60 Minutes - 5/23/2021: Transgender Healthcare, Geldingadalir, Exhume the Truth

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Next week marks the 100th anniversary of the Greenwood Massacre, a two-day assault in 1921 on a thriving black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Scott Pelley reports. A number of states have introduced bills that would prevent doctors from treating transgender youth. Lesley Stahl reports. And Bill Whitaker reports on Earth's newest volcano, Geldingadalir. These stories on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's a real privilege to be able to travel and to see different places, taking yourself out of comfortable positions and challenging yourself. No one builds a legacy by standing still. Start your journey at Remover.com. It's a very ominous development. It's a bad sign. Dr. Erica Anderson is a highly respected gender psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who's transgender herself. She worries that state legislatures are attempting to drastically restrict health care to young trans patients at a time when the community needs well-trained and comprehensive care most. Have you ever seen anything like that before in your lifetime? No. No. Clearly they are demonstrating their ignorance and prejudice.

We watched as a huge stream of lava slithered down a new path into the valley. When we went to take a closer look, we couldn't believe our ears. It sounded like broken glass. It was a molten lava fall. We're about 10 feet away. I'm not sure I can get much closer. Yeah, I'm not sure I can get much closer than this. It's about 10 feet away.

Burns your face. In 1921, the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was among the wealthiest black communities in America. But it was destroyed in a race massacre. Hate rained down on churches and homes from above. The first time in American history the airplanes were used to terrorize America was not at 9-11, was not at Pearl Harbor. It was right here in the Greenwood District. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or both sides. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Last month, Arkansas passed a law prohibiting doctors from treating transgender youth with puberty blockers, testosterone or

estrogen, and surgery to assist their transitions. As part of a new culture war, similar bills have been introduced in at least 20 other states. In some cases, doctors could go to jail. Many physicians and therapists are appalled. like Erica Anderson, a highly respected gender psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who's transgender herself. It's a very ominous development. It's a bad sign. Have you ever seen anything like that before in your lifetime?

No. No. And it's a clear overreach on the part of such legislatures. Clearly, they are demonstrating their ignorance and prejudice. At least six major medical associations have weighed in against these bills, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, of which Dr. Lee Savio Beers is the president. I'm going to read you something that was said in support of this law in Arkansas. One of the Republican senators said, gender-affirming treatments are, quote, at best experimental and at worst a serious threat to a child's welfare. These are not experimental treatments. They're really based in scientific literature.

They're based in decades and decades of expert experience, and they're backed by a number of major medical organizations. So let's say there's a young person and they're on hormones. Under the law in Arkansas, a doctor has to take those hormones away? Yes, and if the doctor decides to move forward, they face significant penalty. Is there any medical rationale for this legislation, in your opinion? No, there is not. The field of transgender health care has grown rapidly.

In 2007, there was one major youth gender clinic in the entire country. Today, there are at least 50. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, WPATH, issues guidelines that currently say to get medical treatments like hormones or surgery, those under 18 should have parental consent and have seen a therapist. To get hormones, those over 18 can sign an informed consent form after an initial assessment, but for surgery, they too need to have seen a therapist. Revised guidelines are expected by the end of this year. The process today is much easier than it used to be when patients who wanted to transition had to go through extensive therapy that many considered onerous and insulting.

In some cases, doctors even tried to, quote, cure them. There's been a residue of trauma in the trans community. People tell the stories of feeling mistreated by the health care system that subjected them to all this extra scrutiny. So there's been a reaction, which is, well, if we actually accept that trans people exist and deserve a right to be themselves and to have access to quality medical care, then let's give it to them. Is there an accreditation to work in this field? So there is coming to be, yes. But not yet.

Dr. Anderson, who sits on the board of WPATH, says that their guidelines are not always followed by clinicians who are not well-trained. There are healthcare providers who have jumped into this area because trans people are interesting. You know, they're unicorns. You know, oh, I have one of them now.

And I think it's deplorable. Your journey. The WPATH guidelines call for affirming but careful evaluation, which is how Dr. Anderson says she has counseled hundreds of trans patients, including this 17-year-old, who she's been treating since he started the transition process at the age of 13, when he was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a deep distress that his body did not match his gender identity. Is your life better?

My quality of life has improved drastically. I very much believe if I hadn't done all of these things, there's a high likelihood I would have tried to take my own life and I might have succeeded. It's clear that there are many trans children who are helped by the kinds of interventions that we're talking about here that would be prohibited by these laws. Does it make a difference in how long someone has expressed gender dysphoria? I mean, you hear of parents who say, oh, I knew when my child was four years old. And then you also hear stories where someone said, well, I felt that way for three months. Well, the formal diagnosis for gender dysphoria has as one criterion that this conflict have existed for a minimum of six months.

Okay, well, six months, is that... And I'm not satisfied with six months myself. While the vast majority of transgender youth and adults are satisfied with their transitions, not all are. In some cases, patients are choosing to reverse the process. It's called detransitioning. In her early 20s, Grace Ladinsky-Smith was seriously depressed and developed gender dysphoria. She began searching for answers in transgender communities on the Internet.

And when I saw them being so happy and excited about doing this wonderful transformative process to really, like, become their true selves, it was like, have I considered that this could be my situation too? Did this have any part of it? A sense that men had it easier in life than women did and that your road might be easier if you were male? Yes, I just had this sense that if I could inhabit life as a trans man, as a man, then I wouldn't feel so self-conscious.

I was thinking that it would make me feel very free. Grace says she found a gender therapist on the Internet and told her, I'm thinking of transitioning. She thought it all sounded pretty good. Did the therapist not question you about how deep the feeling was and what it was stemming from? She didn't go really go into what my gender dysphoria might have been stemming from. We only did a few sessions. Because she was over 18 and didn't need parental consent, she says she merely signed an informed consent form at a clinic and got hormone shots. They asked me, so why do you want to go on testosterone? And I said, well, being a woman just isn't working for me anymore. And they said, okay. So that was that. You got your prescription for testosterone.

Mm-hmm. Yep. Just four months after she started testosterone, she says she was approved for a mastectomy, what's called top surgery, that she told us was traumatic. You know, I'm kind of surprised because based on everything you've said up to now, I would have thought you'd have a great sense of relief. I started to have a really disturbing sense that like a part of my body was missing, almost a ghost limb feeling about being like there's something that should be there. And the feeling really surprised me, but it was really hard to deny. And so she detransitioned by going off testosterone and then went back to the clinic. And she says

complained to the doctor that the process didn't follow the WPATH guidelines. I can't believe that I transitioned and detransitioned, including hormones and surgery, in the course of like less than one year. It's completely crazy. It greatly concerns me where the field has been going. I feel like what is happening is unethical and irresponsible in some places. Laura Edwards-Lieper was the first psychologist at the first major youth gender clinic in the U.S. at Boston Children's Hospital. She says she has helped hundreds of teens and young adults transition successfully after a comprehensive assessment. Do you have conversations with your colleagues about this whole area of accepting what young people are saying too readily? Yes. Everyone is very scared to speak up because we're afraid of not being seen as being affirming or being supportive of these young people or doing something to hurt the trans community.

But even some of the providers are trans themselves and share these concerns. There's no confirmed number of detransitioners in the U.S., though their percentage among the more than 1.4 million transgender Americans is assumed to be small. They are becoming more public, though. We found a Reddit detransition support group with over 19,000 members worldwide, some saying they changed their minds because of family pressure or discrimination in employment and other areas, or simply regret. We also interviewed more than 30 detransitioners who say they also had experienced regret, including these four who hadn't met before now.

How many of you feel that you were blindly affirmed? I didn't get enough pushback on transitioning. I went for two appointments, and after the second one, had like my letter to go get on cross-sex hormones. Two visits, that's it? All four tell us they learned about transitioning on the internet where there are transformation videos on YouTube, trans influencers and forums. I've just never been able to be me, but I can now. For Daisy in Chicago, who says she started taking hormones at 18,

everything was great in the beginning. After every step that you take, every milestone feels like a million bucks. When I got top surgery, I was elated. When I changed my name, I was elated. But when everything that I had set out to do was done, I still felt incomplete. Garrett, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, went from taking hormones to getting his testicles removed, he says, in just three months, whereas the current guidelines call for continuous use for a year. He later got a breast augmentation, but instead of feeling more

himself, he says he felt worse. So more depressed after you transitioned than before. I had never really been suicidal before until I had my breast augmentation. And about a week afterwards I wanted to like actually kill myself like I had a plan and I was gonna do it but I just kept thinking about like my family to stop myself it kind of felt like how am I ever gonna feel normal again like other guys now long before the anti-trans legislation was introduced across the country, the challenges facing the transgender community were daunting.

Trans lives matter! LGBTQ advocacy groups like GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign are worried that highlighting the stories of detransitioners could make things worse. Alfonso David is president of the Human Rights Campaign. We're talking about a community, transgender people that are already marginalized, that are being further marginalized and victimized by elected officials, by anti-equality forces.

They're being used as a political football. And these are real people. These are real lives that we're talking about. So what are some of the challenges right now facing the trans community? The trans community is facing an epidemic of violence. We've had at least 44 transgender people killed last year. Transgender youth, in many cases, attempt suicide at a rate of four times that of their peers. There's worry that the idea that people regret the move can be used against trans people in this political environment.

I worry about it too. I think the kinds of things we advocate for don't hurt trans people. Like we want there to be more help from therapists with dysphoria. We want there to be longer term tracking of health outcomes. Everyone benefits from that. Dr. Anderson says the stories of detransitioners mean the trans community as a whole needs more and better health care, not bans on treatment.

And she thinks it's a mistake to ignore their voices. I think we cannot turn a blind eye to the needs of those trans people who have gotten less than adequate care or even poor care. My heart goes out to them. And their stories are important. And we can't deny them. Earlier this month, the Biden administration, reversing actions taken by the Trump administration, said it will enforce protections against discrimination in health care for transgender people. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa?

As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at Visa.ca slash fintech. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Last March, an unprecedented swarm of more than 30,000 earthquakes shook a corner of southwestern Iceland and rattled houses in the capital Reykjavik 20 miles away. Some tremors lasted only a few seconds. Others punched in at 5.4 on the Richter scale.

Icelanders are used to earthquakes. The whole island is a volcanic hotspot. But this shook even the most stoic among them. Then, on March 19, volcanologists reported the world's newest volcano had burst open, unleashing a spectacular fountain of lava from a tear in the Earth's crust. It's called, I'm only going to say this once, Geldingadaler. So far, the lava hasn't stopped gushing, and neither can we, after seeing it from as close as we dared. This is what 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit looks like.

Incandescent chunks of molten rock, some as big as cars, explode 200 feet in the air, hurled upwards by some of the most elemental forces on the planet. At every new cascade of lava, the Earth rumbles like thunder from an alien world. We watched as lava poured out of the crater, changing Iceland's map forever. It's incredible. You can feel the heat. It's over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And at 500 feet, we can still feel this. And if you go too close, you can burn the skin. We had come to see Earth's newest real estate with Thor Thordarson, one of Iceland's top volcanologists.

Even he seemed a little starstruck at nature's fireworks. I've been looking at activity like this for almost four decades, and I still get mesmerized when I see it. Get mesmerized? Yes. I just sit there and I can watch it day in, day out. There are not many eruptions in the world where you can get this close. In March, it burst into the open in a lonely valley that was once an ancient Viking burial ground. Getting there felt like we'd stepped back in time. Prehistoric rocks littered the fields as our giant 4x4s raced along a dirt track, climbing the barren hills. It's a good show, isn't it?

Oh my God, it's spectacular. At the top, Thor Darson grabbed his gas mask in case the volcano belched out dangerous sulfur dioxide gas. Oxygen. We followed, carrying emergency oxygen. It wasn't long before we were on hands and knees, searching for volcanic glass. In here we have what we call tephra. We have thrown out the vent. These little hair-like pieces here?

Yes, you see them in here and the name pele is here after the goddess of pele here yes the volcano god is in hawaii from chunks the size of a car to little pieces that look like a strand of hair all of that coming out of that volcano. Yes, absolutely. The lava flows have been spectacular from the start, but the fountaining today was just out of the top drawer, just 10 out of 10. If there's one person who's on close terms with the volcano goddess Pele, it's Bruce Houghton, Hawaii's state volcanologist. He and Thor Darson have chased lava all over the world.

So when Iceland blew, Hawton wasn't going to let it pass. You go as quickly as you can. Many eruptions are over within a day or so. Thor had an inkling from way back that this was going to be a long one. So you got up and flew in from Hawaii? I waited. I waited. I waited. I can't believe them, but I waited until I was certain that it had a long life ahead of it. I think it is a beginning of a new eruption period.

A new eruption period. Yes, and I think we're going to see many more eruptions in the peninsula over the next, let's say, 200 to 400 years. That prospect has scientists scrambling to get here, the slow, steady lava flow fueling speculation of a new seismic era. Most eruptions, like the one in 2010 that shut down European air travel, pack an explosive punch. This one is a dream. It means scientists can collect a treasure trove of data

and home in on the holy grail of volcanology, how to predict an eruption. The worst thing you can do, ironically, in a volcanic eruption, is to tell the population, there's going to be an eruption sometime in the next three years, and then walk away and leave them with that. But it's trying to get to the point where you can offer a few days to a few weeks warning. And that's something, so far, we don't do that very well. Is this helping you hit that sweet spot?

We hope it will, but at the moment, we're just gathering the raw material. It's not like the Moses bringing the tablets off the mountain. You know, it's something that takes a long time to address all of the different lines of evidence. Eventually, you know, where we want to take the science of volcanology is to be able to predict, but

also in forecast eruptions. It took meteorology over 200 years to come up with a decent weather forecast. So we've only been at this for 100 years. Not us. Maybe collectively it's getting gross. For the record. One of the next generation of scientists trying to unlock the Earth's secrets is Texas train's geochemist Ed Marshall. So this is all still being pushed out.

Yes, exactly. A self-described lab rat, he couldn't believe his luck to be working at the University of Iceland when the eruption happened. Now he dresses for the office in a heat-protective suit. Digging past the cooled rock at the edge of the lava field, Marshall scoops up the smoldering lava and douses it in water. The flash cooling turns the lava instantly to glass. So when we take hot lava and we flash cool it into a glass,

we preserve all of the chemistry that is locked away in the liquid lava. It's still warm. Now what will you learn from this? So from these samples, we can study their compositions and learn where the lava came from and what's happened to it on the way to the surface. And how far down are we talking? In this case, about nine miles.

That's the deepest in thousands of years. This eruption is really a conduit to the Earth's mantle that we haven't been able to touch in Iceland in historic time. As we talked, the 30-foot lava wall continued to crack and crumble, pushing slowly towards us. You first came out here when this first started to erupt. That's right. What did this valley look like then? Well, this valley that we're in now had no lava in it at all. And what we're seeing is lava slowly coming out of the vent and just filling up the area around it like a bathtub.

How soon would that wall make it here? It depends. It could be here by the end end of the day potentially. 20 to 30 feet in about a day. Yeah yeah that's right. That's incredible. It's not just scientists who've been transfixed by the eruption. This is a country that names its children after volcanoes so no surprise that more than 90,000 have made the pilgrimage to see it. And who could pass up a ready-made barbecue? There are lava dogs, lava s'mores, lava selfies. At dusk, the crowds grew thicker, so one night, we decided to join them.

Look at that. Don't see that every day. No, we don't. Wow. We had asked Kristin Jónsdóttir, head of Iceland's earthquake monitoring, to come along. She told us most eruptions in Iceland start with a big bang. Not this one. Instead, the earth unzipped itself in almost a straight line. Lava boiled up, spreading to two vents, then nine.

Now, vent number five is the only one still active on this southwest peninsula. Jan's daughter told us that wasn't the only surprise. We have not seen an eruption on the peninsula for 800 years. 800 years? Yes. So this is something that I was not expecting to happen in my lifetime. How long can this keep up? We don't know.

That's the honest answer. We are not seeing any signs of a decrease. So we don't know. Just when we thought we had seen it all, the volcano had another idea. We watched as a huge stream of lava slithered down a new path into the valley. When we went to take a closer look, we couldn't believe our ears. It sounded like broken glass.

It was a molten lava fall. We're about 10 feet away. I'm not sure I can get much closer. Yeah, I'm not sure I can get much closer than this. It's about 10 feet away. Burns your face. But it was hard to turn away. You can see also over there, like you can see the glow inside. With more active volcanoes than almost anywhere else on Earth, seismologist Kristin Jonsdottir told us it's not hard to be moved by Iceland's volcanic arsenal.

And to see what she meant, we traveled inland. We are now flying along the western volcanic zone. So each one of those craters, there has been a volcanic eruption out of one of those craters. Yeah, exactly. We flew along a deep trench that stretched for miles. Jan's daughter told us Iceland straddles the border of two tectonic plates. The friction between the plates creates earthquakes and an opening for lava to escape. So this is a fissure. So you can

see there's a whole lot of opening happening here. Now would this be a place where during a quake the lava would come from these fissures? Might do. Might do. We flew past mountains of ash 10,000 years old, more remnants of past eruptions. We were heading to Kotla, one of the island's most violent volcanoes, its center covered with a vast glacier twice the size of Manhattan. If this were to blow, is this one of the most explosive volcanoes on the island? Yes, it is. Would this stop air traffic all over Europe like the last one did? It might do. When's the last time it erupted?

It erupted last time in 1918. But before that, it had eruptions quite regularly every 50 years. So it's long overdue. It's long overdue. So is it smart for us to be here right now? Jan's daughter assured us that Katla was showing no signs of waking up just then. Six seismic monitors record Katla's every hiccup, part of an extensive network that includes GPS sensors and satellite images. I'm mostly interested in what is happening underneath the ground,

the stuff that we don't see. How do we put together that image of what's happening on the ground? And how do we forecast or predict what's going to happen next? And so what's going on right now that's helping you get closer to that goal? Absolutely. So with every eruption, we learn something about the structure of the volcanoes. And not only in Iceland, but this has also an impact worldwide. In the land of fire and ice, the volcano bug bites hard. This latest eruption is the perfect recruitment tool for a new generation of volcanologists.

Chasing lava, one scientist told us, it shakes you to your core. Last year, the death of George Floyd in the hands of Minneapolis police came on Memorial Day. Ninety-nine years before, that same week, Black Americans suffered a massacre. In the days after World War I, a neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called Greenwood, was among the wealthiest Black communities. Oil made Greenwood rich, but jealousy made it suffer. In 1921, a white mob with incendiary rage burned Greenwood to ash. Even memories were murdered when the dead were dropped into unmarked graves. In December of 2019, before the pandemic, we found Tulsa preparing to embrace a reckoning with a plan to exhume the truth and raise the dead. The community that is Greenwood has thriving businesses,

professional offices, doctors, lawyers, dentists. John W. Franklin speaks of Greenwood in the present tense. Greenwood is the nexus of that African-American community. Perhaps because he studied Greenwood in 32 years as a historian at the Smithsonian, or likely because Greenwood is personal. And my grandfather moves here from Rentersville in February 1921. And he's the first person in the family to go to college, Buck Colbert Franklin. Buck Colbert Franklin was a lawyer who chased his dream to a promised land. named Greenwood Negro Wall Street because the district was lined with black-owned shops, restaurants, two newspapers,

a 54-room grand hotel, a hospital, and the Dreamland Theater, which would soon boast air conditioning. But on the day after Memorial Day 1921, Buck Franklin awoke to fearful news. He hears that there's to be possibly a lynching. There's this black man who's been caught with this white woman in the elevator, and the newspapers are saying, read all about it.

There's extra, extra, read all about it. Tulsa's white newspapers told of a black teenager who allegedly attacked a white female elevator operator. At the jail, a lynch mob demanded the prisoner. Black veterans of World War I arrived to shield the defendant for his day in court. A shot was fired, and in a running gun battle, the mob chased the black vets to Greenwood. One of the moments during the riot that your grandfather wrote about was this. On they rushed, whooping to the tops of their voices, firing their guns every step they took.

What is it like for you to read those words today? He too was traumatized by seeing people being shot in front of his eyes. He describes a woman who's trying to find her child who's run in front of her and she's unafraid of the bullets raining down because her concern is to find her child. What began as an attempted lynching at the jail erupted into a massacre. From a high grain elevator, a machine gun laid fire on Greenwood Avenue.

Where's the fire department? Where's the police when we need them? We're part of a city. This is not some small town. This is a city of wealth and order and governance. It is now taken over by a mob. The police joined the mob. National Guard troops pressed the attack against what one Guard officer called the enemy. Quotes from eyewitnesses include, old women and men, children, were running and

screaming everywhere. A deputy sheriff reported a black man dragged behind a car. His head was being bashed in, the deputy said, bouncing on the steel rails and bricks. But what happened next may have frightened Buck Franklin even more. And he hears planes circling and sees roofs of buildings catching fire. And these are from turpentine balls, burning turpentine balls dropped from planes. The first time in American history the airplanes were used to terrorize America was not at 9-11, was not at Pearl Harbor. It was right here in the Greenwood District. Reverend Robert Turner's Vernon AME Church was among at least five churches burned, along with 1,200 homes. A photo was crudely and imperfectly hand-lettered at the time, running the Negro

out of Tulsa. 36-odd square blocks, city blocks, was destroyed. And before they destroyed it, they looted. They took nice furniture, money. When the Black Hospital burned, white hospitals refused to take Greenwood's wounded. Those who bled to death included Greenwood's most prominent surgeon. Ultimately, one hospital did make space in its basement for black casualties. The number of dead is estimated between 150 and 300. Survivors included 10,000 now homeless African Americans. 6,000 of them were herded into internment camps and then released weeks later.

I don't know how they did it, but the following Sunday after the massacre, they came and worshipped in our basement. And that's the same basement that we have today. I can't breathe! The murder of a black man at the hands of police is today shouted into the national memory. Thanks to all of you for being here. But in 1921, it remained possible to erase a genocide. I grew up attending segregated Tulsa public schools. Never in any of the schools was anything ever said about it.

The congregation of Vernon AME Church is two generations beyond 1921, but they too were victimized. This was not taught in the public schools. No, you never heard about this in class. You never heard a word about it. When I went to OU in 1998, I was sitting in a class on African-American history, and the professor was talking about this place

where black people had businesses and had money and had doctors and lawyers, and he said it was in Tulsa. And I raised my hand and said, no, I'm from Tulsa. That's not accurate. And he was talking about this massacre, riot. I said, man, what are you talking about?

I said, I went to school on Greenwood. I've never heard of this ever. How many people were arrested, tried, for what happened in Greenwood? No one. Two or three hundred people murdered, an entire community burned to the ground, and the police were unable

to find a single person. It's a real tragedy. All the thousands of claims that were filed by African Americans, not a one, not a one insurance company paid that claim. And our church was included. No insurance honored for Black Tulsans, no arrests made, no complete count of the dead. The Salvation Army recorded only that it fed 37 gravediggers. The nameless were buried in unmarked graves, while their families were locked down in the internment camps.

I wonder if there are any doubts in this room about whether there are mass graves in Tulsa, Oklahoma. No doubts. My great-grandmother... Oral history's passed-down generations pointed to at least four sites of possible mass graves. As a mayor, I view it as a homicide investigation. Phase one... G.T. Bynum is Tulsa's republican mayor in 2018 he ordered an

investigation of all remaining evidence what you have is a case of law and civil order being overrun by people who were filled with hatred we believe at the end of this road we're walking down right now is one of the sites where we found an anomaly. Anomalies of disturbed earth showed up in the studies of Scott Hammersted. That's not a mower. It's ground penetrating radar. And right here is the anomaly as we see it. He's a senior researcher at the Oklahoma

Archaeological Survey. The anomalies that we're looking at, what are those? It's just contrast between the surrounding soil that's undisturbed and then this soil that has been disturbed. So we're not seeing in these images human remains? No, no, it's definitely not like CSI. You don't see individual skeletons, you just see disturbances and contrasts, which is why you can't really say necessarily that for sure it's a common grave, but it's very consistent with one. Of course, there's any number of things it could be. That's always the thing I have to remind myself. And there's only one way to find out. That is exactly right. We have to dig right we have to dig we have to dig

an excavation in october led by university of florida forensic anthropologist phoebe stubblefield revealed a mass grave with at least 12 individuals determining cause of death will be complicated because of that period's Spanish flu pandemic. So just because you find a burial site, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's from the massacre. Correct. And so I'm interested in markers like signs of violence or any kind of ballistic injuries or chop injuries. Can you retrieve DNA? If it's a good preservation state, there's a high probability. Would it be possible, in your opinion, to actually identify some of these people?

We could try for genealogical matches. So if we had people now who say, Oh, I'm missing a relative from that time period, here's my DNA, then we can make matches through similar markers and do the genealogical matches. There's a long legacy from 1921. Tulsa is still one of the most segregated cities in the country. The north part of Tulsa is black, the south part is white, and the twain don't meet very

much. Right, because of the history of racial disparity that exists in our city. A kid that's growing up in the predominantly African-American part of our city is expected to live 11 years less than a kid that's growing up in a wider part of the city. By the way, Tulsa is not unique in that regard. You see disparities like that in major cities all around America. A full excavation begins on June 1st. Next steps include recommendations for permanent burial and the question of how to honor those who have waited 100 years for justice. How do you commemorate an event that gives dignity and honor to the people who have been lost?

We have taken, in recent decades, in our memorials to etch the names of every single person who was lost. The 9-11 memorial, the Vietnam memorial. That's not going to be possible here. We don't know the names. We don't know the names. And you're going to have to do some kind of, you know,

we have the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. So it has to be something that is representative of lost souls, lost in anonymity. Something like that will have to be planned. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week for a summer of classic and updated stories while we begin reporting and shooting our 54th season of 60 Minutes.