A partially disabled World War I veteran trying to get home to his mother has been identified as a 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre victim buried anonymously in the city’s Oaklawn Cemetery, researchers and Mayor G.T. Bynum said Friday.
C.L. Daniel, a Georgia native whose name had never before come to the attention of Race Massacre researchers, is the first person identified through a project launched five years ago by Mayor G.
T. Bynum to find unmarked burials from the May 31-June 1 calamity in which more than 35 square blocks of Tulsa’s Black Greenwood District were destroyed by whites and dozens and perhaps hundreds of people were killed. DNA comparisons, genealogical research and two letters in the National Archives led Intermountain Forensics, a firm working with the city, to Daniel.
The DNA and genealogy narrowed the search to two brothers with that last name. One of the letters, a 1936 missive from a Georgia attorney to the U.S.
Veterans Administration on behalf of Daniel’s mother, identified C.L. as almost certainly the occupant of what archeologists denote as Burial #3 in the old Black paupers’ section of Oaklawn.
The letter, from Stanford Arnold of Newnan, Georgia, on behalf of Amanda Daniel, seeks “any benefits that be due her” because of her son’s service and honorable discharge because of injury. “She has no discharge (papers) and is going to have difficulty in establishing his death,” Arnold wrote. “C.
L. was killed in a race riot in Tulsa Oklahoma in 1.