Search for Victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre Has Uncovered 27 Coffins
There are strong reasons to suspect that the mass grave was for victims of the 1921 killing, given contemporary evidence.
Archaeological and excavation teams at a mass grave in Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa, Okla., this week.Credit.Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times
June 9, 2021, 7:40 p.m. ET
Last summer, after generations of silence and denial, the city of Tulsa, Okla., began excavations in search of the graves of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Nearly a century had passed since a mob of white Tulsans violently invaded the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood, overcoming a vigorous defense by some residents, killing and rounding up Black Tulsans en masse and burning much of the neighborhood to the ground.
June 4, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
Falling Awake, 2018Credit.Richard Finkelstein/Robert Mann Gallery
By Tom Hanks
Mr. Hanks is an actor and filmmaker whose projects include historical works like “Band of Brothers,” “The Pacific” and “John Adams” and documentaries about America from the 1960s to the 2000s.
I consider myself a lay historian who talks way too much at dinner parties, leading with questions like, “Do you know that the Erie Canal is the reason Manhattan became the economic center of America?” Some of the work I do is making historically based entertainment. Did you know our second president once defended in court British soldiers who fired on and killed colonial Bostonians and got most of them off?
The president, who has made racial equity and justice central themes of his administration, was in Tulsa, Okla., to commemorate a painful part of the country’s history.