Eight-year-old Rosetta Serrano didn’t know much about slavery when she entered the second grade at PS 372—The Children’s School—in Brooklyn, New York. But after studying slavery with her teacher, Steve Quester, she discovered something astounding: Black people had been enslaved by white people.

Every year, millions of students like Rosetta learn about the ugly and far-reaching institution that irrevocably shaped the history of our country. Teaching about slavery is tough. The facts are complex. The emotions those facts evoke are intense. It’s no wonder that educators tend to shy away from the topic, assigning readings from the textbook and avoiding class discussions.

Teaching about an institution as ugly as slavery will never be easy. But it can be done well, and the topic is too important to be left untaught.

Chauncey Spears, director of Advanced Learning and Gifted Programs in the Office of Curriculum and Instruction of the Mississippi Department of Education, says the key to teaching about slavery is taking a multi-faceted approach: “If enslavement is taught correctly and in the proper context—with a focus on real people making real choices—and there is a cohesive, collaborative teacher community with shared instructional values, there can be transformative teaching and learning that is responsive to students.”

Look Within

Creating the “proper context” Spears describes starts when educators look within themselves and acknowledge any personal biases or privileges that might influence their teaching.

Lisa Gilbert is an education coordinator at the Missouri History Museum. Confronting her own emotions about slavery has prepared her to have meaningful discussions about the topic with her students. “As an educator,” says Gilbert, “I want to be truly present with my students. For me, this means sharing my struggle with this history. I don’t understand how it could have been, and yet it was. It troubles me so deeply. And I don’t have the answers. But that’s OK, because history is something we wrestle with, something that challenges us to know ourselves and decide how we can use our lives to shape a better future.”

Set the Stage

Just as educators often feel uncomfortable talking about slavery, students may be hesitant to enter conversations or share their emotions about the topic. Developing a strong sense of trust allows for hard conversations and the asking of hard questions, says Spears.

Ina Pannell-Saint Surin, a fourth-grade teacher at PS 372, agrees. She works hard throughout the year to foster honest discussion about different cultures and guides the development of cultural literacy that enables students to appropriately phrase questions and seek answers.

It is within this construct that Pannell-Saint Surin is able to share her own emotional reactions to slavery. This, she explains, allows students to not only see the impact of slavery, but to share their own emotions.

“Sometimes,” says Gilbert, “we hide from the emotional content of this material. Sometimes we try to resolve it neatly, believing we will help students feel safer this way. But what we’re really doing is leaving them adrift to deal with whatever emotions come up, alone.”

Tell the Whole Story

It’s a goal Quester, the Brooklyn teacher, keeps in mind as he moves away from the traditional slavery story. Many textbooks focus on subjugation and tales of the Underground Railroad or the Emancipation Proclamation. But Quester deepens student understanding by broadening the narrative to show enslaved people as the courageous human beings they were.

Pannell-Saint Surin emphasizes culture when she teaches about slavery. “This way,” she explains, “we can impart the knowledge that Africans had rich, vibrant culture[s] that met their needs before being captured. And that [these cultures have] persevered through great odds and obstacles.”

That knowledge is a jumping-off point, says Gilbert, “the start of a conversation in which we ask: ‘Who do you want to be, and what role do you want to play in creating a more just society?’”

Don't

• Use role-plays. They can induce trauma and minimization, and are almost certain to provoke parental concerns.
   
• Focus only on brutality. Horrific things happened to enslaved people, but there are also stories of hope, survival and resistance.
   
• Separate children by race.
   
• Treat kids as modern-day proxies for enslaved people or owners of enslaved people.
   
• Make race-based assumptions about a child’s relationship to slavery.

Do

• Use primary sources and oral histories. Danny Gonzalez, museum curator for St. Louis County, Mo., recommends letters written by Spotswood Rice, a formerly enslaved man who enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War.
• Underscore enslaved people’s contributions. Roads, towns, buildings and crops wouldn’t have been possible without them.
• Use photographs that reflect activism, family life and other daily activities.
• Choose texts that illustrate enslaved people as whole individuals. Try Henry’s Freedom Box by Ellen Levine or Minty: A Story of Young Harriet Tubman by Alan Schroeder.
• Organize field trips to historic sites that reflect enslaved people in a human and courageous light as well as to places that reflect the lives of black people beyond slavery.
• Introduce stories about black and white abolitionists. Black abolitionists were present, from the beginning, as vocal and courageous advocates for their people.

Essential Elements

Slavery in North America lasted for centuries, affected millions of lives, and contributed to every political, legal, social and economic institution fundamental to our country’s identity. Because the topic can be so overwhelming, the narrative of slavery taught in schools is often oversimplified: Owners of enslaved people become the bad guys; enslaved people become the victims; and Abraham Lincoln becomes the hero who saves the day.

The reality was much more complicated. While not a comprehensive list, the five dimensions of slavery listed below will help you approach teaching this difficult subject in more depth. These often-overlooked areas focus on the people involved, the choices they made, and the context within which they made those choices.

The Institution

The term slavery did not always hold the institutional meaning it did in colonial America and in European colonies. Enslaved people in ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and parts of Africa, for example, were closer to what we now think of as indentured servants or prisoners of war. The trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved people drastically redefined slavery in a number of ways.Enslaved people became the property of their owners for indefinite periods of time; ownership of enslaved people could be inherited; and the children of enslaved people automatically became the property of the family who owned their mothers. The perception of enslaved people as property that could be bought, sold, traded or inherited was marked by use of the term chattel slavery.

Slavery in European colonies also became racialized in a new way. There is evidence of Africans living and working in the American colonies as free men and indentured servants from the early 1500s. But once Virginia entered a period of rapid economic development, the British began importing enslaved Africans in massive numbers. There were no white enslaved people by the end of the 17th century, and being black automatically equated with being enslaved.

Economics

Like other European colonizers, the British relied on the forced, unpaid labor of Africans to create infrastructure and wealth where there had been only land. The tobacco, rice and—eventually—cotton plantations in the South supported developing industries in the North. This expanding economic reliance on the labor of enslaved people required the complicity of the nation. Similarly, the tightly bound “triangular trade”—cyclical importing and exporting of enslaved people, raw materials and manufactured goods among Africa, the Americas and Europe—was a system wholly dependent on forced labor.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made this labor even more valuable, as producing cotton became faster and more efficient. The explosion of the cotton industry opened a new era of slavery in the United States, during which hundreds of thousands of people—mostly from the Carolinas and Virginia—were sold to plantation owners farther southwest. This so-called second middle passage, the second-largest forced migration in American history, tore apart innumerable families that had been stable for generations.

Maintaining these systems required more than just importing bodies and exporting goods. The rise of chattel slavery was accompanied by a widespread campaign of cruelty, degradation and cultural myth-making intended to dehumanize Africans. Historical accounts of auctions provide vivid illustrations of this dehumanization, as the process of buying enslaved people directly mirrored the process of buying animals. Enslaved people were bound with chains, physically examined, bid on and—in many cases—torn from their families, friends and communities.

William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” He would not be surprised to learn that Americans, 150 years after the Civil War began, are still getting it wrong.

During the last five years, I’ve asked several thousand teachers for the main reason the South seceded. They always come up with four alternatives: states’ rights, slavery, tariffs and taxes or the election of Lincoln.

When I ask them to vote, the results—and resulting discussions— convince me that no part of our history gets more mythologized than the Civil War, beginning with secession.

My informal polls show that 55 to 75 percent of teachers—regardless of region or race—cite states’ rights as the key reason southern states seceded. These conclusions are backed up by a 2011 Pew Research Center poll, which found that a wide plurality of Americans—48 percent— believe that states’ rights was the main cause of the Civil War. Fewer, 38 percent, attributed the war to slavery, while 9 percent said it was a mixture of both.

These results are alarming because they are essentially wrong. States’ rights was not the main cause of the Civil War—slavery was.

The issue is critically important for teachers to see clearly. Understanding why the Civil War began informs virtually all the attitudes about race that we wrestle with today. The distorted emphasis on states’ rights separates us from the role of slavery and allows us to deny the notions of white supremacy that fostered secession.

In short, this issue is a perfect example of what Faulkner meant when he said the past is not dead—it’s not even past.

The Lost Cause

Confederate sympathizers have long understood the importance of getting the Civil War wrong. In 1866, a year after the war ended, an ex-Confederate named Edward A. Pollard published the first pro-southern history, called The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. Pollard’s book was followed by a torrent of similar propaganda. Soon, the term “Lost Cause” perfectly described the South’s collective memory of the war.

All these works promoting the Lost Cause consoled southern pride by echoing similar themes: The South’s leaders had been noble; the South was not out-fought but merely overwhelmed; Southerners were united in support of the Confederate cause; slavery was a benign institution overseen by benevolent masters.

A chief tenet of the Lost Cause was that secession had been forced on the South to protect states’ rights. This view spread in part because racism pervaded both North and South, and both ex-Confederates and ex-Unionists wanted to put the war behind them. Beginning with Mississippi’s new constitution in 1890, white southerners effectively removed African Americans from citizenship and enshrined their new status in Jim Crow laws. Northerners put the war behind them by turning their backs on blacks and letting Jim Crow happen.

From 1890 to about 1940, the Lost Cause version of events held sway across the United States. This worldview influenced popular culture, such as the racist 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation and Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestselling paean to the Old South, Gone With the Wind. As I point out in my book Lies My Teacher Told Me, history textbooks also bought into the myth and helped promote it nationwide.

What’s Wrong About States’ Rights?

But advocates of the Lost Cause— Confederates and later neo- Confederates—had a problem. The leaders of southern secession left voluminous records. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s prompted historians and teachers to review those records and challenge the Lost Cause. One main point they came to was this: Confederate states seceded against states’ rights, not for them.

As states left the Union, they said why. On Christmas Eve of 1860, South Carolina, the first to go, adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It listed South Carolina’s grievances, including the exercise of northern states’ rights: “We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.” The phrase “constitutional obligations” sounds vague, but delegates went on to quote the part of the Constitution that concerned them— the Fugitive Slave Clause. They then noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery. ... In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed ...”

South Carolina also attacked New York for no longer allowing temporary slavery. In the past, Charleston gentry who wanted to spend a cool August in the North could bring their cooks along. By 1860, New York made it clear that it was a free state and any slave brought there would become free. South Carolina was outraged. Delegates were further upset at a handful of northern states for letting African-American men vote. Voting was a state matter at the time, so this should have fallen under the purview of states’ rights. Nevertheless, southerners were outraged. In 1860, South Carolina pointed out that according to “the supreme law of the land, [blacks] are incapable of becoming citizens.” This was a reference to the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the southern- dominated U.S. Supreme Court.

Delegates also took offense that northern states have “denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery” and “permitted open establishment among them of [abolitionist] societies ...” In other words, northern and western states should not have the right to let people assemble and speak freely—not if what they say might threaten slavery.

Thoroughly Identified With Slavery

Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery— the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi. “... [A] blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.” Northern abolitionists, Mississippi went on to complain, have “nullified the Fugitive Slave Law,” “broken every compact” and even “invested with the honors of martyrdom” John Brown—the radical abolitionist who tried to lead a slave uprising in Virginia in 1859.

Once the Confederacy formed, its leaders wrote a new constitution that protected the institution of slavery at the national level. As historian William C. Davis has said, this showed how little Confederates cared about states’ rights and how much they cared about slavery. “To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state,” he said. “To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery.”

Their founding documents show that the South seceded over slavery, not states’ rights. But the neo-Confederates are right in a sense. Slavery was not the only cause. The South also seceded over white supremacy, something in which most whites—North and South—sincerely believed. White southerners came to see the 4 million African Americans in their midst as a menace, going so far as to predict calamity, even race war, were slavery ever to end. This facet of Confederate ideology helps explain why many white southerners—even those who owned no slaves and had no prospects of owning any—mobilized so swiftly and effectively to protect their key institution.

This historic map shows how the United States was divided in 1861, as the Civil War began. All of the seceding southern states were heavily dependant on slavery. Keeping African Americans in bondage allowed slave owners to cheaply grow cash crops like cotton, rice and sugar cane.

Tariffs, Taxes and Lincoln

The other alleged causes of the Civil War can be dispensed with fairly quickly. The argument that tariffs and taxes also caused secession is a part of the Lost Cause line favored by modern neo-Confederates. But this, too, is flatly wrong.

High tariffs had been the issue in the 1831 nullification controversy, but not in 1860. About tariffs and taxes, the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes” said nothing. Why would it? Tariffs had been steadily decreasing for a generation. The tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning, had been written by a Virginia slaveowner and was warmly approved of by southern members of Congress. Its rates were lower than at any other point in the century.

The election of Lincoln is a valid explanation for secession—not an underlying cause, but clearly the trigger. Many southern states referred to the “Black Republican Party,” to use Alabama’s term, that had “elected Abraham Lincoln to the office of President.” As “Black Republican” implies, Alabama was upset with Lincoln because he held “that the power of the Government should be so exercised that slavery in time, should be exterminated.” So it all comes back to slavery.