Key Concepts: Teaching American Slavery
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Learning for Justice have created an open-source K-12 framework for teaching about American chattel slavery.
Key Concepts - K-12 Framework for Teaching American Slavery
"The Key Concepts are important ideas that students— and educators—must truly understand to grasp the historical significance of slavery. Select "Watch the Video" for more resources and accompanying videos—providing a deeper dive into each Key Concept to help you bring them effectively into the classroom."
- Slavery, which Europeans practiced before they invaded the Americas, was important to all colonial powers and existed in all North American colonies.
Watch the Video - Slavery and the slave trade were central to the development and growth of the colonial economies and what is now the United States.
Watch the Video - Protections for slavery were embedded in the founding documents; enslavers dominated the federal government, Supreme Court and Senate from 1787 through 1860.
Watch the Video - “Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.*
Watch the Video - Enslaved people resisted the efforts of their enslavers to reduce them to commodities in both revolutionary and everyday ways.
Watch the Video - The experience of slavery varied depending on time, location, crop, labor performed, size of slaveholding and gender.
Watch the Video - Slavery was the central cause of the Civil War.
Watch the Video - Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.
Watch the Video - Enslaved and freed people worked to maintain cultural traditions while building new ones that sustain communities and impact the larger world.
Watch the Video - By knowing how to read and interpret the sources that tell the story of American slavery, we gain insight into some of what enslaving and enslaved Americans aspired to, created, thought and desired.
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*Ira Berlin, "Foreword: The Short Course for Bringing Slavery into the Classroom in Ten Not-So-Easy Pieces" in Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, ed. Bethany Jay and Cynthia Lyerly (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), xviii.