How a Southern Teacher Finally Stopped Avoiding the Hard History of My Own State
The first time a student asked me if her family had owned slaves, I was standing at the back of my eighth-grade classroom in rural Georgia. We were looking at a 1938 photograph of a cotton mill, and I had just explained that many of the workers were sharecroppers, mostly Black, while the mill owners were white. A girl in the front row, Katie, raised her hand and asked, very quietly, “Did my family own any?”
I didn’t know how to answer. Not just because I didn’t know her genealogy, but because the question itself seemed to hang in the air like a fog. I grew up in a small town in Alabama, about an hour from here. My own family never talked about the Civil War or slavery or Jim Crow in any specific way. My grandmother would say things like “Times were hard back then” or “We didn’t have much either,” and that was the end of it. So when Katie asked, I felt my throat close. I said something like, “That’s a really important question to research with your family,” and then I moved on.
But the moment stayed with me. I started thinking about how often I had dodged the actual history of the place I lived in. I had taught the Civil War for years—dates, battles, Reconstruction—but I had never really taught the texture of daily life under Jim Crow. I had never talked about signs on water fountains, or the way voting restrictions worked, or how redlining shaped the very neighborhoods my students drove through every day.
It wasn’t until my own daughter, who was seven at the time, brought home a library book about Ruby Bridges that I realized I had to get better at this. We were sitting on the couch and she looked up and said, “Mom, were there white people who wanted her to go to school? Or did all of them yell at her?” That was her way of asking, “Are we the bad guys?”
I think that’s the question white Southerners carry, whether we say it out loud or not. We worry that if we open the door to the past, we’ll find our own ancestors standing on the other side with a whip or a white hood. We worry that acknowledging what happened means accepting a kind of personal guilt we can’t do anything about. So we stay quiet. We say “That was a long time ago” or “Everyone had their own struggles.” But that silence teaches children something, too. It teaches them that this history is shameful, unspeakable, and somehow separate from who we are now.
What helped me was learning to separate the vague anxiety from the actual history. Katie’s question didn’t mean I had to know her family’s slaveholding record. It meant she was trying to find her place in a story that felt so big and brutal she needed to anchor it somewhere. What my daughter needed wasn’t a confession. She needed to know that white people did many things—some terrible, some courageous, and many that were just ordinary—and that she gets to choose what she does with that inheritance.
So I changed how I taught. Instead of starting with the Civil War, I started with the story of the Barton County School System, which was founded in 1870 as a segregated school for white children. My own great-grandfather attended it. I pulled the records from the local historical society and showed my students the ragged textbook lists for the Black school across town, which was three miles away and didn’t have running water until 1952. We looked at the census from 1860, right here in our county, and I asked them to find the names of enslaved people. It was hard. The enslaved people were listed only by age and sex under the owner’s name. My students were uncomfortable. So was I.
One boy, Marcus, raised his hand and said, “My family couldn’t read or write then because it was illegal. But my great-great-grandmother taught herself.” He didn’t say it angrily. He said it like a fact, and then he looked at me like he was checking to see if I could handle it. That was the moment I understood something important: the history isn’t just about what white people did. It’s about what all of us carried forward. For white students, that’s a complicated mix of privilege and silence. For Black students, it’s a legacy of resistance and survival. Both are true, and both need to be taught.
At home, I started using more precise language with my daughter. Instead of saying “people were mean back then,” I said, “There were laws that made life unfair for Black people, and many white people worked to change those laws. Some white people were the ones who created the unfairness. But our job now is not to worry about whether our family did something wrong. Our job is to notice when things are unfair and do something about it.” She seemed satisfied with that. I think she needed to know she wasn’t personally guilty, but she also needed to know she wasn’t personally innocent in a way that excused her from caring.
I’ve had to learn to sit with my own discomfort. When I read about the lynching of a Black man in a nearby county in 1902, just twenty miles from where I grew up, I had to remind myself that I didn’t have to feel personally ashamed to feel responsible. There’s a difference. Shame closes you down. Responsibility opens a door.
These days, when Katie’s question comes up—and it always does, in some form—I answer it differently. I say, “I don’t know, but you could find out. And while you’re finding out, think about what you hope to learn about the person on both sides of that history.” I also say, “It’s okay if your family did something that feels hard to talk about. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it. It means you have a chance to be honest about who you come from, and then decide who you want to be.”
I’m not going to pretend I’ve figured it all out. My husband and I still argue with relatives at Thanksgiving when they say things like “Why don’t they let it go?” I still have to pause before I show my students a photograph of a lynching postcard. But I no longer think that pausing is a sign of weakness. It’s just the place before you speak, and what matters is what you say next.
The impact of slavery and Jim Crow is still everywhere in this state—in the rivers of school funding, in the names on courthouse squares, in the way we drive through certain roads and don’t think twice about who built them. It’s not a ghost. It’s a living structure. But I’ve stopped trying to learn it all at once or teach it perfectly. I try to do what a good parent does when a child asks a hard question: I sit beside them, I don’t look away, and I tell them the truth as best I can—knowing there’s more to say tomorrow.
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