Oaklawn Cemetery Search Concludes After 47 Exhumations

The City of Tulsa has concluded a fourth excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery in a search for missing and unknown victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Cemetery records indicated 18 burials there associated with the massacre. Acting on reports of undocumented burials in a corner of the cemetery with few markers, archeologists uncovered 195 graves in a section with only five headstones.

In the last four weeks, 11 sets of remains were removed for forensic study, with others excluded as likely victims by the scientific team, which focused on mainly male victims with signs of trauma. Three additional sets of skeletal remains have been determined to have gunshot injuries, some with multiple weapons, and one new case with indications of fire.

Dr. Phoebe Stubblefield, the lead forensic scientist on the project, said the 11 people will be examined as quickly and thoroughly as possible, with plans to re-inter them for preservation, while a lengthy DNA profile is developed with the intention of connecting victims with living relatives. She said most of the 47 sets of remains exhumed have been younger people, mostly male, with skeletal indications of a history of hard work — like broad shoulders.

Dr. Kary Stackelbeck, the lead archaeologist, said the area searched had coffins in individual grave shafts, laid out in an orderly fashion that clearly must have been documented at the time in records long since lost.

Mayor G.T. Bynum is credited with starting the process that led to the search, after decades of inaction to examine the area of Oaklawn long presumed to contain massacre victims, that now has mapped out a large potters field both with all but certain victims, and “an extraordinary number of graves that have nothing to do with what we're looking for.”

Bynum visited the site Thursday, as the work was wrapping up, and said he hoped his successor would continue the work of answering long-standing questions about the massacre.

“These are not normal remains of people who died of natural causes,” he said. “These are our fellow Tulsans who died a violent death.”

The search area at Oaklawn, on the Southwest Corner, has now been carefully mapped out, with plans to eventually install markers on the graves, whether or not the people buried there are identified or remain unknown.