City of Tulsa
A city official said Thursday that Tulsa is on track to begin an exhumation on June 1st of remains discovered in a mass grave at Oaklawn Cemetery last year in a continued search for victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Deputy Mayor Amy Brown made the remarks during a Thursday evening meeting of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Graves Investigation Public Oversight Committee, held virtually.
Brown said the city was in the process of reviewing nine bids from vendors who submitted proposals to assist in archaeological work on the dig.
Brown also said the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey would be assisting in both the Oaklawn exhumation and a ground-penetrating radar search of Rolling Oaks Cemetery, another location where massacre victims are thought to have been buried.
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For decades after the 1920s, even to self-described Oklahoma history buffs like current Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, a nearly forgotten tragedy laid buried in the cityâs collective memory â and as Bynum would discover, much to his horror, the city itself.Â
A century later and after numerous roadblocks to continuing the investigation, Bynum, several OU archaeologists and national scholars hope to bring a measure of justice to the victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre and their descendants by educating the public and memorializing those killed in the event.
Bynum, a Tulsa native, said he attended school in his home city until graduating from Cascia Hall in 1996. Despite years of education spent in the city whose residents witnessed and carried out one of the nationâs worst instances of racist violence, like many Tulsans, heâd never heard of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre until 2001, while at a town hall event for former Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFo
The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum is featuring a new exhibit about the Spiro Mounds titled âSpiro and the Art of the Mississippian World.â
This new exhibit, which opened Feb. 12, explores the archeological and historical data connecting the Spiro site to other communities throughout North and Central America, according to the museumâs website.
Faculty from the University of Oklahoma, including Amanda Regnier and Patrick Livingood, as well as other speakers from across the country will be participating in a âBrown Bag Lunch Seriesâ that go into more detail about the Spiro Mounds, the Mississippian people and the discovery of the sites.