CL Daniel was serving in the US Army at Camp Gordon in Georgia during World War I when he suffered a serious leg injury and was honorably discharged in 1919.
As a new veteran, Daniel made his way to Ogden, Utah, to help build railroad tracks, his family believes. However, he soon became desperate to access his disability benefits from the federal government so he could afford to get back home to his mother in Newnan, Georgia.
Daniel, who was Black, expressed his needs in a letter dated February 25, 1921, to the US War Department.
“Dear sir please send me a nof money to git me a job and to eat with till I get better send now I am asking for I nead it long ways from home and send me a copy of my reckart for pruf to these peples I have a por mother in the state of Georgia town of Newnan … ,” the letter read.
It’s unclear if Daniel ever received those benefits.
But in his trek to Georgia, Daniel, for unknown reasons, stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a race massacre would erupt, his family says. During the violence that happened over two days – May 31 and June 1, 1921 – a White mob destroyed an affluent Black community. As many as 300 people were killed.
Daniel, who was in his 20s, was among those killed in the Tulsa Race Massacre, his family says.
More than 100 years later, the city of Tulsa honored Daniel at a memorial service last week after his remains were excavated in a mass graves investigation at Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery.
The investigation aims to identify remains in certain unmarked graves and determine whether they remains were those of victims of the race massacre. Daniel, who investigators concur was a victim of the massacre, is the first person to be identified out of 46 people who were exhumed since the city broke ground at the cemetery in 2020, state archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck said.
The circumstances of Daniel’s death are unknown, Stackelbeck said. His remains showed no signs of gunshot wounds, she said.
Stackelbeck said experts used forensic and DNA analyses of Daniel’s remains to connect him to his family members.
“This is a very old, cold case, and so (we’re) just simply looking at it from the fact that these people deserve to be found and reunited with their families,” Stackelbeck said. “Their descendants deserve to know where they are and what happened to them. And they deserve better respect than how they were treated in life.”
Five of Daniel’s descendants traveled to Tulsa for the memorial service.
The memorial paid tribute to Daniel and other unidentified people that were exhumed in the investigation. A special monument was erected at the cemetery, and headstones will be installed for each burial.
“It was bittersweet to hear that we had a relative caught up in the massacre,” said Andrew Poythress, Daniel’s great-great nephew. “But it’s also sweet to know that he has been identified and he’s not just a number or a body just buried in a field. He actually has a name. He was a real person and that’s the joy of it.”
Stacy Daniel Brown, Daniel’s great-niece, said she had mixed emotions when the city called her earlier this year to say it had confirmed the DNA match.
“It’s hard to even express those feelings to be honest with you,” Brown said. “To know that at such a young age he had been taken from our great-great grandmother who was the mother of seven sons that she raised alone.”
Brown credited Daniel’s mother, Amanda Daniel – and the letters she wrote to the government seeking answers about his death and the location of his body -– with helping researchers connect the veteran to his family a century later.
The city linked CL Daniel to the massacre, in part, through a letter written by an attorney on behalf of Amanda Daniel to the US Veterans Administration in 1936 regarding her son’s survivor benefits.
The letter, found in the National Archives, states “C. L. was killed in a race riot in Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921.”
“She was a very resilient woman,” Poythress said of Amanda Daniel.
Brown said the city’s discovery has also helped some of CL Daniel’s descendants, including herself, meet some relatives for the first time. They now have weekly Zoom calls and are discussing plans for a family reunion.
The family is also planning to buy a plot at a cemetery in Newnan, Georgia, and bury Daniel’s remains near his mother.
“Black people have not gotten a fair shake in this country,” Poythress said. “The telling of our stories and what we have contributed to this country … so now we have the opportunity to tell our story, and we just want it to be told right.”