The mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, says a World War I veteran is the first person identified from graves filled with victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that devastated the city’s Black community.

A World War I veteran is the first person identified from graves filled with more than a hundred victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that devastated the city’s Black community, the mayor said Friday.

Using DNA from descendants of his brothers, the remains of C.L. Daniel from Georgia were identified by Intermountain Forensics, said Mayor G.T. Bynum and officials from the lab. He 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.

  • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
    5·
    4 months ago

    Two things this makes me think of, one - there’s nothing scarier to a white supremacist than a black soldier/veteran

    Why was there a spike in violence in 1919? Krugler argues that black service members’ experience in World War I was one of the catalysts. In many places, demobilized black veterans, having fought for their country, had a diminished tolerance for racial discrimination—and their families, having sacrificed on the homefront, felt the same way. Meanwhile, white civilians resented what they perceived as an excess of pride (what an Army captain, registering his concern with the Military Intelligence Division, called “social aspirations”) in those who had served. Servicemen were allowed to wear their uniforms for three months after being “demobbed.” Georgian Wilbur Little was lynched in April 1919, reportedly for the sin of wearing his after the cutoff date—a crime that suggests how much the vision of black men in uniform threatened the racial regime.

    [In line link added for context]

    Two - this whole “About Face” comic. I think there is something about being in a war and becoming accustomed to an atmosphere of violence, having to dehumanize people who want to kill you so you can more easily kill them, having rigid structure and routine as the thing that allows you to stay grounded and keep moving forward, etc. - that makes it easier to fall into supremacist movements. Like, we had a noticeable uptick in KKK bullshit after WWI and WWII, and I can’t help but feel like a lot of the shit we see today is our War on Terror adventures coming home to roost in some ways.

    e; just to be clear, I don’t mean this as a whole insult against all veterans or anything of the sort, because some of the best people I know irl are vets, and I think that service can absolutely have an opposite effect on a person’s moral reasoning

    e; added Wikipedia link

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 months ago

      That does make sense. And also, it explains why black soldiers were specifically excluded from the GI Bill after WWII.