How I Talk to My Kids About Slavery and Jim Crow as a White Southerner
The question came while I was clearing plates, somewhere between the mac and cheese and the dishwasher with the broken latch that needs an extra push.
“Did we ever own slaves?”
I stopped. My son was nine, and he had been learning about the Civil War in school. His textbook had a picture of soldiers in gray and blue, some words about states’ rights, and a map of the Battle of Chancellorsville. The word “ownership” hadn’t come up yet.
My first instinct was no. My second was to say something vague about history. My third was the actual truth: I don’t know.
I still don’t know, fully. I grew up in central Virginia, in a town with two Civil War statues and a high school named after a Confederate general. That’s a strange thing to write, because until college, I couldn’t have told you which general it was. This is the oddness of being white and Southern: the history is all around you, in the street names, in the brick courthouse, in the way some families have owned land for generations and others haven’t. But nobody in my childhood ever connected those dots for me.
So when my son asked, I didn’t have a tidy answer. I told him the truth. “That’s a good question. I genuinely don’t know. Let’s look together.”
That phrase—let’s look together—has become our standard response to hard questions. It works better than a lecture. It also works better than silence.
We started with the 1870 census. That’s the first census after the Civil War where Black Americans were listed by name. If your family owned enslaved people, the paper trail usually shows up somewhere before that, but not in the way you might expect. Enslaved people were recorded on separate schedules, listed by age and sex and color, with no names. Meanwhile, the white family name sits at the top of the page. It’s a stark, quiet way to learn how completely a human being could be erased from the record.
I didn’t find our family’s name attached to anyone. But I also didn’t find much of anything. My ancestors on that side were poor farmers in the Shenandoah Valley, and poor white farmers in the 1850s often didn’t own people. They also didn’t leave many letters or diaries. The absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of absence, and I told my son that too. “We don’t know. Some stories weren’t written down.”
That’s the part I’m still working through. How do you feel about the history of slavery and Jim Crow in your state? For me, guilt isn’t the right word. It’s more like a permanent secondhand awareness. I didn’t do these things, and neither did my parents, and I don’t think my great-grandparents did either. But I benefit from the system they lived inside. We all do. That’s not a moral failing to be forgiven. It’s just a fact that needs to be understood.
My grandmother used to talk about her childhood in North Carolina, where Black women did the laundry and ironing in her mother’s house. She spoke about them warmly—said they were good women, hard workers. But she never mentioned their names. She never mentioned what they were paid, or whether they had a separate entrance. That’s the Jim Crow I remember from my own childhood: not harsh words, but omissions. People politely left out of the story. And white Southerners, myself included, grew up absorbing that absence.
I don’t think you can raise kids in the South without confronting what persists. The signs are gone, but the structures aren’t. When I drive my son to school, I cross a highway that was built in the 1960s. That highway neatly separates the older, poorer neighborhoods from the newer ones, and it took me a long time to realize it wasn’t just a road. It was a decision. The same kind of decision that shaped which schools got funding, which neighborhoods got mortgages, which families could build wealth. My kids go to a school district that is mostly white. That’s not accidental. It’s history showing up in the present, wearing a normal face.
When my son asked about slavery, I wasn’t ready. But I’m trying to be more ready for what comes next. And what I’ve learned is that children don’t need perfect answers. They need adults who don’t change the subject.
One thing that helps is asking where their question is coming from. Instead of saying “that’s not nice,” you can say, “That’s a really interesting thing to ask. Did you hear someone say that at school? Were you reading something?” That turns a tense moment into a conversation. Kids repeat things. Often they’re not trying to be cruel—they’re trying to understand. If we shut them down, they learn that race is a forbidden topic. And that doesn’t make them less curious. It just makes them curious on social media instead.
For parents who want to do something concrete, start with your own family history. Ask the oldest relatives questions while they’re still here. Ask where their grandparents lived. Ask what they know about the land. You don’t have to do a formal ancestry project. Just record a phone call with your grandmother. You’ll learn more from twenty minutes of her talking than from any website.
Teachers can do something similar by making the curriculum less about battles and more about ordinary life. Kids understand science, math, reading. They also understand fairness. When you talk about sharecropping, or the convict leasing system, or the literacy tests that kept Black people from voting, you don’t need to tell them that these things were wrong. They already know. The key is not skipping from Emancipation to the Civil Rights Movement like everything in between was just an awkward pause. Jim Crow was its own era with its own laws, its own violence, and its own set of normal people who went along with it. Those normal people had children. Those children are still here.
If you’re planning a field trip or a family visit to a plantation, ask before you book whether the tour includes the history of enslaved people. Many sites now do. Some don’t. You can ask directly: “Does your tour include the lives and stories of the enslaved people who lived here?” If the answer is no, find a different place. There are museums and historical societies across the South that tell the fuller story, often run by Black historians who have been doing this work for decades and deserve more support.
We still haven’t found our family’s slaveholding record. I’m not sure we ever will. My son has mostly moved on to Minecraft. But the question is still open, and I think that’s okay. History isn’t a puzzle you finish. It’s a set of things you keep paying attention to.
Last week, he asked me why one of our local parks has a Confederate flag painted on a picnic table. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded confused. I didn’t have the answer. I told him I’d been wondering about it too.
We sat there for a minute. Then we looked it up together.
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