Ground-penetrating radar in hunt for dead in racial massacre
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Researchers searching for a possible mass grave from a racial massacre in 1887 said they picked up signals Thursday of disturbed earth at a site in south Louisiana, but they cautioned they don't know yet what ground-penetrating radar detected.
The signals were detected Thursday, the first day of a survey of a vacant lot in the community of Thibodaux, where locals believe white mobs dumped the bodies of African-Americans killed during a Reconstruction era rampage. The mobs were out to break a monthlong strike by sugar plantation field hands, many of them ex-slaves, in the era following the American civil war.