Subsurface scanning for clues to the possible location of unmarked burial sites from Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre resumes Monday with the trail separating Oaklawn Cemetery from the Inner Dispersal Loop now on the schedule.
The trail was added after some members of a public oversight committee said they were concerned remains might have been in a section of the cemetery sold to the state in the 1970s for highway easement.
After completing its work at Oaklawn, the survey team will move to Newblock Park, 1414 W. Charles Page Blvd., and vicinity. The team expects to spend the remainder of the week there.
The Newblock Park area is under consideration because the city dump was in that vicinity in 1921, and because of oral history.
The OAS team has already spent 3½ days at Oaklawn, 1133 W. 11th St., surveying several areas with subsurface mapping equipment. The results of the surveys are not expected until December.
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The survey work is open to the public but with some technical restrictions. Cellphones and cameras must be turned off within 300 feet of the scanning equipment and noise must be kept to a minimum.
Children must be accompanied by adults and pets must be leashed.
The OAS team is looking for subsurface anomalies that may indicate graves or mass burial sites from the massacre. Even at the time, many believed far more people were killed in the violence than could be accounted for.
Theories about what happened to those bodies, though, runs the gamut from large-scale burial in individual graves to incineration to being thrown in the Arkansas River. The most common theme is mass burial of some sort, with dozens of possible locations identified.
Newblock Park and Oaklawn Cemetery, where some riot victims are known to have been buried, are considered by researchers the most likely to yield results. They also have the advantage of being public property, which affords easier access.
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