Scholars excavating scene of Tulsa Race Massacre are working to "reconstruct a suppressed history"
CBSN
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.Ashley White received her earliest combat action badge from the United States Army soon after the first lieutenant arrived in Afghanistan. The silver military award, recognizing soldiers who've been personally engaged by an attacker during conflict, was considered an achievement in and of itself as well as an affirming rite of passage for the newly deployed. White had earned it for using her own body to shield a group of civilian women and children from gunfire that broke out in the midst of her third mission in Kandahar province. All of them survived. She never mentioned the badge to anyone in her battalion.