What Do White Southerners Tell Their Kids About Slavery and Jim Crow? A Teacher’s Reflection
The last parent left at 7:40, but one woman lingered by my classroom door. Her son was in my eighth-grade history class, and she’d introduced herself earlier with a warm smile. Now she folded her arms and said, “So I have to ask. Are you going to teach them about slavery?”
It wasn’t an angry question. It was the kind you ask when you’ve been thinking about it for a while. I told her yes, we were already a few weeks into it. She looked at the floor and said, “I just don’t want him to hate himself.”
I knew what she meant. I also knew that I’d been the one standing in her shoes, just a few generations back.
I grew up in Georgia, in a family that had been southern for as long as anyone could remember. My great-grandfather farmed cotton, and there are old photographs of him standing in front of a sharecropper’s cabin. No one ever talked about a slave owner in the family tree, and I didn’t push. In my house, history was something that happened to other people, far away, in places with different accents. The South we lived in was polite, slow, and quietly forgetful.
It wasn’t until I started teaching that I realized how much of that silence was deliberate.
My classroom looks like most history rooms, I suppose. American flags from old presidents, maps with faded crease lines, a globe that hasn’t been updated since the 1990s. But the conversations we have are not faded. When we study slavery, I don’t start with cotton gins and economics. I start with people. We read narratives from the WPA interviews, where formerly enslaved people talk about their lives in plain, matter-of-fact sentences that still have the power to stop a class cold. We look at a plantation ledger from Virginia that lists people as livestock. We talk about that numbering system, how it was designed to strip a person of everything except labor.
My students sit with that for a while. Then they ask the hard questions.
“Did all White people own slaves?”
“Why didn’t they just leave?”
“If my family was here then, were they part of it?”
That last one is the one I dread and respect the most. Because I don’t have a neat answer. I tell them the truth: a lot of White southern families were poor farmers who didn’t own slaves, but that didn’t mean they were innocent. They lived in a system that gave them rank because of their skin. Even if they didn’t hold a whip, they held a place in a hierarchy built on violence. That’s not comfortable to hear. It’s not supposed to be.
When I talked with that mother, I didn’t say all that. I told her something my own mentor said to me years ago: teaching slavery isn’t about making White kids feel guilty. It’s about making them feel responsible. There’s a difference between guilt, which keeps you stuck, and responsibility, which asks you to pay attention.
She nodded slowly and said, “But he’s only thirteen.”
And I understood. At thirteen, you can barely explain why you put your shoes in the hallway. You’re not ready to carry the weight of centuries. But if we don’t hand it to them carefully, they’ll inherit it anyway, with no language and no tools.
That’s the part that people outside the South often miss. You can’t just decide not to pass down history. It seeps into the ground, into the school districts, into the way a city’s highways curve around certain neighborhoods. A white parent can choose to say nothing, but their child still sees the monument in the town square, still notices which side of the tracks has newer sidewalks. The impact of slavery and Jim Crow isn’t a thing you carry in your heart. It’s a thing you can observe in the world.
I was in my twenties before I understood redlining. I’d been driving to a friend’s apartment in Atlanta, and I took a wrong turn onto a street with beautiful old homes, then a few blocks later a street with boarded-up houses. The transition was so abrupt it looked like someone had drawn a line. Later I learned that someone literally had. The 1930s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps graded neighborhoods by race and assigned them colors. Green for White, red for Black. Lenders refused mortgages in red areas, and homeowners couldn’t build equity. That was Jim Crow, not in a textbook, but in concrete and property values.
Now I teach that map to my students. We put a color copy of a 1938 map of Richmond next to a current map of the city, and they see the same shape. They see that the redlined neighborhoods still have underfunded schools, fewer grocery stores, higher asthma rates. They start to understand that the Civil Rights Act didn’t fix everything, because the physical structure of inequality was never dismantled. It just got rebranded.
That’s the conversation White southern parents often fear, so they avoid it. They say, “That was then, this is now,” because they think that’s the only way their kids can feel okay about being White and southern. But the kids I teach don’t want to be told that the past doesn’t matter. They want to know what it was, and what they should do about what it left behind.
So here is what I’ve learned to do, as a parent and a teacher, when the hard questions come up.
First, I don’t answer a question my child hasn’t asked. If your seven-year-old asks about a Confederate monument, you don’t need to deliver a lecture on chattel slavery. You can say, “That statue is a memorial to people who fought to keep Black people enslaved. We don’t honor that in our family.” Then stop. Let them ask more if they want. They usually will, but they need a pause first.
Second, I don’t soften the wrongness. It’s tempting to explain slavery as “a difficult chapter” or “people were different then.” But children are not confused by moral clarity. They’re actually calmest when adults say plainly, “Owning another human being was wrong, and the people who did it made a terrible choice.” That doesn’t indict a whole family or region. It names the evil so a child can recognize it if they ever see something like it again.
Third, I separate choice from ancestry. I tell my students that you can’t choose your family tree, but you can choose what you do with its history. If you find out an ancestor owned slaves, you don’t have to apologize for them. You can’t apologize for them. What you can do is learn how that wealth shaped the landscape, and then ask yourself if you benefit from that same structure now. That’s a much harder discussion, and it’s where real education starts.
I think of that parent again sometimes. I don’t know if her son went home and talked about what we read from Frederick Douglass, or if he shut his notebook and went to practice. I hope he asked her questions. I hope she had a better answer than she thought she’d have. That’s the part of this work that doesn’t have a clear finish line. You don’t get to close the book on the past, but you can decide whether you’re going to look at it honestly.
The South is still full of soft summer evenings and front porches and people who hold doors for strangers. I love it in a way that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t grown up here. But it’s also a place where history is never really past. It’s in the names of the schools, the lines of the interstates, the quiet pauses in family conversations at Thanksgiving.
When that mother asked if her son would hate himself, I should have said: He won’t hate himself. He might hate what happened. He might even hate that he didn’t know about it sooner. But self-hatred isn’t the goal, and it’s not even a useful emotion. The useful one is recognition. Recognition that you live in a house built with bricks you didn’t lay, on ground you didn’t own, with doors that were locked by someone else and left open just enough for you to walk through.
I don’t have all the words for that yet. I’m still learning them, year after year, in a classroom that holds thirty desks and a history that won’t stay in the past. But I know this: the question isn’t whether the impact of slavery and Jim Crow persists. It does. The question is whether we can sit with our kids in that truth long enough to let them decide what comes next.
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