The Search for Tulsa Massacre Victims Finally Reveals a Name

C.L. Daniel, an Army veteran, was in Utah looking for work after World War I and had planned to travel back to Newnan, Ga., his hometown.

He never made it back.

Mr. Daniel made a stop in Tulsa, Okla., and became a victim of the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst racial attacks in American history, in which as many as 300 people were killed.

Five years after the city of Tulsa began searching for the victims, the investigation finally yielded a long-awaited identification, said Mayor G.T. Bynum on Friday. Other names had previously been identified in a state commission report on the massacre in 2001. Mr. Daniel is the first person named as part of the city’s effort to identify those killed in the attack.

Finally, some of what happened to Mr. Daniel is known.

“C.L. Daniel was a veteran who served our country in World War I, who was killed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and whose family did not know where he had been buried for the last 103 years — until this week,” Mr. Bynum said.

Tulsa officials had been working with Intermountain Forensics, a lab assisting with DNA and genealogical analysis, to identify the victims.

Exhumed remains of individuals had provided enough DNA to create eight profiles that were tied to living relatives. The investigation connected the profiles to 19 possible surnames in seven states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas.