Greenwood Massacre aka Tulsa Race Riots - 1921

mooray said:

And I wish all bad guys would explode, but it's stupid as a real world conversation, so you don't see me running around trying to sell people on it.

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mooray said:

Is this an ESL issue? I never said you wanted bad guys to explode..

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Tulsa Race Massacre survivors and the descendants of victims have asked the U.S. Justice Department to intervene in the city’s search for mass graves.

Justice for Greenwood, a foundation representing three known massacre survivors, as well as descendants, historians and activists, sent a letter Friday to formally request that the Justice Department open an investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act to determine what happened during the century-old massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.

The devastation of the Tulsa Race Massacre

The request comes weeks after the city reburied remains that were exhumed from a mass grave discovered in a city-owned cemetery. Still undetermined: whether the mass grave in Oaklawn Cemetery is connected to the 1921 rampage that left as many as 300 Black people dead and the all-Black neighborhood of Greenwood in ruins.

Tulsa officials reinterred the remains over the objections of massacre survivors, descendants of victims and members of the 1921 Mass Graves Oversight Committee, which voted to delay the reburial of the remains until the city had completed its investigation.

Damario Solomon-Simmons, the lead attorney in a lawsuit filed in 2020 by massacre survivors and descendants demanding that the city “repair the damage” caused by the attack, said Tulsa has a conflict of interest in investigating the massacre.

“There are innumerable reasons why the Department of Justice should intervene in this case,” attorneys wrote in the request letter. “First, the City perpetrated the massacre and then led the cover up of the massacre for 75 years. Over the last 20 years and currently, the City’s official position is they are not responsible for the horrendous loss of life, land, or livelihood that they caused.”

The attorneys questioned whether the city could “be trusted to handle this mass grave search with integrity” and accountability. “The known and suspected mass grave sites are crime scenes," the letter said. "As such, these crime scenes should not be investigated by the very perpetrator(s) of the crime, let alone entities we know have failed to adequately investigate and prosecute those responsible for the crimes.”

Tulsa officials declined to comment on the request for the Justice Department’s intervention, citing pending litigation, city Communications Director Michelle Brooks said.

“The Department has received the request filed by descendants of the Tulsa race massacre and we are reviewing it,” a Justice Department spokeswoman said.

Tulsa just commemorated the 100th anniversary of the massacre, which happened when a White mob descended on the all-Black neighborhood of Greenwood on May 31, 1921, and destroyed it. Thirty-five square blocks were burned and more than 10,000 Black people were left without homes. Massacre eyewitnesses and survivors reported seeing bodies of Black people thrown into mass graves, into the Arkansas River or loaded onto trucks or trains, making a tally of the fatalities difficult.

No White person was charged in the massacre, and insurance claims filed by Black homeowners and business owners were rejected. For decades, there was silence about what happened.

In 2018, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum (R) reopened the investigation into whether there are mass graves after a Washington Post story detailed unresolved questions from an earlier inquiry, which did not include a search.

In October, remains of possible victims were discovered in a section of the cemetery scientists called the “Original 18” site. It is located near the graves of Reuben Everett and Eddie Lockard. The tombstones of Everett and Lockard, which say they died on June 1, 1921, are the only known marked graves of massacre victims in the cemetery.

In July, scientists announced they discovered as many as 35 coffins in the unmarked mass grave, which also included steps carved into the wall of the pit, an indication that it contains perhaps dozens of coffins.



The letter requesting the Justice Department intervention was signed by the three known living massacre survivors — Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, Viola Ford Fletcher, 107 and Hughes Van Ellis, 100. It was also signed by city and state officials in Oklahoma, Tulsa City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper, State Rep. Regina Goodwin (D-Tulsa), and several prominent leaders of human rights and civil rights organizations, including Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative; Angela Rye, CEO of IMPACT Strategies; Damon T. Hewitt, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; and Nicole M. Austin-Hillery, executive director of the U.S. program at Human Rights Watch.

“We are deeply disturbed and alarmed by the possibility that some of the bodies recently found could be those of the same people we saw in the street in the wake of the Massacre, who were senselessly and violently murdered,” the massacre survivors said in a statement.

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The process of re-exhuming of some of the 19 bodies exhumed a year ago for testing in an effort to identify victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, then reburied in an Oklahoma cemetery, began Wednesday to gather more DNA from the remains.

The latest exhumations of bodies that were taken from Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa, will be followed by another excavation for additional remains.

Of the 19 bodies previously exhumed, 14 fit the criteria for additional DNA analysis, but just two of the 14 had enough usable DNA recovered to begin sequencing by Intermountain Forensics of Salt Lake City.

Danny Hellwig, director of laboratory development for Intermountain, said Wednesday that the DNA recovered from the remains had degraded during the more than 100 years they were buried.

“These samples are very ... degraded,” Hellwig said. “There are samples that are very light right now on DNA, some that are semi viable, some that are just on the threshold” of being viable.”

Hellwig said work to develop a genealogy profile for the two remains with enough viable DNA is expected to start in about a week and couple be completed within a few weeks, but efforts to identify the remains could take years.

Intermountain Forensics is also seeking people who believe they are descendants of massacre victims to provide genetic material to help scientists find potential matches.

Following the exhumations, another search will begin for 18 bodies with gunshot wounds whose burials in plain caskets were documented at the time, but without information where within the cemetery, according to forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield.

“We will be targeting in our excavations plain casketed individuals” who are male, based on the contemporary reports, Stubblefield said.

The search area is south and west of previous excavations conducted in 2020 and 2021, said state Archaeologist Kary Stubblefield, who is leading the project.

The remains will be reburied, at least temporarily, at Oaklawn, where the previous reburial was closed to the public, drawing protests from about two dozen people who said they are descendants of massacre victims and should have been allowed to attend.

The exhumations will be followed by another search for bodies in an area south and west of the areas previously excavated in 2020 and 2021.

None of the remains recovered thus far are identified or confirmed as victims of the massacre in which more than 1,000 homes were burned, hundreds were looted and a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street was destroyed. Historians have estimated the death toll to be between 75 and 300.

Victims were never compensated, however a pending lawsuit seeks reparations for the three remaining known survivors of the violence.

The latest search is expected to end by Nov. 18.

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hanimmal said:

https://apnews.com/article/tulsa-oklahoma-forensics-city-massacres-b0c4350019a6b4af80429e9a511a7874
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