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 central ideas that students— and educators—must truly understand to grasp the historical significance of slavery. Southern Poverty Law Center created a series of ten videos to accompany the Key Concepts.
- Slavery, which Europeans practiced before they invaded the Americas, was important to all colonial powers and existed in all North American colonies.
- Slavery and the slave trade were central to the development and growth of the colonial economies and what is now the United States.
- Protections for slavery were embedded in the founding documents; enslavers dominated the federal government, Supreme Court and Senate from 1787 through 1860.
- “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 (Berlin, 2016)
- Enslaved people resisted the efforts of their enslavers to reduce them to commodities in both revolutionary and everyday ways.
- The experience of slavery varied depending on time, location, crop, labor performed, size of slaveholding and gender.
- Slavery was the central cause of the Civil War.
- Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.
- Enslaved and freed people worked to maintain cultural traditions while building new ones that sustain communities and impact the larger world.
- 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.
Teaching Hard History: Key Concepts
Summary: https://www.tolerance.org/sites/default/files/2018-02/TT-Teaching-Hard-History-Key-Concepts-Summary-Objectives-Jan2018.pdf
Videos: https://www.splcenter.org/learning-for-justice/frameworks/teaching-hard-history/classroom-videos/
Citations
Shuster, Kate and Maureen Costello. Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/teaching-hard-history/.
Berlin, Ira. "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. University of Wisconsin Press, 2016, xviii.
Updated January 26, 2026.