A veteran of the first world war has become the first person identified from graves filled with more than a hundred victims of the 1921 Tulsa massacre of the Oklahoma city’s Black community, the mayor said on Friday.
Using DNA from descendants of his brothers, the remains of CL Daniel – from Georgia – were identified by Intermountain Forensics, said Mayor GT Bynum and lab officials. Daniel was in his 20s when he was killed.
“This is one family who gets to give a member of their family that they lost a proper burial, after not knowing where they were for over a century,” Bynum said.
“His remains show no signs of gunshot wounds. They were identified purely due to the expertise of our team of experts and give us hope that other remains found in similar circumstances could be those of other victims.”
Comparing the search process to “searching for a needle in a pile of needles”, Bynum added: “We also have documented evidence that there are at least 17 other victims buried in Oaklawn cemetery so this identification affirms our need to continue this search with the knowledge that identification and reunification is possible.”
Over the span of two days in 1921, a mob of white supremacists in Tulsa carried out one of the deadliest acts of racist violence ever in the US.
From 31 May to 1 June, the mob killed about 300 Black people, in addition to looting and destroying over a thousand businesses, schools and homes across Tulsa’s Greenwood district, also known as Black Wall Street.
Brenda Nails-Alford, a descendant of massacre survivors and a member of the committee overseeing the search for victims, said Daniel’s identification brought her to tears.
“This is an awesome day, a day that has taken forever to come to fruition,” Nails-Alford said.
More than 120 graves were found during searches that began in 2020, with forensic analysis and DNA collected from about 30 sets of remains. Daniel’s remains are the first from those graves to be linked directly to the massacre.
The breakthrough for identifying Daniel came when investigators found a 1936 letter from his mother’s attorney seeking veteran’s benefits. Alison Wilde, a forensic scientist with Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Forensics, said the letter provided by the US’s national archives convinced investigators that Daniel was killed in the massacre.
In a statement released on Friday, Tulsa city officials said:
“In part, the letter states, ‘CL was killed in a race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921’. Receipt of this letter confirms that CL … is a Tulsa race massacre victim not previously identified.”
None of Daniel’s family members – many of whom don’t know each other – attended the news conference announcing the identification. Wilde said the identification was made earlier in the week.
“I think it’s shocking news, to say the least,” for the family, Wilde said. “We know we’ve brought a lot into their lives.”
In June, the Oklahoma state supreme court dismissed a lawsuit brought forth by two living survivors of the massacre – Viola Fletcher, 110, and 109-year old Lessie Benningfield Randle – who sought reparations.
Fletcher and Randle argued that – under Oklahoma’s public nuisance law – the massacre continued to affect Tulsa and remained responsible for the financial and social disparities between the city’s Black and white residents.
After their lawsuit’s dismissal, they issued a statement saying: “We are deeply saddened that may not live long to see the state of Oklahoma or the United States of America honestly confront and right the wrongs of one of the darkest days in American history.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
