from the Courthouse" when Black business owners came to the defense of a lone Black man being attacked by a group of around six white men. It is possible that the eyewitness did not recognize the fact that this incident was occurring as a part of a rolling gunfight which was already underway. In either case, as news of the violence spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded. White rioters invaded Greenwood that night and the next morning, killing men and burning and looting stores and homes. Around noon on June 1, the Oklahoma National Guard imposed martial law, ending the massacre. About 10,000 Black people were left homeless, and the cost of the property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $ million in ). By the end of 1922, largely, the residents' homes had been rebuilt, but the city and real estate companies refused to compensate them. Many survivors left Tulsa, while residents who chose to stay in the city, regardless of race, largely kept silent about the terror, violence, and resulting losses for decades. The massacre was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories. In 1996, 75 years after the massacre, a bipartisan group in the state legislature authorized the formation of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The commission's final report, published in 2001, states that the city had conspired with the racist mob; it recommended a program of reparations to survivors and their descendants. The state passed legislation to establish scholarships for the descendants of survivors, encourage the economic development of Greenwood, and develop a park in memory of the victims of the massacre in Tulsa. The park was dedicated in 2010. Schools in Oklahoma have been required to teach students about the massacre since 2002, and in 2020, the massacre officially became a part of the Oklahoma school curriculum. Background In 1921, Oklahoma had a racially, socially, and politically tense atmosphere. The territory of northern Oklahoma had been established for the forced resettlement of Native Americans from the southeast, some of whom had owned slaves. The "first Black inhabitants of Indian Territory were those who came as enslaved people with their native owners." Other areas had received many settlers from the South whose families had been slaveholders before the Civil War. Oklahoma was admitted as a state on