historical information about the massacre.
Some historians think that as many as 300 Black people were killed in the attack. Nearly all are believed to have been buried in a series of mass graves approved by the white authorities of the time. Under the temporary restrictions, Black family members of the deceased were reportedly barred from witnessing the burials, as they were held under armed guard, away from their dead mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.
Historic accounts trace the spark of the riot to an incident between a young black man and a white woman in a downtown elevator. The man, who worked as a shoe shiner and was in the elevator on his way to the restroom, allegedly offended the woman, who worked as an elevator operator.
Stackelbeck: “We’re looking for a new set of bodies to search for again” and “will we know when to go back to them?”
“This is going to be part of our process of discriminating which ones we’re going to proceed with in terms of exhuming those individuals and which ones we’re actually going to leave in place, at least for now,” she added.
“But testing on some did not yield a very good result,” Stackelbeck said in an update last week. She said that teams were going back to those bodies to get more samples and hopefully get better results.