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The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

A geophysical study to locate a mass grave

University of Oklahoma, Norman, U.S.

Robert Brooks

Oklahoma State Archaeologist, Norman, Oklahoma, U.S.

Thomas Fenner

MALA GeoScience USA, Manchester, New Hampshire, U.S.

Corresponding author: A. Witten, awitten@ou.edu

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

On 30 May 1921, a black man was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S., for allegedly attempting to rape a white woman in an elevator in a downtown building. Many days later, the woman recanted her original story; however, by this time events had spun out of control. When the arrest was revealed to the public in a May 31 newspaper article, an armed mob convened outside the jail intent on lynching the suspect. A lynching was prevented by the arrival of armed black World War I veterans. The rage of the mob was redirected, resulting in a night of violence. Red Cross records state that 1115 residences were destroyed and historical photos document total destruction of the Greenwood section (the focal point of Tulsa's black business community) of the city. The current estimate of deaths resulting from this event is approximately 300.

As a result of the chaos that followed these violent events, there was little effort to document casualties. In fact, it was not until the definitive study by Elsworth in 1982 that there was any significant historical documentation. Now, 80 years later, not a single body has been recovered. Rumors of mass graves persist, but several recent excavations have yielded nothing.

The only eyewitness account is a recent one by a man in his eighties who in June 1921 witnessed several crates containing the bodies of blacks being prepared for mass burial in a pit in a section of Tulsa's Oaklawn Cemetery.

In 1998, researchers with the Tulsa Race Riot Commission analyzed numerous accounts of mass graves and decided to study three locations: Newblock Park, Oaklawn Cemetery, and Booker T. Washington Cemetery. In July 1998 the three locations were investigated by ground penetrating radar (Maki and Jones, 1998). A pulseEKKO 1000 unit with 225-MHz and 450-MHz antenna tested . . . [Full Text of this Article]