Efforts to ID Tulsa race massacre victims raise privacy issues

On the night of May 31, 1921, a white mob descended on an affluent black neighborhood in Oklahoma. A group of people gathered after the arrest of a black teenager who had been accused of attacking a white girl. In one of the worst episodes of racial violence in US history, thousands of white people took to the streets in the middle of the night with torches, guns, and bombs.

The rioters destroyed more than a thousand homes and hundreds of businesses in a matter of hours, so prosperous it was called "Black Wall Street." Many Black people were killed during the massacre, according to historians. Unmarked graves are believed to have held some of the dead. The city of Tulsa started searching for those graves in 2020. Nineteen sets of human remains have been exhumed at a local cemetery that may be related to the massacre.

Scientists working for the city have been able to get usable DNA from two people. Genetic material from these two people's living descendants could be used to identify the victims. These people need to be named. They need to be named. Danny Hellwig, director of laboratory development for Intermountain forensics, a nonprofit laboratory based in Utah, said that families deserve to know who they are.

Some residents and privacy experts are concerned that this genetic data could be used for other purposes, including in criminal investigations, because people are being asked to upload their data to a genealogy website. Eric Miller is a professor at Loyola Law School. Miller is an attorney for a nonprofit that is trying to get some kind of compensation for the survivors of the massacre. An online town hall was hosted by the group to discuss their privacy concerns. Descendants of the race massacre are the only people being asked to donate their genes. It was a massacre of black people. The descendants are all black.

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People with connections to the massacre can take a DNA test through 23andMe, Ancestry, FamilyTreeDNA, or MyHeritage. (Free test kits are available to those who want to participate, but about 70 percent of the people who have inquired about the project have already taken a consumer DNA test at some time in the past.) They then upload their raw genetic data file to GEDmatch, a free genealogy website that’s open to the public. Using that data file, the site generates relative matches based on the amount of DNA users share with other people in the database.

The person who died in the 1921 massacre must be in the database in order for this to work. The remains of two people will be uploaded to the site. Researchers will map out their family trees if they find modern-day matches to those individuals. More than 50 presumed descendants are participating in the project, according to Hellwig.

Joseph James DeAngelo was identified as the Golden State Killer thanks to genetic genealogy. It has been used to solve hundreds of homicides and sexual assaults in the US. Blood taken during a newborn health screening can be used to implicate a father in a crime.