Students across Oklahoma will soon learn about a dark moment in the state’s history that has long gone unmentioned — until now.

On Wednesday, state legislators announced plans to move forward with an initiative that would feature the history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre as part of the public school curriculum. The new framework, which the state’s education department will soon release statewide, will equip teachers with the resources and support they need to properly teach what’s described as one of the worst instances of racial violence in American history.

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The massacre unfolded June 1, 1921, when an angry white mob besieged Tulsa’s Greenwood District, an affluent African-American community also known as “Black Wall Street.” The thriving neighborhood of schools, homes and businesses was looted and burned to the ground amid claims that a Black man had assaulted a white woman.

An estimated 300 people, the majority of them Black, were killed and hundreds of others unaccounted for.

For decades, details of the deadly massacre have been swept under the rug. Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford recently spoke with local station KFOR  about the de facto embargo placed on the massacre.

Source: Oklahoma to Finally Teach History of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre as Part of School Curriculum