Social Studies for White Kids

Learning About Slavery in the Segregated South

 

I lived until I was nine in an approximately half-black town, without ever having any social contact with a black kid.

I don’t mean I didn’t have any as close friends. I mean I never had a single conversation with an African American child. Even in slavery days, “white” and “black” children might have personal contact, but in the South of my childhood we were kept as separate as humanly possible. We literally didn’t know each other. As people say when they talk about those days, that was just the way …