Scholars excavating scene of Tulsa Race Massacre are working to "reconstruct a suppressed history"
By Tori B. Powell
Scholars excavate scene of Tulsa massacre
Nearly 100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, a team of scholars is working to uncover the unmarked graves of victims with hopes of identifying some of their bodies.
"We knew its history had been suppressed," Phoebe Stubblefield, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Florida, said in an interview with CBSN. The first challenge, then, was finding where the dead are buried.
Between May 31 and June 1, 1921, a White mob looted and destroyed a section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, called Greenwood, where many Black families lived at the time. It was known to some as "the Black Wall Street." The mob was fueled by claims that a Black teenager attacked a White woman.